Swiss artist HR Giger (1940-2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott's 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. Yet this was just one of the most...

"Extremely timely and original work from one of the nation's most respected scholars in which radical politics and trans aesthetics meet in the practice of unbuilding and unmaking buildings and...

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited...

Carlo Zinelli, called Carlo (1916-1974), is one of the leading figures in Art Brut, along with Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli. The book devoted to him by Collection de l'Art Brut, in Lausanne - the...

The full range of Saint Phalle's oeuvre is paid glorious tribute in this retrospective volume, which also features new images and an extended biography. Niki de Saint Phalle was an eclectic artist...

"What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have...

"Tattooing within Indigenous communities is a time-honored practice that binds the tattoo recipient to a deeply felt collective history. More than mere decoration, tattoos embody cultural values,...

"An innovative new history of how the migration of designers in the 20th century shaped modernist art and architecture"--

"This is a history of porcelain as a business and consumer product, from the eighteenth century to the present day. Many books have been written on Chinese porcelain as an exotic import from Asia,...

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from...

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to...

"A revolutionary art movement asserted itself in India between the declaration of independence at midnight on August 15, 1947, and the economic boom of the 1990s. This is the first in-depth study of...

Art Deco is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of the decorative arts. Conceived in France before the First World War, it spread throughout Europe and had its greatest and most...

In this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed...

The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary...

Texts by Hans Haacke that range from straightforward descriptions of his artworks to wide-ranging reflections on the relationship between art and politics.Hans Haacke's art articulates the...

An exploration of how the widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a nineteenth-century US culture that was accustomed to printed and spoken words When and how did pictures start to permeate...

The intimate, inspiring memoir of a “curator extraordinaire” (The Guardian)—part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part insider’s tour of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to...

Ai Weiwei is famous for much more than his art. As a champion for the right to free expression and against arbitrary state power, his actions reach far beyond the art world. His work is infused with...

Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, or Chronicle of the World (better known today as the Nuremberg Chronicle, after the German city in which it was created), was a groundbreaking encyclopedic work and at...