Book Description
From the early years of the American Republic to the present, art and architecture have consistently aroused major disputes among artists, critics, scholars, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Now one of our most respected cultural historians chronicles these clamorous debates about the public appropriateness of paintings, sculpture, memorials, and monuments.
Michael Kammen examines the nature, diversity, and persistence of major disputes generated by art and artists and shows what has changed since the 1830s and why. He looks at the role of artists and patrons, local and national governments, conservatives and liberals, and the media in creating and sustaining heated controversies. We see the notable acceleration of such episodes since the 1960s; the effect of the democratization of American museums; the quest for provocative shows to attract crowds; the increased visibility resulting from the public art movement that has stirred anger and created some of our stormiest battles; the desire of many artists and galleries to shock, provoke, and contest, engendering the perplexity, if not outright hostility, of audiences; the use of art as social criticism; the effort to include and appeal to minorities; the threat of litigation and the role of courts; and the commercialization stemming from dependence on corporate sponsorship.
Kammen’s central themes include such questions as, What kind of art is most appropriate for a democratic society? What should our relationship be to Old World criteria of excellence in the arts? How can we achieve a distinctively American art? Why have so many controversies hinged upon issues of nudity, decency, and sexuality? Why has public art (most notably sculpture) become so politicized that began in the late 1960s? He explores the “death-of-art” debate since the 1970s and issues of censorship that have arisen over time. Finally, he asks whether art controversies have invariably had a negative effect—noticing the interesting ways in which minds have been changed and museums have overcome difficult episodes. He also reminds us that when New York’s Museum of Modern Art celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, President Dwight Eisenhower declared “as long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art.” Kammen agrees.
Customer Reviews:
Michael Kammen's Visual Shock.......2007-01-08
As a national experiment able and eager to invent itself from a relatively clean slate, and as a democracy open to multiple voices, America has been and continues to be a country where the nature and purpose of art is hotly debated. In his recently published book, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture, Pulitzer-prize winning cultural historian Michael Kammen turns his insightful attention to American controversies over the visual arts to discover what these controversies reveal about the nature of America and its public discourse.
Kammen's examination includes controversies familiar to most informed readers -- Diego Rivera's murals for Rockefeller Center or the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, for example -- but also finds lesser known controversies -- such as John Singer's Sargent's own troubles with murals or the initial Washington monument, a half-nude neo-classical statue -- equally fruitful for his scholarly inquest.
This meticulously researched and cogently argued book is not another repeat of the history of American art. Kammen's book follows a unique trajectory because Kammen's interest in the subject is as a cultural rather than art historian. He is more interested in how the public talks about art than the art itself; so that in Visual Shock discussions of the art that changed the art world give way to the art controversies that changed the way Americans discuss art, and what those discussion say about America.
Kammen divides his investigation into nine chapters, each of which follows a chronological examination of a particular form of art controversy -- from issues of monumentalism and memorialization and nudity and decency, which were prominent in the 19th century, to the debates on public art, political art and the nature of the museums in more recent times.
Within the scope of the entire work, Kammen identifies four main themes that interest him as a cultural historian: the way art controversies are symptomatic of social change in the U.S.; the debate over art's role in a democratic society and expectation such a society has of art and architecture; the impulse for the origins of art controversies and how they have changed over time; and the outcome, negative or positive, of controversies.
Kammen's book reveals that America has a fairly short cultural memory and that what causes an initial stir and even ideological battle usually becomes, within a generation, an established part of our cultural framework. Many of us will know the controversy regarding Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, but fewer will remember or have learned that practically every other monument along D.C.'s Mall -- now endeared landmarks of our country's capitol -- was controversial as well.
What moves America to discourse also changes over time. In the 19th century, issues of nudity and moral decency were hotly debated, even when, as in the case of Thomas Eakins' use of nude models in a classroom, the offending practices occurred in non-public settings. In our own time, nudity per se rarely causes a stir (BYU's selective editing of a Rodin exhibit in 1997 being an exception Kammen notes) and issues of moral decency spring up only in the case of government funding, as in the furor of NEA funding during the 80s.
As a cultural historian, Kammen is particularly interested in public art, where the full force of community discussion takes place. His chapter, "The Dimension and Dilemmas of Public Sculpture," which examines controversial public sculptures such as Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" in lower Manhattan, is particularly interesting reading. Another element of the public realm Kammen illuminates is the changing nature of the Museum, which Kammen examines in a chapter in its own right. The author demonstrates that museums recover rather quickly from any initial uproar over a controversial exhibit and usually achieve higher turnout because of the controversy. Many museums, galleries, and artists understand this and create their own uproar; and when they don't, the media, knowing controversy makes for good copy, often stokes the flames of discontent.
Whatever part of his topic Kammen examines, his arguments are always well illustrated with particular cases. Too often, however, what he illustrates in prose is not illustrated by images, an unfortunate deficiency in a book whose main focus is the visual arts.
For the most part, Kammen keeps his own feelings about the merits of the artworks discussed to himself and does his job as historian in parsing out the factors that influenced the controversies examined. At times Kammen's writing style can be overly academic and his expositions can be lengthy, causing the casual reader to wish for a condensed version. But whether skimmed over for its salient kernels or examined in detail for its double-helix intricacies, Visual Shock has a great deal to offer both specialized art audiences and general ones interested in American culture. The book will teach you as much about America as it will about art.
An outstanding survey........2007-01-04
Art and architectural aspirations have long aroused disputes among artists, scholars and the common citizen over the appropriateness of paintings, memorials and monuments: for the first time these debates are surveyed in VISUAL SHOCK: A HISTORY OF ART CONTROVERSIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE. Here are the social and political disputes which have taken place from the 1830s to modern times, with central themes and relationships including questions on the types of art appropriate for a democratic society, and how to assess and possibly regulate its appearance. Changes in policies, opinions, and conflicts between trustees of the arts and the general public are chronicled in chapters surveying the wild world of art history. An outstanding survey.
A History of the Culture Wars.......2006-11-22
Artist George Braque said, "Art is meant to disturb." This is a profoundly twentieth-century view of what art should accomplish, and clashes with the views of most Americans who enjoy going to a museum or contemplating a commemorative civic sculpture, and do not do so for any advantage of being disturbed. There has certainly been an acceleration of controversy in America regarding art; the Brooklyn Museum's notorious show "Sensation" of 1999, which Rudolph Giuliani tried repeatedly to close down, is a good example, as are countless shows picketed, boycotted, vandalized, or censored in the past couple of decades. But although art controversies in America may have increased, they did not begin only in the recent years, but have been ongoing for at least two centuries. In _Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture_, critic Michael Kammen has written a detailed account of the art and architecture that has bothered Americans. It is a surprise to learn how many buildings, sculptures, and paintings were notorious in the past and have become beloved icons, but it is no surprise to learn how indignation comes in various forms against the sexuality, politics, or religious feelings which the art portrays.
It is hard to imagine that anyone could ever have objected to the Lincoln Memorial but it was not just die-hard Confederates that did so when the nation prepared to honor Lincoln at the centennial of his birth. Many hated the location selected, as if America was deliberately sticking its greatest president into a marsh. A Grecian temple was not a universally accepted choice; members of Congress pointed out, for instance, that Lincoln never would have even learned the Greek alphabet, so why honor him with a modern Parthenon? There have always been people who are convinced that any depiction of nudity is scandalous, despite the persistence of artists over the centuries who found the human form worthy of representation. It is surprising, however, that the first controversy over nudity mentioned here is for a memorial to George Washington. Horace Greenough got a commission in 1833 to sculpt the Father of Our Country to stand in the Capitol, and although Washington wasn't actually nude in the huge marble statue that resulted, except above the waist; he had a toga wrapped around the rest of him, and the statue was a figure of ridicule. Age did not bring acceptance to the statue, which after placements other than the Capitol, was condemned to the Smithsonian. There are, to be sure, other controversies of nudity in art described here, especially regarding such photographs as those of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the displays of performance artists who do shows in the buff. It does not take nudity to make controversy, however; sometimes just a style will do so. Until recent years, the most controversial art show in America was the Armory Show of 1913, which was literally set up in an armory building in New York City by an ad hoc group of artists. It was the first chance for the modernism that had grown up in Europe to be seen here, and people didn't like it. Influential critics did not like the exhibit, and their writings gave justification for the public to disdain modernism for two subsequent generations. Eventually in the witch-hunting years after World War II, the generally progressive politics of modern artists was decried, with anti-communists declaring that modern art was Marxist at its core, ignoring that Stalin could abide nothing but artistic realism.
Art museums are more popular than ever, and one of the best bits of good news in Kammen's wide-ranging survey is that Americans cannot agree on what is good art, or even what is art. There has not been complete agreement on such matters in previous centuries or now. This is why reading Kammen's book is such fun; it is full of optimism. There were angry controversies about art in previous years, and those have been settled, with the controversial pieces now widely accepted and even loved. Freedom of expression is strong, and creativity is rewarded even when it is controversial. We can learn from art that is made deliberately to provoke. The controversies described here have not produced bland conformity and have resulted only in occasionally regional, not national, censorship. We can withstand the visual shocks, and we are ready for more.
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Opening with a photograph of a 1950s Disneyland home designed in the shape of a TV (by those fun-loving futurists at MIT), this book's text and photos consistently maintain a balance between insightful social commentary and critique and sensitive recapturing of the essence of visual broadcast's dawn.
Book Description
America in the 1950s: the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked--and how we looked--mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, this book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.
Customer Reviews:
"Life In The Age Of Television Was A Feast For The Eye...".......2000-09-06
Karal Ann Martling tucks her mission in writing "As Seen On TV" in that last sentence of the next-to-last chapter of her fascinating book. She tours the 1950s' TV-raised images, from First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's dress closet to her husband's paintings to garish car in the garage, ready-made food in the kitchen, and herky-jerky TV images pointing to changed American culture and aestetic. Hers is a more entertaining, breezier read than recent books from, respectively, David Halberstam on the 1950s or historian Michael Kammen on American preference.(Marling shared time at Cornell with Kammen, thanking his students in her acknowledgements for "challenging lunchtime conversation.")
Marling merges era icons, fads, and seminal events more seamlessly into social statement than Halberstam did or Kammen attempted. Her understanding of cars evolving into social statements segues best into the image of Elvis Presley, the "King of Rock and Roll" for whom the "gorp"-covered Cadillac was chariot of choice. (she also credits Martin and Lewis with exposing the entertainment's dual sensibilities during early TV).
Marling also writes of home convenience from new appliances and quick dinners colliding with the rustic, more honorable life many felt had been replaced. This clash inspired and popularized Grandma Moses' idealized portraits of American country life, Walt Disney's scale model re-creation of small-town America at Disneyland (and on the accompanying TV program), and Betty Crocker's shorthand version of motherly mentoring through General Mills' best-selling cookbook. Marling's chapter on Walt Disney's inspirations for creating the park is among the book's most fascinating. But a chapter on "American Bandstand," should Marling have chosen to include it, may have tied even more loose ends together.
The book may also have done with some re-arrangement; the closing chapter accurately and humorously chronicles the 1959 Richard Nixon-Nikita Krushchev "kitchen debate." But its tale of form of function, argued by its most important leaders at the peak of Cold War hysteria, may have been more effective introducing Marling's tale. The book may then have received more social context by stating sooner Nixon's belief, according to Marling, in "style as a manifestation or a symbol of difference and, in difference, multiplicity - the possibility of choice - as...connecting idle consumer fetishism to ideology." This would also have more closely tied the 1950s' garish color imagery with its parallel, grainier black-and-white images (Nixon, the Cold War, and Joe McCarthy, a standout 50s figure seen on TV but not in this book.) Nonetheless, "As Seen On TV" is a fun, informative read for those wishing to understand the reasoning behind an era's unforgettable images.
Very interesting book with wonderful photographs.......1999-05-26
Very interesting reading. It is amazing to actually see how television has changed American life. I can't even fathom how life would be today, without TV. A great read for all who are interested in American pop culture in the 1950s.
Book Description
From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-twentieth-century American culture.
Kitch examines the years from 1895 to 1930 as a time when the first wave of feminism intersected with the rise of new technologies and media for the reproduction and dissemination of visual images. Access to suffrage, higher education, the professions, and contraception broadened women's opportunities, but the images found on magazine covers emphasized the role of women as consumers: suffrage was reduced to spending, sexuality to sexiness, and a collective women's movement to individual choices of personal style. In the 1920s, Kitch argues, the political prominence of the New Woman dissipated, but her visual image pervaded print media.
With seventy-five photographs of cover art by the era's most popular illustrators, The Girl on the Magazine Cover shows how these images created a visual vocabulary for understanding femininity and masculinity, as well as class status. Through this iconic process, magazines helped set cultural norms for women, for men, and for what it meant to be an American, Kitch contends.
Customer Reviews:
Women in the Media: A Brief Account.......2005-04-08
America is more than familiar with the stereotypical blonde bombshells that grace the covers of magazines, television programs, movies, and advertisements. In Carolyn Kitch's book she is able to outline the origins of how stereotypical images came about. Her extensive background in the media along with the use of actual magazine illustrations allows her to present her arguments in a way that anyone with an interest in women's history in the media can understand.
Kitch's book maintains the reader's interest by citing specific examples, providing information about the time period, and providing illustrations. Keeping a loosely chronological form allows the book to flow, but the ideas of the time period are more important to Kitch than keeping a pattern. She breaks at appropriate points to discuss alternate visions that challenged and reinforced stereotypes in the media.
While Kitch's book is effective, it is not extensive. Its sheer size just doesn't allow Kitch to get as in depth as she could. She promises so much in the introduction, but isn't able to deliver all that she promises.
The books briefness keeps it from being extensive, but it is still able to provide me with a more organized knowledge of how stereotypes of women in the media such as the ever-popular blonde bombshell came about.
Great reading and great images.......2005-03-25
I found this book to contain great ideas and images about the changes in masculinity and femininity as portrayed in the American media. My students enjoyed the ideas in class discussions as well.
Tracing women's lives & representations: a fascinating read!.......2002-04-13
As the saying goes, "Beauty is not skin deep." Of course, that doesn't matter to the American media; it would seem that in their opinion, there's no place in our society for anyone whose beauty is not evident on the surface. Moreover, the standards of beauty on television and in the print media set the bar quite high. A pretty face won't do; to be a superstar, you need to bare lots of skin, like Britney.
Thinking back to Victorian-era prudishness, when a girl's *ankles* couldn't be exposed and when a woman's place was in the home, it's hard to imagine how our culture got to this point. How did we women get to where we are today? And what relationships, if any, are there between the way we live life and the media images surrounding us?
To learn the answers to these questions and more, read "The Girl on the Magazine Cover." Kitch, a journalist and historian, presents a compelling case for women's journey from "matronly" to "dangerous but beautiful" to "cute, skinny, and sexually free." Her focus is on 1895 through 1930, a period of some of the most rapid changes in our history, when technology, early feminism, and higher education intersected. Kitch argues that one result of their intersection was the "new woman," whose liberation was quickly co-opted by the forces of capitalism and consumerism into little more than a marketing tool. (Progress, indeed!)
Note that Kitch's focus is broader than the title would imply: She devotes one chapter to depictions of African-American women, another to the crisis of masculinity faced by men in this era of change, and still another to families. Her epilogue is quite strong, drawing connections between the depictions of women in early magazines to the depictions of women on television today.
In sum, "The Girl on the Magazine Cover" is an evocative, compelling contribution to the fields of mass communication and women's studies. Kitch's arguments are sound, backed with extensive research and illustrated by well-chosen reproductions of period magazine artwork. If the media, women's rights, and/or stereotyping are of interest, then this is the book for you!
Womens images on magazine covers - more than surface meaning.......2002-02-20
After obtaining some old women's magazines from the 1900's, I wanted to learn more about drawings of women which graced these magazine covers. I also wanted to understand why illustrations were used far more often than photos, even after photos were used for the ads within the magazines themselves.
This book was just what I needed to understand not only what the illustrators were trying to say about women's roles at the time but about how so many of these images and stereotypes of the "ideal" woman still permeate our magazines (and culture) today. If you've ever doubted that "what goes around comes around again" when it comes to women's stereotypes and ideals, reading this book may change your mind.
For those familiar with such icons of The Golden Age of Illustration as C. Coles Phillips's Fadeaway Girls or the rather sophisticated women of J. C. Leyendecker or any other artists of the time, this book will be a delight, revealing new insights about the artists visions. For those interested in social history, the book is equally engaging, showing how artist who drew cover girls for popular magazines such as Life, Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping also worked for major businesses and even the government, helping to perpetuate the popular images of women throughout the culture.
Book Description
In this book, artist and art historian Michael Harris investigates the role of visual representation in the construction of black identities, both real and imagined, in the United States. He focuses particularly on how African American artists have responded to--and even used--stereotypical images in their own works.
Harris shows how, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racial stereotypes became the dominant mode through which African Americans were represented. These characterizations of blacks formed a substantial part of the foundation of white identity and social power. They also, Harris argues, seeped into African Americans' self-images and undermined their self-esteem.
Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye Saar, Juan Logan, and Camille Billops--reflects a wide range of perspectives. Examined together, they offer compelling insight into the profound psychological impact of visual stereotypes on the African American community.
Customer Reviews:
Wonderful scholarship!!.......2006-03-16
Excellent scholarship by Michael Harris. A sensitively written history of visual stereotyping and its effects. The book interweaves and points out the importance of Yoruba and other African philosophical heritages and their positive affects on artists, images in the U.S. Really excellent!!!!!!
Outstanding analysis of the power of images.......2003-10-28
The book is as intellectually stimulating as it is visually captivating. Anyone interested in giving serious thought to the history and power of images depicting persons of African descent should read this book. It's thoughtful and thought provoking. A topic that should interest any American, no matter what their race or ethnicity!
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Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (California Studies in the History of Art)
Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany
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Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration
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Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory
ASIN: 0520203860 |
Amazon.com
This groundbreaking book explores, in unprecedented detail, the distinctive visual culture of female communities, a genre never before given serious attention by art historians. The group of works discussed, a previously undiscovered group of devotional drawings by a Benedictine nun in the later Middle Ages, also includes illuminated manuscripts, prints, textiles, and metalwork. This book carefully reconstructs the artistic traditions that were fundamental to the lives of cloistered women. Nuns that were separated from the high altar, for instance, could participate in the mass through their art, which served as an expression of visual longing. The drawings provided the nuns with a substitute for sacramental presence and thus represented the fulfillment of spiritual desires. This fascinating, if scholarly, work is a gladly received contribution to the study of medieval art.
Book Description
Jeffrey F. Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity.
Setting the drawings and related imagery--manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork--within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.
Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.
Customer Reviews:
a masterful work.......2007-04-30
An exquisite book in every way. Hamburger's arguments are spun with cosmic refinement, letting the whole mediaeval spirit reign human and beautiful, and focusing on its treasures - the mediaeval convent and the women religious whose work as artisans of devotion remains to this day an urgent interest. The story is unheard of, and soaked with succinct scholarship. The writing's uncommonly beautiful, full of intellectual fervor, but as mild as the Jesu of the women whose remarkable images still astonish after hundreds of years. The red Christ is a pure doctrinal exegisis for every age, and a real find. Hamburger draws the right relationship between the nuns' art, their lives of profession, and essential information about the religious' interior relationship to the wider Church throughout the high Middle Ages. His fondness for and ready assent to the vitality of the art of the nuns of St Walburg only shows his scholarship more clearly. Nothing gets in the way, and the illustrations from beginning to end are unforgettable. A large section of full color plates (including the red Christ) in the center of the book, and the vital b/w illustrations are closeup, and a critical part of a captivating story. We're told as much about our own age by this masterful book as we are the world of gifted cloistered women, and the implications of that are far-reaching.
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Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 18801935 (Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture)
Melissa Dabakis
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521461472 |
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This book focuses on representations of work in American sculpture, from the decade in which the American Federation of Labor was formed, to the inauguration of the federal works project that subsidized American artists during the Great Depression. Restoring a group of important monuments to the history of labor, gender studies and American art history, this book analyzes key monuments and small-scale works in which labor was often constituted as "manly" and where the work ethic mediated both production and reception.
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Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (Studies in European Culture and History)
Lutz Koepnick , and
Sabine Eckmann
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 1403974888
Release Date: 2007-01-23 |
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Caught by Politics engages with the paths and aesthetic strategies of German and European exile visual artists, designers and film practitioners in the United States such as Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Hans Richter, Peter Lorre, and Edgar Ulmer. It also explores the degree to which American artists including Walter Quirt, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell responded to the Europeanization of American culture.
Book Description
In exploring the impact that the extensive cultural exchange between the Old and the New Worlds during the sixteenth century had upon artistic practice and discussion of art at that time, distinguished Renaissance art historians reevaluate the Eurocentrism of Italian Renaissance art history and envision how the history of Renaissance art would look if cultural interaction and the conditions of reception became the primary focus.
Book Description
Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what Americans of European descent see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.
Carefully reconstructing the racial and philosophical contexts of selected artworks that contain no narrative links to race, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Bucolic genre paintings of white farmers, pristine landscape photographs of the western frontier, monumental civic architecture, and early action films provide case studies for investigating how European-American sight became inextricably bound to the racial values of American society. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race, than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. A significant contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, this accessible, provocative, and compelling book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.
Book Description
This cutting-edge volume presents a sweeping view of the evolution of visual culture in the United States through fifteen absorbing case studies by top scholars of American art that explore visual culture's engagement with social controversy. Written especially for this work in lively and accessible language, the essays illuminate what visual forms--including traditional crafts, sculpture, painting and graphic arts, even domestic and museum interiors--can tell us about social conditions, how visual culture has contributed to social values, and how concepts of high and low art have developed. The only work on visual culture to span American history from the early republic to the present and to delve into issues from ethnicity to geography, Seeing High and Low allows readers to follow the evolution of concepts of "high" and "low" art as well as to gain new insight into American history.
Arranged roughly chronologically, these generously illustrated essays explore topics including the formative role of visual images in the process of class stratification in the Early Republic; the contribution of media images and paintings to debates on environmental crises, race relations, and urbanization in the late nineteenth century; and the difficulties of engaging with social issues while employing a modernist vocabulary.
Books:
- Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
- Watercolor Basics: People
- Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC
- Yellow Eyes (Posleen War Series #8)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
- 500 Tattoo Designs
- A Young Painter: The Life and Paintings of Wang Yani-- China's Extraordinary Young Artist
- Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature
- Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking (8th Edition)
- Bad Kitty
Books Index
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