ARTH 387/587: Theories of Art and Culture

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Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Art in Theory 1815-1900 provides the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents ever assembled on nineteenth-century theories of art.

Current debates about the status of Modernism have led to an increasing interest in critical and aesthetic theories, and to a questioning of some of the traditional assumptions and limits of art history. Beside the writings of the century's major artists, Art in Theory includes relevant texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures.

This is the revised edition of "Art in Theory, 1900-1990."

The Companion provides an accessible critical survey of Western visual art theory from sources in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thought through to contemporary writings.

Covering a broad, diverse, and engaging sampling of works--abstract and representational painting, monumental sculpture, performance art, video installations, films, and photographs--author Terry Barrett responds to these questions using three sources: the artists who created the works, philosophers of art, and art critics. Introducing students to a variety of established theories of art, he presents the traditional sets of criteria of Realism, Expressionism, and Formalism, which are in turn updated by recent sources of Poststructuralism. Barrett applies each of these theories to challenging works of contemporary art, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each mode of interpretation.

In 2 volumes.

Wide-ranging in its analyses, this volume relates theory to the practice as well as to the intellectual and cultural-historical currents of each period. It thus demonstrates the value of a historical approach to theoretical issues, and has the particular merit of showing how the modern conception of art as a critical practice develops out of older ideas.

Here nearly 150 alphabetical entries explain the who, what, where, and when of postwar and contemporary art. These concise mini-essays on the key terms of the art world are written with wit and common sense by veteran critic Robert Atkins. A timeline traces world and art-world events from 1945 to the present day, and a single-page ArtChart provides a handy overview of the major art movements in that period.

This glossary not only serves as a dictionary but as a guide to theory and criticism of visual art and culture. Terms can be accessed alphabetically or thematically; the significant cross referencing makes this an easy dictionary to use.

The Encyclopedia surveys the full breadth of critical thought on art, culture, and society, from classical philosophy to contemporary critical theory.

In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa.

Contains Appadurai's "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"

Entertaining, concise, and relentlessly probing, City of Bits is a comprehensive introduction to a new type of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway.

Debord's text remains crucial for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture.

Contains: "Semiotics and Structuralism" - "Psychoanalysis" - "Post-Structuralism"

Contains: "Rhetoric of the Image"

Contains: Marin, "Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's the Arcadian Shepherds"

Contains: On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle Image Signs"

Contains: Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Contains: Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulation"

Contains "Panopticism"

Also contains: Levin, "Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of 'Real Time'"

Contains: Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" - Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

Contains: Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity"

Contains: Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience"

Contains: Lacan, "The Line and Light" - "What is a Picture?"

Contains: Mitchell, "Imperial Landscape"

Contains: Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, Performing Transgender Rage." in vol.1, #3, June 1, 1994, p.237-254.

Contains: Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" - "Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity"

Contains: Bal and Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History" on p. 242 - Derrida, "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure]" on p.432

Contains: Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context"

Contains: Derrida, "Differance"

Contains: Bal, "Light in Painting: Disseminating Art History"