New perspectives on Belgian Surrealism and the photographic practices of Marcel Mariën Marcel Mariën (1920–1993) was a key figure of Belgian post-war Surrealism. He is widely acknowledged for his landmark work on Belgian Surrealism and his collaboration with future Situationists like Guy-Ernest Debord in his journalLes Lèvres nues. Nevertheless, Mariën’s texts, collages, photographs, film, and objects have to date remained understudied. This is the first volume devoted to Mariën's photographic work. Through a series of close readings, Mieke Bleyen connects the collage and photographic practices of Mariën with his wider oeuvre, particularly with his archival and editorial activities. By applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the ‘minor’, this book proposes an alternative reading of Mariën’s anti-aesthetics and focuses on the affective range of his work. The figure of Mariën also serves as a case study that offers new perspectives on Belgian Surrealism's relation to mainstream Surrealism and the role of photography within Surrealism. This volume, moreover, raises a critique on ‘major’ art history's conception of time as linear progression and argues instead for twisted and extended temporalities in the case of Marcel Mariën. With previously unpublished images from Mariën's private archive.

In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.” Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method—tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, and others, Yapp demonstrates that the minor allows for discussing non-Western art more broadly and for reconfiguring dominant political and aesthetic institutions and structures.

This undergraduate text covers the standard (old and new) methodological approaches to art history, in a clear, direct and understandable way.

The first book to apply the concept of the 'minor' to the theory of photography. The notion of the minor, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka, Towards a minor literature (1975), is introduced and connected applied here for the very first time to the field of photography theory. Deleuze and Guattari defined minor literature in terms of deterritorialization, politicization and collectivization. By transferring 'the minor' to the medium of photography, this book enlarges the idea of 'the minor' and opens it up to all kinds of mutations in the process. The essays gathered in this book discuss the ways in which photography can make the dominant codes of representation stammer and how it can produce new effects and address people yet to come. The authors consider 'the minor' as a valuable tool to help photography research move beyond, or in between, binary and hierarchized ways of thinking (of high and low art, for example, or centre and periphery). As such, it aims to contribute to a rethinking of photography as multiplicity and variation. Consequently, the term is connected with both marginal and canonical photographic practices, covering photographers as different as Miroslav Tichy, Paul McCarthy, Tacita Dean, Dan Graham, and Paul Nougé. After developing a theory of the minor, this book explores how the operations of the minor can be found in major art practices. It closes by tackling the question of photography as variation in case studies of belated forms of surrealist photography. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

This collection explores the aesthetic qualities of human relationships, sports, taste, smell, food, and natural and built environments.

Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting. With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art. For each volume, John O'Brian has furnished an introduction, a selected bibliography, and a brief summary of events that places the criticism in its artistic and historical context.

This study recognizes the broad impact of opera in early-modern French culture.

While interest in the relationship between theology and the arts is on the rise, there are very few resources for students and teachers, let alone a comprehensive text on the subject. This book fills that lacuna by providing an anthology of readings on theological aesthetics drawn from the first century to the present. A superb sourcebook, Theological Aesthetics brings together original texts that are relevant and timely to scholars today. Editor Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen has taken a careful, inclusive approach to the book, including articles and extracts that are diverse and ecumenical as well as representative of gender and ethnicity. The book is organized chronologically, and each historical period begins with commentary by Thiessen that sets the selections in context. These engaging readings range broadly over themes at the intersection of religion and the arts, including beauty and revelation, the vision of God, artistic and divine creation, God as artist, images of God, the interplay of the senses and the intellect, human imagination, mystical writings, meanings of signs and symbols, worship, liturgy, doxology, the relationship of word and image, icons and iconoclasm, the role of the arts in twentieth-century theology, and much more.