Wendy Steiner

Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Where previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the twentieth century modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament. Modernism's rejection of traditional tenets of beauty--harmony, empathy and femininity--still reverberate through both art and society today.

The Trouble with Beauty

The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art

Venus in Exile

Surveying a wide range of cultural controversies, from the Mapplethorpe affair to Salman Rushdie's death sentence, Wendy Steiner shows that the fear and outrage they inspired are the result of dangerous misunderstanding about the relationship between art and life. 27 halftones.

Art in an Age of Fundamentalism

The Scandal of Pleasure

Fredric Jameson

James Elkins

Elaine Scarry

Kathleen Marie Higgins

Dave Hickey

Theodor W. Adorno

Griselda Pollock

Andy Warhol

Thierry De Duve

Gerhard Richter

Christoph Grunenberg

Leon Golub

Rosalind Krauss

Diarmuid Costello

Paul Wood

Caroline A. Jones

Arthur Coleman Danto

John Roberts

Mark Cousins

Alexander Alberro

Jason Gaiger

Timothy J. Clark

Richard Woodfield

Rudolf Sagmeister

Robert Smithson

Vito Acconci

Alex Katz

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Nancy Spero

Rasheed Araeen

Agnes Martin

David Raskin

Art & Language

John Currin

Anna Dezeuze

Leo Fitzmaurice

Suzanne Perling Hudson

Mark Hutchinson

Saul Ostrow

Simon O'Sullivan

Dominic Willsdon

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies . Beauty is among the most hotly contested subjects in current discussions on art and culture. After decades of disavowal, beauty's resurgence in recent art has engaged some of the most influential artists and writers. Spanning diverse positions, this anthology assembles the key texts on the cultural politics of this recent phenomenon, as well as contextualizing these debates - both for and against - in artistic practice and the broader history of aesthetics. Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Gary Hume, Asger Jorn, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, Edouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol. Writers include: Theodor Adorno, Alexander Alberro, Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Mark Cousins, Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Derrida, Thierry de Duve, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Grunenberg, Dave Hickey, Suzanne Perling Hudson, Caroline A. Jones, John Roberts, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner and Paul Wood.

Beauty

Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament, preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus, with all her charms, into exile, Wendy Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's horrified response in Frankenstein, Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. She argues that the avant-garde set out to replace the impurity of woman and ornament with form -- the new arch-symbol of artistic beauty. However, in the process of controlling desire and pleasure in this way, artists admitted the exotic fetish objects of "primitive" cultures -- someone else's power and allure that surely would not overmaster the sophisticated modernist. A century of pornography, shock, and alienation followed, and this rejection of feminine and bourgeois values -- domesticity, intimacy, charm -- kept the female subject an impossible and remote symbol. Ironically, as Steiner reveals, the feminist hostility to the "beauty myth" had a parallel result, leaving Western society alienated from desire and pleasure on all sides. In the course of this elegantly constructed and accessibly written argument, Steiner explores the cultural history of the century just ended, from Dada to Futurism, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Pumping Iron II: The Women and Deep Throat, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Outsider Art, Naomi Wolf and Cindy Sherman, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, ranging across art and architecture, poetry and the novel, feminist writing and pornography. Only in recent years, Steiner demonstrates, has our culture begun to see a way out of this damaging impasse, revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard, and celebrating pleasure and charm in the arts of the present. By disentangling beauty from a misogynistic view of femininity -- as passive, narcissistic, sentimental, inefficacious -- Western culture now seems ready to return to the female subject and ornament in art, and to accept male beauty as a possibility to explore and celebrate as well. Steiner finds hints of these developments in the work of figures as varied as the painter Marlene Dumas, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and the choreographer Mark Morris as she leads us to a rediscovery and a reclamation of beauty in the Western world. From one of our most thoughtful and ambitious cultural critics, this important and thought-provoking work not only provides us with a searching analysis of where we have been in the last century but reveals the promise of where we might be going in the coming one.

A masterly performance by a penetrating, inquisitive mind, Vie Real Real Thing is that rarest of books, one whose provocations will inspire readers to take a new--and nuanced--look at the world around them. --Book Jacket.

The Model in the Mirror of Art

The Real Real Thing

Wendy Steiner reveals an intricate exchange between the visual arts and the literary romance.

Form Against Context in Painting and Literature

Pictures of Romance

Wendy Steiner

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