Showing titles in Art

When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom had the opportunity to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she was eager to reconnect with the performer that she'd first met late one night in 1966 at a Yorkville coffeehouse. More conversations followed over the next four decades of friendship, and it was only after Joni and Malka completed their last recorded interview, in 2012, that Malka discovered the heart of their discussions: the creative process.

A must-have course for corporate leaders, design professionals, marketers, and anyone else who communicates visually, How Colors Affect You tells you everything you need to know about the science of color and its impact on all aspects of human experience. These lectures will give you a beautiful new perspective on color - one rooted in credible scientific knowledge and not popular myth.

From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political and cultural. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world.

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly engaging introduction, the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct. The key postmodernist ideas are explored and challenged, as they figure in the theory, philosophy, politics, ethics, and artwork of the period, and it is shown how they have interacted within a postmodernist culture.

An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Nearly every book with "wabi" or "wabi sabi" in the title is based on the concepts first elucidated in this book. Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.... 

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. During the four extraordinary years that Michelangelo spent laboring over the ceiling, power politics and personal rivalries swirled around him. He battled ill health, financial and family difficulties, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the Pope's impatience - a history that is more compelling than most novels.

The Artist’s Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international best seller, millions of fans have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life. Still as vital today - or perhaps even more so - than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of The Artist’s Way and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into the creative process that she has gained.

Veteran Hollywood writer David Rensin travels behind the scenes and through 65 years of show business history to tell the real stories of the marvelous careers that began - and in some cases ended - in the mailroom. Based on more than 200 interviews, Rensin unfolds the never-before-told history of an American institution - in the voices of the people who lived it. Through seven decades of glamour and humiliation, you'll go where the trainees go, do what they must do to get ahead, and hear the best insider stories from the Hollywood everyone knows about but no one really knows.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.... Since 2009, when it first published, to today, Bluets has drawn scores of readers and listeners with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human - via 240 short pieces, at once lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. This new edition celebrates Maggie Nelson’s uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape. 

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the civil rights movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.

Robert Plant by Paul Rees is the definitive biography of Led Zeppelin's legendary frontman. As lead singer for one of the biggest and most influential rock bands of all time-whose song "Stairway to Heaven" has been played more times on American radio than any other track-Robert Plant defined what it means to be a rock god. Over the course of his 20-year career, British music journalist and editor Paul Rees has interviewed such greats as Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Bono, and AC/DC.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. 

A humiliating military defeat by Bismarck's Germany, a brutal siege, and a bloody uprising - Paris in 1871 was in shambles, and the question loomed, "Could this extraordinary city even survive?" Mary McAuliffe takes the listener back to these perilous years following the abrupt collapse of the Second Empire and France's uncertain venture into the Third Republic. By 1900, Paris had recovered, and the Belle Epoque was in full flower, but the decades between were difficult, marked by struggles.

In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life.

No one skewers the popular movements of American culture like Tom Wolfe. In 1975, he turned his satirical pen to the pretensions of the contemporary art world - a world of social climbing, elitist posturing, and ingeniously absurd self-justifying theorizing. From the fuliginous flatness of the 50s to the pop op minimal 60s, right on through the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t 70s, Tom Wolfe debunks the great American myth of modern art in an incandescent, hilarious, and devastating blast.

Role Models is filmmaker John Waters's self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities---some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road.

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.

Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive. In Culture Care artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future. This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms.

Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism - the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components - has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.