Category: Art and Architecture

June 6, 2012

Columbia University Press Authors at dOCUMENTA 13

The eagerly anticipated art fair dOCUMENTA 13, held every five years, opens on June 9 in Kassel, Germany. dOCUMENTA has become one of the biggest art events in the world but also includes “other objects and experiments in the fields...

May 17, 2012

Gertrude Stein, Alan Dershowitz, Barbara Will, and the Controversy at the Met

The recent opening of The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has ignited a controversyregarding Gertrude Stein’s fascist past. At the center of this debate is Barbara Will’s recent book Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the...

March 23, 2012

Mark C. Taylor on Andy Goldsworthy

We conclude our week-long feature on Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy, with an excerpt from Mark C. Taylor’s chapter on Andy Goldsworthy: Goldsworthy’s preoccupation with place is often misunderstood. Some critics summarily dismiss him as a druidic...

March 22, 2012

Mark C. Taylor on James Turrell and Roden Crater

“Roden Crater is the most ambitious work and might well turn out to be the most important artwork of our time. For pilgrims fortunate enough to journey into Turrell’s work, the world is, indeed, transformed.”—Mark C. Taylor In his chapter...

March 21, 2012

Is Matthew Barney the Most Religious Artist Working Today? — Mark C. Taylor Explains

As he explains in Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor was initially skeptical of Matthew Barney. However, as he became more familiar with Barney’s work, his opinion changed. In the following excerpt he explains the religious...

March 20, 2012

Mark C. Taylor on "Fat Chair" by Joseph Beuys

“It’s all about the fat.”—Mark C. Taylor on Fat Chair, by Joseph Beuys In Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor explores these four artists’, whose work, unlike that of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Takashi Murakami,...

January 30, 2012

Mark C. Taylor: Is Modern Finance Ruining Modern Art?

“As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself.”—Mark C. Taylor In a piece for Bloomberg View, Mark C. Taylor, author...

January 13, 2012

Julia Kristeva on the Legacies of the Severed Head

In the concluding chapter to The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva speculates on some of the meanings and legacies of representations of sacrifice and the severed head: Because the sacred, or the nostalgia for it that remains, turns out...

January 11, 2012

Julia Kristeva: Two Severed Heads from The Severed Head

   In the following passage from The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva explores the iconography and symbolism of beheadings during the French Revolution: More Roman, Marat takes great pleasure in what he believes to be the “serene joy” of...

January 9, 2012

Julia Kristeva on The Severed Head

“That is how the guillotine of history falls, sparing neither men nor works.”—Julia Kristeva This week we will be featuring The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva. In her newest book, Kristeva explores artistic representations of severed heads from...

September 28, 2011

Kenneth Goldsmith and UbuWeb

In addition to being the author of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, Kenneth Goldsmith is also the creator and curator of UbuWeb. Started in 1996, UbuWeb has become one of the leading resources for modernist, avant-garde, and...

October 26, 2010

Do You Know Graphic Women? — A Quiz Based on "Graphic Women," by Hillary Chute

In Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, author Hillary L. Chute explores the visual and verbal techniques of five acclaimed female cartoonists: Marjane Satrapi, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Lynda Barry. Think you know your graphic women?...