Theory of Art

Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between pas...

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

The question posed by Herman Rapaport, in the title of this book, is intended both seriously and ironically. It is not Rapaport's purpose to debate...

Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements. Rudolf Arnheim ...

Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach demonstrates how video art functions on the basis of a comparative media approach, providing a crucial und...

Covering philosophical issues ranging from tattooed religious symbols to a feminist aesthetics of tattoo, Tattoos and Philosophy offers an enthusia...

This book investigates the notion of beauty in participatory art, an interdisciplinary form that necessitates the audience’s agential participation...

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking "Art and Visual Perception" in 1974, as an authority on the psychologica...

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commem...

A renowned art historian confronts the specific powers of painting, and the hold of the visual image on the viewer's imagination Why do we find our...

This volume is the third in an influential series of anthologies by editors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard that challenge art history from a femi...

Conceptual Performance explores how the radical visual art that challenged material aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s tested and extended the limit...

New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five ma...

“Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls “Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of...

With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions abou...

Electronic art offers endless opportunities for reflection and interpretation. Some works are either interactive or entirely autonomous, and the vi...

This book engages debates in current art criticism concerning the turn toward participatory works of art. In particular, it analyzes ludic particip...

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the...

Electronic art offers endless opportunities for reflection and interpretation. Works can be interactive or entirely autonomous and the viewer's per...

In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he expl...

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of "not looking." The collec...

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretica...

In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he expl...

Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrat...

The phenomenon of iconoclasm, expressed through hostile actions towards images, has occurred in many different cultures throughout history. The des...

A major issue in the relation of art to the rest of society is the question of how art penetrates politics. From the perspective of most art schola...

First published in 1959, this book is concerned with the methodology of art history, and so with questions about historical thinking; it enquires w...

Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism argues that Surrealism worked as a powerful agitator to disrupt dominant ideas of mod...

Meaning in the visual arts centers on how the physical work makes its content or presence visible. The art object is fundamental. Indeed, the diffe...

Metaphysical thought has been excluded from much of the discourse on modern art, especially abstract painting. By connecting ideas about faith with...

This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significanc...

This book explores the nature of Jung’s understanding of modern art, in particular his reception to the work of Picasso and his striking prejudice ...

This book explores the critical significance of the visual arts to transnational feminist thought and activism.This first volume in Marsha Meskimmo...

Politics, society and culture are essential spheres of life; as such, they are founded on individual and collective, thus abstract ideas. In their ...