The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’s rebel pavilion near the official art exhibit at the 1855 French World’s Fair to curator Beryl Madra’s choice of London-based Cypriot Hussein Chalayan for the off-site Turkish pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale, artists have used these exhibitions to reflect on contemporary art, speak to their own governments back home, and challenge the wider geopolitical realm—changing art and art history along the way. Ultimately, Caroline A. Jones argues, the modern appetite for experience and event structures, which were cultivated around the art at these earlier expositions, have now come to constitute contemporary art itself, producing encounters that transform the public and force us to reflect critically on the global condition.

This book explores digital artists’ articulations of globalization. Digital artworks from around the world are examined in terms of how they both express and simulate globalization’s impacts through immersive, participatory and interactive technologies. The author highlights some of the problems with macro and categorical approaches to the study of globalization and presents new ways of seeing the phenomenon as a series of processes and flows that are individually experienced and expressed. Instead of providing a macro analysis of large-scale political and economic processes, the book offers imaginative new ways of knowing and understanding globalization as a series of micro affects. Digital art is explored in terms of how it re-centers articulations of globalization around individual experiences and offers new ways of accessing a complex topic often expressed in general and intangible terms. The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalization is analytic and accessible, with material that is of interest to a range of researchers from different disciplines. Students studying digital art, film, globalization, cultural studies or digital media trends will also find the content fascinating.

Why is this art? The world of contemporary art can seem intimidating, absurd, and self-obsessed, while the sums of money exchanged are baffling. Writing on contemporary art is often tortured and confused, ignoring the important questions: What is contemporary art? How does it relate to money and power? How is it made? Will it survive? To answer these questions, Katya Tylevich and Ben Eastham offer a series of short biographies on eight great works of twenty-first century art by Martin Creed, Barry McGee, Camille Henrot, Marina Abramovic, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, Erwin Wurm, Michaël Borremans, and Gregory Crewdson. They follow these paintings, films, installations, experiences, experiments, sculptures, and performances through all the key stages of their existence so far – from the delicate quiet of the studio to the grand chaos of the art world. A funny, engaging, personal guide through the world of art today, My Life as a Work of Art takes as its starting point the only really important thing: the work of art itself.

Celebrating art and interpretation that take on social challenges, Doris Sommer steers the humanities back to engagement with the world. The reformist projects that focus her attention develop momentum and meaning as they circulate through society to inspire faith in the possible. Among the cases that she covers are top-down initiatives of political leaders, such as those launched by Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, and also bottom-up movements like the Theatre of the Oppressed created by the Brazilian director, writer, and educator Augusto Boal. Alleging that we are all cultural agents, Sommer also takes herself to task and creates Pre-Texts, an international arts-literacy project that translates high literary theory through popular creative practices. The Work of Art in the World is informed by many writers and theorists. Foremost among them is the eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who remains an eloquent defender of art-making and humanistic interpretation in the construction of political freedom. Schiller's thinking runs throughout Sommer's modern-day call for citizens to collaborate in the endless co-creation of a more just and more beautiful world.

The work of art's mattering and materialization in a globalized world, with close readings of works by Takahashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, and others. It may be time to forget the art world—or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and its attendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalization as a world process. Rather than think about the “global art world” as a socioeconomic phenomenon, or in terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers “the work of art's world” as a medium through which globalization takes place. She argues that the work of art is itself both object and agent of globalization. Lee explores the ways that art actualizes, iterates, or enables the processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists who have come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the “just in time” managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky's images of contemporary markets and manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in Thomas Hirschhorn's mixed-media displays; and the “pseudo-collectivism” in the contemporary practice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and others. To speak of “the work of art's world,” Lee says, is to point to both the work of art's mattering and its materialization, to understand the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates.

Everyone is as unique and beautiful as a classic work of art, whether you are Great Wave Off Kanagawa “with the power of the sea,” or Starry Night, “a galaxy of love.” Lift the flaps to reveal classic works of art beneath! Accompanying each masterpiece is a creative, colorful, and kid-oriented illustration, depicting children in a scene analogous to the one in the famous work. Every spread includes a loving poem about what makes you a unique work of art—just like the classic paintings and sculptures underneath the flaps! Children will be delighted to learn about the work of famous artists, like Mary Cassatt and Vincent van Gogh, in this die-cut picture frame format. Each classic painting or sculpture is labeled with the title, the artist, and the year the painting was created—providing an early exposure to worldly works of art!

Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton’s literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary relations. The fifteen purposefully-brief chapters, 103 illustrations, and 64 supplemental web-images reflect the great richness of the topics and the diverse experiences and expertise of the contributors. Part I: Panoramas, provides overviews and key contexts; Part II: Cameos offers different perspectives of the varied afterlives of the most widely-circulating illustrations of Paradise Lost, those by Gustave Doré; Part III: Textual Close-ups focuses on a rich variety of book illustrations, from centuries-old elite engravings to a twenty-first century graphic novel; and Part IV: A Prospect beyond Books, explores visual media outside of books that manifest powerful connections, direct and indirect, with Milton’s works and legend.

These books are a modern fitness studio for the brain! A total of 300 diverse puzzles help to keep your mind flexible and train your mental stamina in logical and mathematical thinking. Time and time again, the collection of widely-varied games of mental agility contained in these two volumes will set you new tasks to challenge your grey cells! Accept the challenge posed by these two training programs and discover the fun of finding your own logical path through the puzzle labyrinth! After the global hit Ars Sacra, Rolf Toman and his team embark on a journey once more. The Palace of Versailles and St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican are the outstanding buildings from this epoch. There are undreamed-of jewels in Europe and America, the New World, waiting for discovery. Magnificent libraries, vaults of science or mysterious gardens, skilled works of porcelain and illusionistic painting, to name just a few aspects of this complex epoch. With his passion and meticulousness, photographer Achim Bednorz succeeded to get details in front of his camera that cannot even be seen on the original locally. The photographs that are exclusive for this volume are particularly well-presented in their large format. The author Barbara Borngasser wrote her take on Baroque history to fit, and swiftly takes the reader into the Great World Theater, the Theatrum Mundi. SELLING POINTS: Completely new breath-taking photographs by Achim Bednorz The composition will pull the reader into the book emotionally Completely new texts by the editor of bestseller Ars Sacra (Rolf Toman) Contains the most current scientific knowledge on the topic Lavish layout and high quality look like Ars Sacra 800 photographs

DIVExamines questions of agency, artisanship, and identity in relation to collaborative art practice./div