James Elkins

This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.

A History of People who Have Cried in Front of Paintings

Pictures & Tears

He also addresses the phenomenon of art critiques as a microcosm for teaching art as a whole and dissects real-life critiques, highlighting presuppositions and dynamics that make them confusing and suggesting ways to make them more helpful. Elkins's no-nonsense approach clears away the assumptions about art instruction that are not borne out by classroom practice. For example, he notes that despite much talk about instilling visual acuity and teaching technique, in practice neither teachers nor students behave as if those were their principal goals. He addresses the absurdity of pretending that sexual issues are absent from life-drawing classes and questions the practice of holding up great masters and masterpieces as models for students capable of producing only mediocre art. He also discusses types of art--including art that takes time to complete and art that isn't serious--that cannot be learned in studio art classes.

A Handbook for Art Students

Why Art Cannot Be Taught

A study on how our eyes function with our brains examines the irrational elements of physical sight and concludes that human seeing transforms both the viewer and the object being viewed

On the Nature of Seeing

The Object Stares Back

I hope this book will inspire every reader to stop and consider things that are...so clearly meaningless that they never seemed worth a second thought.... Grass, the night sky, a postage stamp, a crack in the sidewalk, a shoulder. Ordinary objects of everyday life. But when we look at them--really look at them--what do we see? In the tradition of John Berger's bestselling Ways of Seeing,James Elkins'sHow to Use Your Eyesinvites us to look at--and maybe to see for first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. A butterfly's wing pattern encodes its identity. A cloudless sky yields a precise sequence of colors at sunset. A bridge reveals the relationship of a population with its landscape. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins also explores complicated things like mandalas,the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous. How to Use Your Eyesis a thrilling read evocative of the work of Diane Ackerman and Stephen Jay Gould. It will transform your view of nature and the mind.

How to Use Your Eyes

What Painting Is

Photography Theory (Art Seminar)

Stories of Art

OElkins shines his bright light across the long-overlooked shadowland of studio education. Beautifully written and easy to use, this book is an absolute must for art students and faculty alike."NGeorge Smith, founder and president, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

A Guide

Art Critiques

Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? Answering this question and more, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art.

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

Art criticism was once passionate, polemical and judgmental: now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description. And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. Here, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes.

What Happened to Art Criticism?

در باب مشاهده

In this unprecedented collection, over twenty of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject including Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Jay Bernstein ponder the disconnect between these two disciplines. The volume has a radically innovative structure: it begins with introductions, and centres on an animated conversation among ten historians and aestheticians. That conversation was then sent to twenty scholars for commentary and their responses are very diverse: some are informal letters and others full essays with footnotes. Some think they have the answer in hand, and others raise yet more questions. The volume ends with two synoptic essays, one by a prominent aesthetician and the other by a literary critic. This stimulating inaugural volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question; Does philosophy have anything to say to art history?

Art History Versus Aesthetics

In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner that he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness--its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see--and pain--extremely powerful images that can sear into our consciousness permanently. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, Elkins demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty--physically, psychologically, emotionally, and aethstically--of the act of seeing.

ʻAkkāsī chīst?

David Morgan

The near-absence of religion from contemporary discourse on art is one of the most fundamental issues in postmodernism. Artists critical of religion can find voices in the art world, but religion itself, including spirituality, is taken to be excluded by the very project of modernism. The sublime, "re-enchantment" (as in Weber), and the aura (as in Benjamin) have been used to smuggle religious concepts back into academic writing, but there is still no direct communication between "religionists" and scholars. Re-Enchantment, volume 7 in The Art Seminar Series, will be the first book to bridge that gap. The volume will include an introduction and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on religion and art including Boris Groys, James Elkins, Thierry de Duve, David Morgan, Norman Girardot, Sally Promey, Brent Plate, and Christopher Pinney.

Re-Enchantment

Hilton Als

Harold Eugene Edgerton

Roth Horowitz (Firm)

Exhibition catalog of photographs taken with a rapatronic camera of nuclear tests during the 1950s by Harold E. Edgerton with Herbert Grier and Kennth Germeshausen. Also included are photographs of Hiroshima taken by an anonymous photographer shortly after the 1945 bombing.

Documenting the Bomb

After and Before

In a wide-ranging argument moving from Sumerian demons to Lucian Freud, from Syriac prayer books to John Carpenter's film The Thing, this book explores the ways the body has been represented through time. A response to the vertiginous increase in writings on bodily representations, it attempts to form a single coherent account of the possible forms of representation of the body. This work brings together concerns, images, and concepts from a wide range of perspectives: art history and criticism, the history and philosophy of medicine, the history of race, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, studies of feminism and pornography, and the new interest in visual studies. Yet it is less a philosopher's look at history or a historian's foray into philosophy than a practical and critical look at the current constellation of art practices. Above all, it is intended to be of immediate use in the conceptualization and production of visual art and its history.

Pain and Metamorphosis

Pictures of the Body

This is the third volume in The Art Seminar, James Elkin's series of conversations on art and visual studies. Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.

Is Art History Global?

Robert Williams

Renaissance Theory presents an animated conversation among art historians about the optimal ways of conceptualizing Renaissance art, and the links between Renaissance art and contemporary art and theory. This is the first discussion of its kind, involving not only questions within Renaissance scholarship, but issues of concern to art historians and critics in all fields. Organized as a virtual roundtable discussion, the contributors discuss rifts and disagreements about how to understand the Renaissance and debate the principal texts and authors of the last thirty years who have sought to reconceptualize the period. They then turn to the issue of the relation between modern art and the Renaissance: Why do modern art historians and critics so seldom refer to the Renaissance? Is the Renaissance our indispensable heritage, or are we cut off from it by the revolution of modernism? The volume includes an introduction by Rebecca Zorach and two final, synoptic essays, as well as contributions from some of the most prominent thinkers on Renaissance art including Stephen Campbell, Michael Cole, Frederika Jakobs, Claire Farago, and Matt Kavaler.

Renaissance Theory

Harper Montgomery

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or nonaesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bernstein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach.

Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or as objective discovery and reporting.

James Elkins

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