What are some essential art reads? I've heard both good & bad things about Relational Aesthetics & I'm not sure whether or not to pick it up.
Also not sure if Veeky Forums is too familiar with art books, but I doubt any other board would be better.
What are some essential art reads...
Justin Rogers
Aiden Anderson
On Beauty and On Ugliness by Umberto Eco.
David Cook
Ancient Greek aesthetics:
Plato: 1) Hippias Major, 2) Ion, 3) Politeia (books 2, 3 and 10)
Aristotle: Poetics
Modern aesthetics:
1) A.G. Baumgarten - Meditationes (this is a must read, Baumgarten is the father of aesthetics)
2) Kant: Critique of Judgement (the four moments are essential)
3) Hegel (can't recommend anything in English - he didn't dedicate a single work to aesthetics only)
Levi Nelson
Thanks a lot for this, can you comment at all on the OP image or no?
Ayden Jenkins
Simple: the greatest artist of all time, James Joyce.
Alexander Wood
Pure ideology, nothing of substance. Avoid it for your own good. I would suggest you to read (and understand) the core of Greek/modern aesthetics and compare it to the work of Bourriaud. You'll notice how shallow and utterly meaningless his "work" is.
Aiden Ross
Bourriaud is really boring, this book is poorly written, its ideas incredibly narrow and unimaginative. The only reason to read it is to see what literature was given to read in contemporary art schools about ten years ago. I sincerely hope the hype is over.
Jaxon Wright
Who you should read is Julius von Schlosser.
Nolan Flores
I liked it, and also Postproduction.
Art feels like a dead end desu and Bourriaud was the last thing I found to be kind of fresh.
I may be biaised though because I also really liked the Palais de Tokyo when he was the co-director, and he is just an all around nice guy.
Easton Watson
Foul Perfection
The Invisible Dragon
Air Guitar
Against Interpretation
The Whitechapel essay collections r cool too
Sebastian Ward
Why Creativity is Sexy: A Review of the Evidence of Sexual Selection for Creative Abilities in Humans
Luis Miller
Geoffrey Miller hypothesis
Homo habilis - Forensic facial reconstruction
Geoffrey Miller, drawing on some of Darwin's largely neglected ideas about human behavior, has hypothesized that many human behaviors not clearly tied to survival benefits, such as humor, music, visual art, some forms of altruism, verbal creativity or the fact that most humans have a far greater vocabulary than that which is required for survival, Miller (2000) has proposed that this apparent redundancy is due to individuals using vocabulary to demonstrate their intelligence, and consequently their "fitness", to potential mates. This has been tested experimentally, and it appears that males do make greater use of lower-frequency (more unusual) words when in a romantic mindset compared to a non-romantic mindset, suggesting that vocabulary is likely to be used as a sexual display (Rosenberg & Tunney, 2008). All these qualities are considered courtship adaptations that have been favored through sexual selection.
Camden Stewart
Art Historian here,
Hobberman for your Formalsim (ie: Rational plebfilters)
Hegel for your Muh Spirit
Berger so you can translate the intrinsic beauty of art to plebs and vice versa.
Modern art criticism and theory is a meme wrecked by emotive unimperical academic liberal theorist ie: muh feminist critique etc etc (Ironically the two best feminist works are by John Berger's Ways of Seeing and Linda Nochlin's Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, a staunch propent of feminist 80s memes). Most of the theory hasn't evolved past muh Lacan viewer/viewed image ideas, it's worth brushing up on that.
True patricians aspire to be conisuers and formalist masters, leave the theory to the Starbucks employee plebs if you want to take art seriously. You'll get much more mileage learning about how composition, form etc create an image than wheter or not Raphael was a feminist.
Ethan Butler
Danto
Jackson Cooper
bump
Luke Ortiz
>Most of the theory hasn't evolved past muh Lacan viewer/viewed image ideas
You mean like Berger? Also you're wrong, most theory is based on context. Composition and form is only worth learning for specific historical moments. You need to learn theory as well if you want to know anything about how art functions today, and you can't ignore some aspects of art in favour of others if you want to talk about art with any honesty.
Andrew Diaz
>conisuers
James Morgan
Most modern theory is applying new contexts to old work, but I won't pretend to be up to date with contemporary art. Knowing theory is important if only to better refute the memes, but formalism and (:^))connoisseurship are the only true patrician ways to understand art.
Berger is more of a Marxist (much broader meaning in Art History circles here) art historian than anything else, but his writing best emphasis the emotional validity of art and ideas before getting too heavy with the theory. Primo inspiration, great at translating the bigger ideas into normieable thoughts.
Gabriel Lewis
You have to be more specific, OP.
Do you want to know more about a certain artist and period, interpreting and understanding paintings, or aesthetics?
There's no such thing as 'Everything you can & need to know about art: the book', and those that claim to be tend to be very superficial.
Daniel Martin
Where would one properly lean about composition, form, etc?
Thomas Morales
...
Dominic Watson
I was originally interested in this book in the OP image because many friends of mine think highly of it, but other than something like that, I am in school for media art & am very interested in artists like Francis Alÿs & Pipilotti Rist... I prefer more modern art, in regards to paintings, I like abstract artists that lean towards De Kooning.
Levi Ward
>how art functions today
does it?