Ai Weiwei is one of the world’s most acclaimed artists and dissidents. This book presents him in conversation with theorists, critics, journalists, and curators about key moments in his life and career. These wide-ranging conversations flow between topics such as his relationship with China, the meaning of citizenship, moving his studio to Lesbos to be on the front lines of the migrant crisis, how to make art, and technology as a tool for freedom or oppression. Ai opens up about his relationship to his father as a poet and as a dissident forced into hard labor in a small village after the Cultural Revolution. He shares his thoughts on formal education and the importance of finding your own way as an artist. New York—both the city and its people—were formative for Ai Weiwei, and he speaks eloquently about how these experiences continue to influence him. Ai conjures up scenes from his long relationship with the city: dropping out of Parsons School of Design because he couldn’t afford tuition, making portraits in Washington Square Park as an undocumented immigrant in the 1980s, taking photos for the New York Times at demonstrations in Tompkins Square Park, and returning to set up the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors project across the city. These candid, spontaneous conversations reveal why Ai Weiwei has become such a major force in contemporary art and political life.

Network of superlatives Frederick Kiesler was a committed networker and communicated regularly with the who’s who of the avant-garde. He was an important intermediary between the visionary ideas of the European Moderne movement and the up-and-coming New York art scene. About 20 contributions portray his colorful life and his multifaceted oeuvre in various contexts, and place Kiesler in a dialog with the most important artists and architects of his time. The publication on the occasion of the 20 year anniversary of the Friedrich Kiesler Foundation deals with his relationship with the Bauhaus, surrealism, and the New York School, as well as with personalities such as Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Hans Arp, Sigfried Giedion, and others. An interwoven analysis of his life and work Contributions on individual and case studies Kiesler and Bauhaus, Mondrian, Buckminster Fuller, Duchamp, and many others

The deluxe edition of Brigid Berlin: Polaroids is limited to 100 signed and numbered copies only, and is presented in a bespoke slipcase. It includes an archival pigment print of Andy Warhol, stamped, hand-initialed and numbered on the verso by Brigid Berlin, exclusive to this edition. The book is numbered and signed by Berlin. Brigid Berlin (born 1939) was one of the most prominent and colorful members of Andy Warhol's Factory in the 1960s and '70s. Her legendary personal collection of Polaroids is collected here for the first time and offers an intimate, beautiful, artistic, outrageous insight into this iconic period. This wild photographic odyssey features a foreword by cult filmmaker John Waters, who writes: "Brigid was always my favorite underground movie star; big, often naked, and ornery as hell.... The Polaroids here show just how wide Brigid's world was; her access was amazing. She was never a groupie, always an insider."

The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through. It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book--a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history. The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries--including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella--from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux. Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient. “Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried.”

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The first book to bring together interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema’s most talented pioneers.

This book provides insight into the significant area of public art and memorials in Berlin. Through diverse selected examples, grouped according to their basic character and significance, the most important art projects produced in the period since World War II are presented and discussed. Both as a critical theoretical work and rich photo book, this volume is a unique selection of Berlin’s diverse visual elements, contemporary and from the recent past. Some artworks are very famous and are already symbols of Berlin while others are less well known. Public Art and Urban Memorials in Berlin analyzes the connections created by public art on one hand, and urban space and architectural forms on the other. This volume considers the Berlin works of iconic artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Daniel Libeskind, Dani Karavan, Bernar Venet, Keith Haring, Christian Boltanski, Richard Serra, Peter Eisenman, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brüggen, Wolf Vostell, Gerhard Richter, Eduardo Chillida, Jonathan Borofsky, Olaf Metzel, Sol LeWitt, Frank Gehry, Max Lingner, Bernhard Heiliger, Frank Thiel, Juan Garaizabal and more. The reader is led through seven chapters: Creative City Berlin, Introduction to Public Art, Public Art in Berlin, the Celebration of Berlin’s 750th Anniversary in 1987, Temporary public art, Socialist Realism in Art, and Urban Memorials. The chapter Public Art in Berlin discusses selected projects, Bundestag Public Art Collection, Public Art at Potsdamer Platz and The City and the river – a renewed relationship. The chapter on urban memorials discusses: Remembering the Divided City and Holocaust Memorials in Berlin. The book delivers nine interviews with artists whose Berlin work is revealed through this volume (Bernar Venet, Hubertus von der Goltz, Dani Karavan, Juan Garaizabal, Susanne Lorenz, Kalliopi Lemos, Frank Thiel, Karla Sachse and Nikolaus Koliusis).

Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.