From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts—musical, literary, and visual—and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us. As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. “Art’s relevance,” he writes, “has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance.” Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings—wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture. Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable—that’s the key to its importance. Taking his stand with artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation—the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium—that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we’re experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it’s the interplay between authority and freedom—what Perl calls “the lifeblood of the arts”—that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society.

Most players prefer to attack, resulting in defensive technique being the weakest part of their game. There are a number of methods of playing against an attacker, which include passive defense, simplification, blockade, stalemate, or a trap. Alternatively a player can defend actively or launch a counterattack. These and many other techniques are described in this thoroughly practical book. Lev Polugaevsky was one of the world's leading grandmasters for nearly three decades. Iakov Damsky was a chess writer and chess commentator for Soviet TV and radio.

Pretentiousness is the engine oil of culture; the essential lubricant in the development of all arts, high, low, or middle.

Most chess games are not won – they are lost. Many instructional chess books tell you how to improve a position when it is already (or may be) favourable. This book offers help when you definitely do not have the advantage. Every chess player needs a sound arsenal of defensive techniques. This book covers them all – counterplay, when to accept sacrifices, how to anticipate short- and long-term threats, and how to minimise losses. It also helps you create a strong underlying psychological framework for defensive technique – it teaches you how to stay cool under fire, how to stonewall and how to exploit your opponent's weaknesses.

What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity. In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

Art and Morality A Defence of the Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde Edited by Stuart Mason On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.

Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century--world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust--grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning? The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated."

The Tarrasch Defence is one of the most ambitious ways to play against 1.d4. Black immediately fights for the centre, gets a lot of space and develops his pieces without many problems. Great fighters like Boris Spassky, Paul Keres and Garry Kasparov have played the Tarrasch Defence. Former Russian Champion Alexey Bezgodov has more than 30 years of experience with the Tarrasch and is one of the world’s greatest experts. The Art of the Tarrasch Defence is a deeply researched journey into the positional structures, the key moments in the fight for the initiative, the players and the variations. Bezgodov has injected his main line, the neglected Kasparov System, with a lot of surprising ideas and presents new ways to handle White’s offbeat variations. He also shows that quite a few lines for Black with a bad reputation are actually good. He teaches how the giants of chess have exploited the many dynamic possibilities of the Tarrasch Defence, and he includes plenty of practical exercises. This is a must-have book for fearless players who wish to surprise their opponents and who like to play aggressively with Black – but only with a reliable opening with a sound positional foundation.

A new edition of this bestselling introduction to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Includes new sections on digital music and environmental aesthetics. All other chapters have been thoroughly revised and updated.