A broad and deep anthology of critic and art historian Richard Shiff’s most influential writings, which have shaped our understanding of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. In his engaging and often strikingly deep observations of major modern and contemporary visual art, Shiff has written about an impressive range of artists, including Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, and Bridget Riley. A leading scholar and powerful voice, Shiff’s insight into some of the most prominent artistic practices spans generation, place, and approach as seen in this considered selection of essays on twenty-six artists. These writings first appeared in exhibition catalogues for retrospectives at galleries and institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern. Shiff supplements his unquestionable fluency in art history with insights cultivated from his readings in philosophy, phenomenology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, among other fields. Shiff’s writing—conceptually rich, meditative, and enjoyable to read—is attuned to the nuances of artistic style and technique, drawing out art’s social implications not merely from broad histories but also directly from artists’ mark making and technical gestures. Actively engaged as a viewer and a writer, Shiff has transformed the act of looking at art into contemplative and captivating writing. Includes essays on Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Georges Braque, Jim Campbell, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Suzan Frecon, Lucian Freud, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Jack Whitten, and Zeng Fanzhi.

Pursuing a new and timely line of research in world art studies, Humor in Global Contemporary Art is the first edited collection to examine the role of culturally specific humor in contemporary art from a global perspective. Since the 1960s, increasing numbers of artists from around the world have applied humor as a tool for observation, critique, transformation, and debate. Exploring how humorous art produced over the past six decades is anchored in local sociopolitical contexts and translated or misconstrued when exhibited abroad, this book opens new conversations regarding the functioning of humor and the ways in which art travels across the globe. With contributions by an impressive array of internationally based scholars covering six major continental regions, the book is organized into four distinct geographical sections: Africa and the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, South and North America, and Europe. This structure highlights the cultural specificity of each region while the book as a whole offers a critical perspective on the postcolonial, globalized art network. Reflecting on present-day processes of globalization and biennialization, which confront viewers with humorous art from a variety of cultures and countries, this book will provide readers with a culturally sensitive understanding of how humor has become vital to many contemporary artists working in an unprecedentedly interconnected world.

This book examines the terms upon which painting in the United States sought to negotiate with the legacy of American formalist aesthetics and by extension, the understanding of modernist painting it had become most readily associated with. In so doing, a separate set of possibilities for painting gradually began to emerge. The salient debates and practices that collectively worked to establish such a response are approached through the philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s idea of pensiero debole or so-called weak thought. To this end, the proposed study both identifies and seeks to examine a type of "weak" painting which, like Vattimo’s idea, took as its critical point of departure “the exhaustion – but not the vanishing – of the project of modernism (the belief in reason, progress, history, the nation-state, etc.).” Craig Staff explores particular instances wherein artists sought to extend the parameters of the object beyond what had been called into question, namely the proclivity for modernist painting’s "strength" to be understood as denoting, amongst other things, a perceived set of universal essences. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, fine art, cultural studies, critical theory, curatorial studies and philosophy.

The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history.

In an age where art history’s questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins’s series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be. Shiff’s turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

Here for the first time is a full-length study of the 'critical modernisms' of the three leading art writers of the second half of the twentieth century, which helps us build a better understanding of the development of modern art writing and its relation to the 'post-modern' in art and society since the 1970s. Focusing on canonical modern artists such as Manet, Cezanne, Picasso and Pollock, this book provides an important understanding of writing and criticism in modern art for all students and scholars of art theory and art history. Mainstay issues discussed include aesthetic evaluation, subjectivity and meaning in art and art writing. Jonathan Harris examines key discourses and identifies points of significant overlap as well as sharp disjunction between the critics. Developing the notions of 'good' and 'bad' complexity in modernist criticism, Writing Back to Modern Art creates ways for us to think outside of these discourses of value and meaning and helps us to look at the place that art writing holds in the latter twentieth century and beyond.

Grouped into 21 thematic sections, this collection provides theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in different directions. It provides an understanding of the complex intersections of gender with an array of social identifications.

The fifth and final volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on modern artists. Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg’s perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis that were always put into the service of interpretation. Following the series publication on Pablo Picasso, this volume focuses on other modern artists, including Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Max Ernst, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Hans Haacke, and Jeff Koons. Included are seven unpublished lectures and essays, Steinberg’s landmark essay “Encounters with Rauschenberg,” a survey of twentieth-century sculpture, and an examination of the role of authorial predilections in critical writing. The final chapter presents a collection of Steinberg’s humorous pieces, witty forays penned for his own amusement. Modern Art is the fifth and final volume in a series that presents Steinberg’s writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.

A necessary reexamination of Indigenous mounds, demonstrating their sustained vitality and vibrant futurity by centering Native voices Typically represented as unsolved mysteries or ruins of a tragic past, Indigenous mounds have long been marginalized and misunderstood. In Earthworks Rising, Chadwick Allen issues a compelling corrective, revealing a countertradition based in Indigenous worldviews. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native writers, artists, and intellectuals, Allen rebuts colonial discourses and examines the multiple ways these remarkable structures continue to hold ancient knowledge and make new meaning—in the present and for the future. Earthworks Rising is organized to align with key functional categories for mounds (effigies, platforms, and burials) and with key concepts within mound-building cultures. From the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio to the mound metropolis Cahokia in Illinois to the generative Mother Mound in Mississippi, Allen takes readers deep into some of the most renowned earthworks. He draws on the insights of poets Allison Hedge Coke and Margaret Noodin, novelists LeAnne Howe and Phillip Carroll Morgan, and artists Monique Mojica and Alyssa Hinton, weaving in a personal history of earthwork encounters and productive conversation with fellow researchers. Spanning literature, art, performance, and built environments, Earthworks Rising engages Indigenous mounds as forms of “land-writing” and as conduits for connections across worlds and generations. Clear and compelling, it provokes greater understanding of the remarkable accomplishments of North America’s diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century.

Creative Writing and Art History considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing. Essays range from the analysis of historical examples of art historical writing that have a creative element to examinations of contemporary modes of creative writing about art. Considers the ways in which the writing of art history intersects with creative writing Covers a diverse subject matter, from late Neolithic stone circles to the writing of a sentence by Flaubert The collection both contains essays that survey the topic as well as more specialist articles Brings together specialist contributors from both sides of the Atlantic