Theory of art

What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Aesthetic program, literary genre, philosophy, and subculture, Steampunk embraces a universal vision that questions our relationship with time itself...

This publication accompanies New Zealand collective et al.'s first Australian survey exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). The exhibition marks the largest presentation of the artists' work outside New Zealand since representing the...

The hidden life of the greatest surviving work of Inca artThe most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a five-hundred-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a...

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of...

This collection of essays revisits gender and urban modernity in nineteenth-century Paris in the wake of changes to the fabric of the city and social life. In rethinking the figure of the flaneur, the contributors apply the most current thinking in...

One of the twentieth century's most influential texts on philosophical aestheticsPainting as an Art is acclaimed philosopher Richard Wollheim's encompassing vision of how to view art. Transcending the traditional boundaries of art history, Wollheim draws...

A new study of the early Renaissance portrait.In fourteenth-century Italy, ever more women and men - not only clergy but also laity - introduced their own portraits into sacred paintings. Images of modern supplicants, submissive and prayerful, shared...

The first English translation of one of the earliest and most brilliant art-historical surveys, from one of the greatest modern art historiansAlos Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the greatest modern art historians. The most important member of the so-called...

This anthology of eminent Singaporean art historian T.K. Sabapathy's texts, selected from over four decades (1973 2015) of art critical and historical texts, brings together, for the first time, a cogent selection of the most important and influential...

From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s ItalyFlashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and...

"With an artistic mindset, we don't always draw what we can't see. And because we don't draw it, we can't fully understand it." - Kurt OferTo challenge this restricted outlook, architect Kurt Ofer has formulated an utterly unique way of drawing, which...

Architects, artists, film-makers and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical...

Learn how to critique your own art, quickly identify problems, and fix them to improve both your work and technique. Unlike being in class or in an enthusiast's group, creating alone means critiquing alone. There is so much information available...

Authorship critically examines emergent themes in contemporary architecture by revisiting the seemingly defunct notion of design authorship. As we revel in the death of the master architect, how do we come to terms with the shifting role of creativity in...

Why have some of the most interesting artists of our time committed themselves to some of the most devastating conflicts on Earth?Why are some of the most interesting artists of our time committed to engaging with conflict and exploitation around the...

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert "fictive-art" practitioner.In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer...

Ben Davis is one of the leading contemporary art critics in New York. His work has been heralded by the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Village Voice, the New Yorker and many other art publicationsIn the tradition of John Berger, Ben Davis...

On the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, The New Criterion has brought together a plump chrestomathy of essays demonstrating its range and acuity as America's foremost review of culture and the arts. With contributions by Bruce Bawer, Anthony...

The Necessity of Sculpture brings together a selection of articles on sculpture and sculptors from Eric Gibson's nearly four-decade career as an art critic. This book covers subjects as diverse as Mesopotamian cylinder seals,...

This collection brings together for the first time many of the influential Marxist art-historian Andrew Hemingway's most important works on Romantic landscape painting. With a careful eye for both the ideological and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of...

Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space-Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan's experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan...

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the...

The avant garde is dead, or so the story goes for many leftists and capitalists alike. But in an era of neoliberal austerity, neocolonial militarism and ecological crisis, this postmodern view seems increasingly outmoded. Rejecting 'end of ideology'...

The book examines how increasing engagement with the rest of the world transformed European art, architecture and design. It considers how commercial activity and colonial ventures gave rise to new and diverse forms of visual and material culture across...

Inspired by recent approaches to the field, the book reexamines the field of Renaissance art history by exploring the art of this era in the light of global connections. It considers the movement of objects, ideas and technologies and its significance...

This is the first anthology to bring transnational feminist theory and criticism together with women's art practices to discuss the connections between aesthetics, gender and identity in a global world. The essays in Women, the arts and globalization...

In this provocative new account, David Joselit shows how art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries began to function as a commodity, while the qualities of the artist, nation, or period themselves became valuable properties. Joselit explores...

The first major history of the bravura movement in European paintingThe painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements presented a...

A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The...

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color blue throughout the agesBlue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now cite it...

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty...

A beautifully illustrated visual and cultural history of the color red throughout the ages The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege...

Black--favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics, fashion designers and fascists--has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty, good and bad. In...

This text examines Vilem Flusser's philosophy of photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science, and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within...

A new book from Reaktion best-selling author and artist, David Batchelor, The Luminous and the Grey is a unique study of the places where colour comes into being and where it fades away. Colour is a given of most people's everyday lives, but at...

Exposes the charlatanry that fuels much academic art history today and leaks into the art world generally.

This short book introduces the reader to the key concepts in art from ancient times to the present day. Unlike many previous publications, in which non-Western art is a mere add-on to the great artists and movements of the Western canon, this tells the...

This beautiful book brings you the very best of art throughout history - using a truly innovative timeline-led approach. Savour iconic paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and Monet's Waterlilies, and discover less well-known artists,...