Theory, Criticism & Philosophy

Electronic communications have had a transformative effect on the public discourse on contemporary art by removing temporal and geographical barriers to the flow of information and, for the first time, putting local exhibition makers and institutions in contact with an international art public unmediated...

In Hall of Mirrors, Graham Bader traces the development of Roy Lichtenstein's art into, through, and beyond his classic pop oeuvre of the 1960s. Bader charts the trajectory of Lichtenstein's practice from his student days in the late 1940s to his mirror paintings of the...

From the moment art historian Leo Steinberg championed his work in opposition to Clement Greenberg's rigid formalism, Robert Rauschenberg has played a pivotal role in the development and understanding of postmodern art. Challenging nearly all the prevailing assumptions about the visual arts of his...

In this book philosopher Jacques Rancière (b.1940) radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers...

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media - film and television, recorded sound, and publishing...

Martin Scorsese is the most influential director of his generation and, with his work regularly included among the top 20 films of all time, his place in cinema history is assured. Scorsese's films have defined the cinematic essence of each decade since the 1960s...

Who was Jacques Derrida, and why does he have such a towering, and foreboding reputation across modern philosophy? For some he is the source of the crisis of alternative facts. For far right terrorist Anders Brievik, 'Derridian deconstruction' was the cause for the end...

Sigmund Freud spent the final year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, surrounded by all his possessions, in exile from the Nazis. The long-term home and workspace he left behind in Berggasse 19, Vienna is a seemingly empty space, devoid of the...

The first English translation of Erwin Panofsky's long-lost work on Michelangelo.In 2012, a manuscript by renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky was rediscovered in a safe in Munich, in the basement of the Central Institute for Art History. Hidden for decades among folders and administrative...

In the years of his greatest dominance, Clement Greenberg almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the New York School at the centre of the American art world. His work set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based...

Sigmund Freud himself was certainly aware of the significance of psychoanalysis when he founded it: he saw it on the same level as the Copernican revolution and Darwin’s theory of evolution. The theory of the subconscious, which today has the status of an anthropological...

Internationally renowned dealer and market expert Michael Findlay offers a lively and authoritative look at the financial and emotional value of art throughout history. In this newly revised, updated, and generously illustrated edition Findlay draws on a half-century in the business and a passion...

A radical re-writing of the history and politics of black metal music, Tonight It’s a World We Bury explores a range of tendencies central to black metal and uncovers their potential as critiques of capitalism. Challenging the commonly-held perception that black metal is a genre of...

For thousands of years, humans have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Great Walls have appeared on nearly every continent, the handiwork of people from Persia, Rome, China, Central America, and beyond. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations,...

This study of a work from Richard Prince's series of Untitled (couples) considers the long history of the image and Prince as a pioneer of the appropriated image. In Prince's 1977 work Untitled (couple), difference mixes uncannily with sameness. We can't quite tell whether the shiny...

The Labyrinth of Rooms is a story about how the shape of architecture can change the way we think, and how the shape of our thoughts can change the way we see architecture. Stated otherwise, the story conceives of the human life as a...

Urbanism Beyond 2020  explores the concept of architectural "normal" and what that can look like as the world adapts after the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a hopeful book, seeking to find reasons and goals to better the practice of design coming out of a...

This book is a culmination of socially engaging architectural projects from the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania) that provide solutions to current socio-environmental issues. Featured projects provide a direct channel to people operating within a projects context to make their perspective...

In this spectacular, news-making exposé that has the entertainment industry abuzz and on its heels, Vanity Fair's Maureen Ryan blows the lid off patterns of harassment and bias in Hollywood, the grassroots reforms under way, and the labour and activist revolutions that recent scandals have...

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Featuring attention to works by the following artists: Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Vanley Burke, Chila Burman,...