What's Language Got To Do With It?

Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray?

According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep—who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image—and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm.

What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike.

“A treasury of episodes—generally overlooked by art history and visual studies—that turn on images that ‘walk by themselves’ and exert their own power over the living.”—Norman Bryson, Artforum

innovative critique of how visual material finds its place in the culture.......2007-09-10

Tolstoy's scathing and unapologetic look at 'Art History' can still be argued in our own culture. The times have changed but mankind has not. I would venture to say that Generation X understands very little about true artistic works, we are so bombarded with commercialism and materialism. We are only interested in what gives us erotic and material pleasure. But in the long run, temporal and vainglorious things did not satisfy Tolstoy and his contemporaries, and will not satisfy us either.

Joseph Beuys's work continues to influence and inspire artists and thinkers around the world—in areas from organizational learning, direct democracy, and new forms of money, to new methods of art education and the practice of "ecological art."

Volker Harlan—a close colleague of Beuys—whose own work also explores substance and sacrament—talked with Beuys about the deeper motivations and insights behind "social sculpture" and his expanded view of art. These profound reflections, complemented by Harlan's thoughtful essays, give a sense of the interconnected nature of all life forms and provide the basis for a path toward a future that is ecologically sustainable.

Timms believes that the real goal of campaigns to market the arts is not to make people's lives culturally richer but to make the arts industry economically richer.

A timely and insightful reflection on the contemporary art world........2007-07-12