"Artists, Critics, Context is an anthology of readings on American art and culture that begins in the 1940s with Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War and ends in the 1990s with the ubiquity of video installations and the broad cultural changes arising from technological developments in telecommunications and biotechnology."--Preface pg. ix.

Art criticism was once passionate, polemical and judgmental: now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description. And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. Here, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes.

Bringing together twenty-nine of Lawrence Alloway’s most influential essays in one volume, this fascinating collection provides valuable perspectives on the art and visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Lawrence Alloway ranks among the most important critics of his time, and his contributions to the spirited and contentious dialogue of his era make for fascinating reading. These twenty-nine provocative essays from 1956 to 1980 from the man who invented the term ‘pop art’ bring art, film, iconography, cybernetics and culture together for analysis and investigation, and do indeed examine the context, content and role of the critic in art and visual culture. Featuring a critical commentary by Richard Kalina, and preface by series editor Saul Ostrow, Imagining the Present will be an enthralling read for all art and visual culture students.

In this groundbreaking anthology, twenty-two artists, architects, historians, critics, curators, and philosophers explore the role of public art in creating a national identity, contending that each work can only be understood by analyzing the context in which it is commissioned, built, and received. They emphasize the historical continuum between traditional works such as Mount Rushmore, the Washington Monument, and the New York Public Library lions, in addition to contemporary memorials such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Names Project AIDS Quilt. They discuss the influence of patronage on form and content, isolate the factors that precipitate controversy, and show how public art overtly and covertly conveys civic values and national culture. Complete with an updated introduction, Critical Issues in Public Art shows how monuments, murals, memorials, and sculptures in public places are complex cultural achievements that must speak to increasingly diverse groups.

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."

DIVA collection of writings from the influential feminist art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, with a forward by Johanna Drucker./div

Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings—some long, some short—that taken together forma group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans, Schjeldahl ranges widely through the diverse and confusing art world, an expert guide to a dazzling scene. No other writer enhances the reader’s experience of art in precise, jargon-free prose as Schjeldahl does. His reviews are more essay than criticism, and he offers engaging and informative accounts of artists and their work. For more than three decades, he has written about art with Emersonian openness and clarity. A fresh perspective, an unexpected connection, a lucid gloss on a big idea awaits the reader on every page of this big, absorbing, buzzing book.

History of art criticism - Describing and interpreting art - Judging art - Writing and talking about art - Theory and art criticism.

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject. Contributors include Dave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitney Davis, Irit Rogoff, Guy Brett and Boris Groys.

Leo Steinberg’s classic Other Criteria comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” and the “flatbed picture plane” to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called “a tour de force of critical method,” is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns’s work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations. “The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights—although the quality is very high and the insights are important—as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords.” —Alfred Frankenstein, Art News “Not only one of the most lucid and independent minds among art critics, but a profound one.”—Robert Motherwell