New Books in Art

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Mod...

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual...

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confr...

Then let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Future Imperfect: The Past Between My Fingers... (2021), Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events...

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a 2011 talk by Deirdre Bair about the artist Saul Steinberg. Bair received the 1978 National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett. Since then, she has written biographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Carl Jung, and Al Capone. In 2019, she published a memoir, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me. Bair’s biograp...

Surfboards were once made of wood and shaped by hand, objects of both cultural and recreational significance. Today most surfboards are mass-produced with fiberglass and a stew of petrochemicals, moving (or floating) billboards for athletes and their brands, emphasizing the commercial rather than the cultural. Surf Craft maps this evolution, examining surfboard design and craft with 150 color imag...

The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values...

Over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mughal court painters evolved from illustrators of manuscripts and albums to active mediators of imperial visionary experience, cultivating their patrons’ earthly and spiritual authority. The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (University of Washington Press, 2023) traces this shift, demonstrating how royal art...

In her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld ava...

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) in...

Rebecca Whiteley's book Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term...

The fiftieth anniversary of Helvetica, the most famous of all sans serif typefaces, was celebrated with an excitement unusual in the staid world of typography and culminated in the release of the first movie ever made starring a typeface. Yet Helvetica's fifty-year milestone pales in comparison with the two thousandth anniversary in 2014 of Trajan's Column and its famous inscription--the preeminen...

Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of vi...

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative litera...

What is the future for cultural policy? In Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value, and the Social (Edward Elgar, 2023),  Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, analyses key trends on themes in contemporary cultural policy. The book covers the rise of wellbeing, the dominance of economics,...

The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art (Princeton University Press, 2022), Michael Gill shows how Shaftesbury’s efforts to work on himself resulted in his becoming one of the first philosophers writing in English to develop an aes...

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last— disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges rangi...

What are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, an Associate Profe...

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers r...

What is art, and who gets to define it? Museums have long staked a claim on knowing what to show, but there has always been a wide range of how viewers engage with art. There is also a wide range of artists and what is considered art, from classical masters like Titian to modern conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp. Lance Esplund is an art critic, journalist, educator, and author. His book, titl...

In The Story of Follies: Architectures of Eccentricity (Reaktion, 2023), Celia Fisher presents an amusing, informative guide to a fanciful and charming building, the folly. Are they frivolous or practical? Follies are buildings constructed primarily for decoration, but suggest another purpose through their appearance. In this superbly illustrated book Celia Fisher describes follies in their histor...

What does data science tell us about art auctions?  This episode is syndicated from the new Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. Published by the MIT Press, Harvard Data Science Review is an open access multidisciplinary journal that defines and shapes data science as a scientifically rigorous field based on the principled and purposed production, processing, parsing and analysis of data. In this...

The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not...

Featured episode from Between Art and Science, a new podcast from Leonardo. This episode, hosted by Erica Hruby, features a conversation between two authors published in the Leonardo special issue “Cosmos and Chaos:” Bettina Forget and Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Listen as these authors discuss the connection between art and science, the flawed idea of the hero, exploration of both land and space, and th...

Writer and academic Anthony Gardner (NSK from Kapital to Capital, Politically Unbecoming) interviews Marko Ilić about his new book A Slow Burning Fire, which documents Yugoslavia's cultural output throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. This first comprehensive study of the former Yugoslavia's alternative art scene tells the origin stories of some of the most significant artists of the late twentieth cen...