From Picasso's Cubism and Duchamp's readymades to Warhol's silkscreens and Smithson's earthworks, the art of the twentieth century broke completely with earlier artistic traditions. A basic change in the market for advanced art produced a heightened demand for innovation, and young conceptual innovators – from Picasso and Duchamp to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst – responded not only by creating dozens of new forms of art, but also by behaving in ways that would have been incomprehensible to their predecessors. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art presents the first systematic analysis of the reasons for this discontinuity. David W. Galenson, whose earlier research has changed our understanding of creativity, combines social scientific methods with qualitative analysis to produce a fundamentally new interpretation of modern art that will give readers a far deeper appreciation of the art of the past century, and of today, than is available elsewhere.

Galenson combines social scientific methods with qualitative analysis to produce a new interpretation of modern art.

When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that yields masterpieces early in their lives? By examining the careers not only of great painters but also of important sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors, Old Masters and Young Geniuses offers a profound new understanding of artistic creativity. Using a wide range of evidence, David Galenson demonstrates that there are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation, and that each is associated with a distinct pattern of discovery over a lifetime. Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Galenson shows why such artists as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, and Alfred Hitchcock were experimental old masters, and why Vermeer, van Gogh, Picasso, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Orson Welles were conceptual young geniuses. He also explains how this changes our understanding of art and its past. Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find. By illuminating the differences between them, this pioneering book provides vivid new insights into the mysterious processes of human creativity.

In 1958, the French philosopher Etienne Gilson observed that quot;painters are related to manual laborers by a deep-rooted affinity that nothing can eliminate,quot; because painting was the one art in which the person who conceives the work is also necessarily the person who executes it. Conceptual innovators promptly proved Gilson wrong, however, by eliminating the touch of the artist from their paintings: in 1960 the French artist Yves Klein began using quot;living brushesquot; - nude models covered with paint - to execute his paintings, and in 1963 Andy Warhol began having his assistant Gerard Malanga silkscreen his canvases. Today many leading artists do not touch their own paintings, and some never see them. This paper traces the innovations that allowed a complete separation between the conception and execution of paintings. The foundation of this separation was laid long before the 20th century, by conceptual Old Masters including Raphael and Rubens, who employed teams of assistants to produce their paintings, but artists began exploring its logical limits during the conceptual revolution of the 1960s and beyond. Thus by the end of the twentieth century Jeff Koons explained that he did not participate in the work of painting his canvases because he believed it would interfere with his growth as an artist, and Damien Hirst defended his practice of having his paintings made by assistants on the grounds that their paintings were better than his. Eliminating the touch of the artist from painting is yet another way in which conceptual innovators transformed art in the twentieth century.

Compelling, well-illustrated study focuses on the works of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, and others. Citations from letters, diaries, and interviews provide insights into the artists' views. 121 black-and-white illustrations.

The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero ? the number that is also not a number ? allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative ? that is, how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, and how we exist in language.

How can one become a successful artist? Where should one start a career in the art world? What are useful strategies to achieve recognition in the art system? Such questions hoard in students' minds ever since entering art school and they probably chase every kind of art professional who is at an early career stage. “The Road to Parnassus” tries to understand what makes a good start in today's art world, who are influential players in the field and which strategies might apply. The swift career ascension of Glasgow artist Douglas Gordon – one of today's leading visual artists – and of the broader YBA generation that rose into worldwide prominence in the 1990s – Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas among the best known – serves as a convenient case to analyse contemporary artist strategies. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach – spanning from traditional art history, to sociology and economics – pursuing the reconstruction of the field of forces in art as intended by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Compared to previous publications on art system dynamics, such as Thompson's “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark”, this book offers an enhanced understanding of the factors that allow a young artist to enter the arena of contemporary art. The present research should help uncover the art system logic – which appears enigmatic to non-experts – revealing that artists are aware they need to consider global trends, beat competitors and meet the demands of dealers, collectors, curators and museums. This book furthers existing contributions on the YBAs (for example Stallabrass' “High Art Lite”), offering innovative conclusions on recent British art, such as on the duality between London and Glasgow, the gender opposition among emerging artists and the predominance of resourceful authors.

1. Classical foundations -- 2. Special relativity -- 3. Quantum mechanics -- 4. Elementary particles -- 5. Cosmology.

Double Desire challenges the tendency by critics to perpetuate an aesthetic apartheid between Indigenous and Western art. The double desire explored in this book is that of the divided but also amplified attractions that occur between cultural traditions in places where both indigenous and colonial legacies are strong. The result, it is argued, produces imaginative transcultural practices that resist the assimilation or acculturation of Indigenous perspectives into the dominant Western mod...