The Aesthete In The City The Philosophy And Practice Of American Abstract Painting In The 1980s

Rosalind Krauss is, without visible rival, the most influential American art writer since Clement Greenberg. Together with her colleagues at ^IOctober^R, the journal she co-founded, she has played a key role in the introduction of French theory into the American art world. In the 1960s, though first a follower of Greenberg, she was inspired by her readings of French structuralist and post-structuralist materials, revolted against her mentor's formalism, and developed a succession of radically original styles of art history writing. Offering a complete survey of her career and work, ^IRosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism^R comprises the first book-length study of its subject. Written in the lucid style of analytic philosophy, this accessible commentary offers a consideration of her arguments as well as discussions of alternative positions. Tracing Krauss's development in this way provides the best method of understanding the changing styles of American art criticism from the 1960s through the present, and thus provides an invaluable source of historical and aesthetic knowledge for artists and art scholars alike.

First Published in 1999. John Ruskin (1819-1900), Walter Pater (1839-1894), and Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) represent three generations of English aesthetes whose writings have transformed art history and the formations of museums as we know them. They are three great writers in a distinctively English tradition. Concerned with the nature of aesthetic experience, and with the interpretation of visual art, they offer approaches that are dramatically different, in challenging ways, from those of professional art historians. They published autobiographies, explaining the relationship of their conceptions of aesthetic experience to their critical thinking about social questions. With England and Its Aesthetes , David Carrier has assembled the autobiographical sketches of these influential aesthetes. His reading reveals them to be less concerned with art appreciation or an aesthetic approach to everyday life than with issues of identity, politics, and desire.

In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.

DIVProminent art historian looks at the birth of the art museum and contemplates its future as a public institution./div

Editing the Image looks at the editing of visual media as both a series of technical exercises and as an allegory.

The great poet Charles Baudelaire (1821&–1867) was also an extremely influential art critic. High Art relates the philosophical issues posed by Baudelaire's art writing to the theory and practice of modernist and postmodernist painting. Baudelaire wrote in an age of transition, David Carrier argues, an era divided by the Revolution of 1848, the historical break that played for him a role now taken within modernism by the political revolts of 1968. Moving from the grand tradition of Delacroix to the images of modern life made by Constantin Guys, this movement from &"high&" to &"low,&" from the unified world of correspondences to the fragmented images of contemporary city life, motivates Baudelaire's equivalent to the post-1968 turn away from formalist art criticism. Viewed from the perspective of the 1990s, Carrier argues, the issues raised by Baudelaire's criticism and creative writing provide a way of understanding the situation of art writing in our own time.

Boldly developing the central traditions of American modernist abstraction, Lawrence Carroll's paintings engage with a fundamental issue of aesthetic theory, the nature of the medium of painting, in highly original, frequently extraordinarily successful ways. Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll explains how he understands the medium of painting; shows what his art says about the identity of painting as an art; discusses the place of his paintings in the development of abstraction; and, finally, offers an interpretation of his art. The first monograph devoted to him, this philosophical commentary employs the resources of analytic aesthetics. Art historians trace the development of art, explaining how what came earlier yields to what comes later. Taking for granted that the artifacts they describe are artworks, art historians place them within the history of art. Philosophical art writers define art, explain why it has a history and identify its meaning. Pursuing that goal, Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art, and Lawrence Carroll roams freely across art history, focused at some points on the story of old master painting and sometimes on the history of modernism, but looking also to contemporary art, in order to provide the fullest possible philosophical perspective on Carroll's work.