89 Seconds at Alcázar


Book Description

Artwork by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. Edited by Karen Young. Text by Eve Sussman. Photography by Bobby Neel Adams, Benedikt Partenheimer. Contributions by Claudia de Serpa Soares.




Slow Art


Book Description

Introduction : marking time -- What is slow art? (when images swell into events and events condense into images) -- Living pictures -- Before slow art -- Slow art emerges in modernity I : secularization from Diderot to Wilde -- Slow art emerges in modernity II : the great age of speed -- Slow fiction, film, video, performance, 1960 to 2010 -- Slow photography, painting, installation art, sculpture, 1960 to 2010 -- Angel and devil of slow art




The Ladies-in-Waiting


Book Description

In 1656, Diego Velázquez, leading figure in the Spanish Golden Age of painting, created one of the most enigmatic works in the history of art: Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting). This graphic novel, written and drawn by two of Spain’s most sophisticated comics creators, examines its legacy as one of the first paintings to explore the relationship among the viewer, reality, and unreality. (It guest stars Cano, Salvador Dalí, Zurbarán, and many others.) Olivares’s art moves from clear line to expressionistic; from pen nib to brush stokes; from one color palette to another, as The Ladies-in-Waiting uses fiction to explore the ties among artists and patrons, the past and the present, institutions and audiences, creators and creativity. Their combined efforts have garnered not only international comics prizes, but the equivalent of the National Book Award in Spain, where the book has been a commercial and critical sensation.




The Rape of the Sabine Women


Book Description

"Brooklyn-based Eve Sussman founded the Rufus Corporation, an ad hoc group of artists, dancers, actors and musicians who create videos, photographs and live events, in 2003. This volume compiles film stills from two works for which Sussman and her collaborators are most known. "89 Seconds at Alcazar" (2004) is a high-definition video tableau inspired by Diego Velazquez's painting "Las Meninas" (1656). The piece focuses on the 89 seconds when the Spanish royal family and their courtiers would have been in the exact configuration portrayed in the painting. The Rape of the Sabine Women - featuring a mesmerizing score composed by Jonathan Bepler - is an allegorical video that conflates the myth of Romulus' founding of Rome with David's painting "Intervention of the Sabine Women" (1796-99). It is set in an idealized, cinematic version of the 1960s that includes G-men and a decadent party in a chic International Style summer home." --Book Jacket.




Zooming In


Book Description

From the first sets of photographic records made by Western travelers to doctored portraits of Chairman Mao and the avant-garde photographic performances of the post–Cultural Revolution era, photography in China has followed divergent paths. In this book, Wu Hung explores the multiple histories of photographic production in China, using them to tell a larger story about China’s shifting sociopolitical contexts and the different agendas, technologies, and aesthetics that have helped define its arts. At the center of the book is a large question: how has photography represented China and its people, its collective history and memory as well as the diversity of Chinese artists who have striven for creative expression? To address this question, the author offers an in-depth study of selected photographers, themes, and movements in Chinese photography from 1860 to the present, covering a wide range of genres, including portraiture, photojournalism, architectural and landscape photography, and conceptual photography. Beautifully illustrated, this book offers a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of an important photographic history.




Art of the Deal


Book Description

Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices of living artists' works have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists now think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Artists no longer simply make art, but package, sell, and brand it. Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it's headed. He takes a unique look at the globalization of the art world and the changing face of the business, offering the clearest analysis yet of how investors speculate in the market and how emerging art forms such as video and installation have been drawn into the commercial sphere. By carefully examining these developments against the backdrop of the deflation of the contemporary art bubble in 2008, "Art of the Deal" is a must-read book that demystifies collecting and investing in today's art market.




The Cinema of Sensations


Book Description

Following a previous international conference at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and the subsequent publication of a volume of studies with the title Film in the Post-Media Age (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), which insisted, citing the words of Jacques Rancière, that the ecosystem of contemporary moving images should be understood not as a unified digital environment, but as a highly diversified, “multisensory milieu,” another conference was organised, focusing this time directly on the “multisensory” nature of moving images. Pairing the keywords “cinema” and “sensation”, an invitation was extended for presentations offering a closer examination of the sensual aspects of moving images in order to identify and map out at least some of the possible new directions perceived as taking shape as “sensuous” film studies. The questions contributors addressed included: What kind of paradigms, authors, and styles can be identified in the practice of a cinema exploring the palpable presence of bodies in film history? How can sensory, audiovisual perception and cognitive knowledge be connected when watching moving images? What does the experience of so-called haptic images entail in film and video art? How does an emphasis on sensations and the body relate to representations of social issues and cultural difference? How are representations of other arts in films, or the filmic image appearing as a painterly tableau perceived? How can new images incorporate a sensation of “old” images? What is the difference between haptic images and “hyper” cinema in the form of 3D movies? How can the new naturalistic trends in contemporary cinema be interpreted? What kind of sensual forms are devised for what is unrepresentable or impalpable? The conference took place between the 25th and 27th of May 2012, with the title The Cinema of Sensations, and attracted researchers from all over the world for what turned out to be three days of presentations on extremely varied subjects and lively discussions conducted in a memorably cheerful atmosphere. The present volume is the palpable outcome of these debates, and publishes a selection of articles that have been written for, or after, this conference.




Crash


Book Description

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration. Her reflections on the crash as the traumatic, uncertain moment of inertia that comes in the wake of speed and confidence challenge the tendency in cinema studies to privilege movement above film’s other qualities. Ultimately, Beckman suggests that film studies is a hybrid field that cannot apprehend its object of study without acknowledging the ways that cinema’s technology binds it to capitalism’s industrial systems and other media, technologies, and disciplines.




Art on the Block


Book Description

A fascinating tour of the last five decades of contemporary art in New York City, showing how artists are catalysts of gentrification and how neighborhoods in turn shape their art--with special insights into the work of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons Stories of New York City's fabled art scene conjure up artists' lofts in SoHo, studios in Brooklyn, and block after block of galleries in Chelsea. But today, no artist can afford a SoHo loft, Brooklyn has long gentrified, and even the galleries of Chelsea are beginning to move on. Art on the Block takes the reader on a journey through the neighborhoods that shape, and are shaped by, New York's ever-evolving art world. Based on interviews with over 150 gallery directors, as well as the artists themselves, art historian and cultural commentator Ann Fensterstock explores the genesis, expansion, maturation and ultimate restless migration of the New York art world from one initially undiscovered neighborhood to the next. Opening with the colonization of the desolate South Houston Industrial District in the late 1960s, the book follows the art world's subsequent elopements to the East Village in the ‘80s, Brooklyn in the mid-90s, Chelsea at the beginning of the new millennium and, most recently, to the Lower East Side. With a look to the newest neighborhoods that artists are just now beginning to occupy, this is a must-read for both art enthusiasts as well as anyone with a passion for New York City.




Blockchain Value


Book Description

This book focuses on the values of blockchain across industries. If you think that blockchain is everything you don’t understand about technology, finance, and law mixed together, then this book will help you appreciate its value more clearly. While it is a complex technology that is still largely experimental today, it will be transformative in the future. This book focuses on the values of blockchain across industries. Among other things, it explores how blockchain technology adds value to data management, security, and sharing as well as ownership, property, collaboration, and trust. It also explores the possibilities of the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS), digital goods or dGoods, and the transformative power of small acts and micropayments.