The Great Art Hoax exposes the real fakery and hypocrisy of the art world: how art is manufactured and marketed; how the pathology of private possession drives up the price; and how false art is hyped as true art to the tune of millions of dollars. Jon Huer demonstrates convincingly that what the art market deals as art need not be "art" at all.

"[P]rovides a treasure trove of information that will engage readers intrigued by but new to the subject of art forgery as well as those with an art or art history background." Booklist, Starred Review Forgery is a provocative presence in the art world that captures attention in the press and inspires books about the exploits of famous fraudsters as well as scholarly articles and monographs. But missing until now has been a big-picture look at the phenomenon of art forgery. The Many Faces of Art Forgery provides a uniquetreatment that features historical highlights, philosophical insights, psychological profiles, economic theories, and legal statutes and cases. Key features include: The story of art forgery from antiquity to the present, including 80 named forgers, the tricks of their trade, and the social forces that ensure the existence of their enterprise. How scientific analysis is both effective and limited in exposing art fakes. Multiple definitions for the term “forgery” as applied to art. The effect on authenticity in legal terms, philosophical terms, and public opinion when an artwork undergoes extensive restoration, or artists hire surrogates to make their works, or they appropriate images from otherartists or styles from indigenous cultures. Forgers’ mentalities: their motivations, rationalizations, and strategies. The ethics of art forgery: from criminality to esteem for fooling experts. The possibility and aesthetic worth of a “perfect fake.” In all, readers will understand the substantial place forgery occupies in the realm of art, as well as that what constitutes authentic versus inauthentic is not always clear-cut, nor are legal and moral judgments about forgery. In conveying this message, the author provides a wealth of information in an accessible and engaging style suitable for experts and general readers alike.

The humanities are the human elements in any culture. In the West these humanities have ordinarily been anchored in and derivative of Eurocentric culture, and have been centered on elite and art-related subjects. As such they have strengthened and perpetuated elite culture, and have been restricted and narrow in their point of view. They have enervated the modern humanities which in a democratic society insist on having democratic humanities. Democratic humanities demand a new point of view which demands respect for and dignity to the common aspects of culture as well as inclusion of those elements. It is time the call went ringing through the land: The Old is Sick, Please Bring Assistance! Rejuvenate the humanities! The essays in this volume are Assistance, an effort to demonstrate the inalienable need for new subjects in the humanities canon and the value of those subjects as parts of the New Humanities. The twenty essays in this effort to bring new vitality to the humanities range through fields familiar in life but unfamiliar in the humanities canon. They include leisure, folk cultures, material culture, pornography, comics, animal rights, Black studies, travelling and, of course, the bugbear of academics, television. The authors include some of the outstanding scholar-observers of today, all of whom address their subjects in cool, dispassionate and convincing reason. The subject of revitalizing the Humanities is important indeed. This volume will go a long way toward alerting the intellectual community to the desperate need to bring new understanding to the study of the modern humanities.

This book explores the nature of power in persons, groups, and nations by asking a question that we can understand in contemporary terms: what would Bill Gates do if he had Hitler's absolute power? It is a sociological question that exposes power as a tool of control over the powerless, not as a psychological trait or manners of personal interactions. With Hitler's power, any individual, group, or nation could become as crazy as Hitler or as cruel as the Nazis. Call from the Cave argues that the savage struggle for power, exemplified in the free market system of America--history's first and purest "natural" society--is in our very human nature. In the footsteps of the ancient Romans and the recent Nazis, we push on in every waking moment of our lives to expand our power and to control the souls and minds of other human beings to do our bidding. The book concludes that this is the very destiny of humanity we cannot escape.

A collection of essays on new directions and future trends in popular culture studies, with sections on parameters and dynamics of popular culture studies; leisure and recreation; sense of community; marketing cultures; and extension or circularity. Topics include the role of the university as an institution of popular culture; religious fervor; developing the place and role of community in society; and marketing the apocalypse. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In this unique, panoramic account of faded dreams, journalist John Feffer returns to Eastern Europe a quarter of a century after the fall of communism, to track down hundreds of people he spoke to in the initial atmosphere of optimism as the Iron Curtain fell – from politicians and scholars to trade unionists and grass roots activists. What he discovers makes for fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, reading. From the Polish scholar who left academia to become head of personnel at Ikea to the Hungarian politician who turned his back on liberal politics to join the far-right Jobbik party, Feffer meets a remarkable cast of characters. He finds that years of free-market reforms have failed to deliver prosperity, corruption and organized crime are rampant, while optimism has given way to bitterness and a newly invigorated nationalism. Even so, through talking to the region's many extraordinary activists, Feffer shows that against stiff odds hope remains for the region's future.

Statistics indicate that more than half the population of America is illiterate or subliterate in the conventional sense, but very literate in other media such as television, sports, and leisure time activities. But statistics can lie or tell only half a fact. Since the languages of literacy are constantly expanding and developing, it is time that American educators, and the public in general, reexamine their definitions of literacy and the media in which we need to be literate. Therefore, educators must redefine literacy if they are to be realistic about its sources, uses, and values. The need is vital to a developing world.

"... Frightening."---Timothy Flack, formerly of Stars & Stripes --

We in the U.S. have deserved someone like Donald Trump as our president for some time. Until now, by a string of luck, we had mostly centrist presidents, both Republican and Democratic, some with only a modicum of intelligence and humanity. With Donald Trump, however, we finally ran out of luck and he is our sitting president. Now, the spotlight is focused on him, but we easily forget that he is, after all, a product of his own society. Trump's rise to power owes itself to its own social-historical circumstances: For decades now America’s Consumer Society had prepared the American voters, mostly White, to find someone like Trump as their leader, by supplying them with around-the-clock distractions that made them feel good, happy and falsely powerful. Trump's ascendancy could not be possible without our consumption of daily entertainment which makes us selfish, childish and idiotic human beings. Such minds are easily affected by anxiety, anger and vengefulness. In our daily sea of popular entertainment of mass circulation, we have become trash cans--Mental Trash Cans--that exist just to process trash that enters and leaves our minds almost at the same time. This wasted mind, America’s most celebrated symbol of success that is created by its best and brightest, keeps us away from one another as we become privatized citizens and neighbors in our individual cocoons, lonely, scared, dumbed down, living and dying our solitary unconnected lives. Into this vacuum of intelligence and humanity, enter Donald Trump, the entertainer-billionaire, now the President, who, with his brand of populist Fascism, challenges the powers of entrenched Corporate America and all of its mind-captivating arsenal. He successfully conquered White Americans by separating them from non-whites, thus revealing America’s nationalism and racism, hitherto papered over in its Liberal-Capital consumer paradise. The common Americans, whether White or non-white, possess two prized items that Corporate and Political America covets and wants to take from them, the dollar and the vote: The American Masses, now as garbage-fed children, are neither smart nor united enough to protect the two critical weapons of their democracy. Trump’s presidency proves it.

The way we live, work, and die-alone and with other Americans-have so many hidden layers that we might as well say that there are two Americas: one we think we know and the other virtually unknown to us. Such a thought is compelling enough to motivate a sociologist to start writing down what he thinks about the hidden America. Then, what emerges from this effort is a picture of America that is at once so familiar and so alien. It is the alien part of America that troubles us, that scares us, and that pushes us to escape into louder, more colorful, and more pleasant unreality. As our escapism becomes more urgent each day, so does its testimony to the emptiness and loneliness of our solitary existence. Huer discusses this alien part of America in American Paradise.