Download or read book Why Art Cannot Be Taught written by James Elkins and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001-05-17 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book What Painting is written by James Elkins and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Elkins argues that alchemists and painters have similar relationships to the substances they work with. Both try to transform the substance, while seeking to transform their own experience.
Download or read book Stories of Art written by James Elkins and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this intimate history, James Elkins demonstrates that there is - and can never be - only one story of art. He opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids.
Download or read book Pictures and Tears written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.
Download or read book How to Use Your Eyes written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-08-20 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for the 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. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.
Download or read book What Photography Is written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, 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 also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, the book demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty--physical, psychological, emotional, and aesthetic--of the act of seeing.
Download or read book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With bracing clarity, James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples, from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's Angelus, from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history, including Watteau's "meaningless" paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper.
Download or read book The Object Stares Back written by James Elkins and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Visual Studies written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest book, James Elkins offers a road map through the field of visual studies, describing its major concerns and its principal theoretical sources. Then, with the skill and insight that have marked his successful books on art and visuality, Elkins takes the reader down a side road where visual studies can become a more interesting place. Why look only at the same handful of theorists? Why exclude from one's field of vision non-Western art or the wealth of scientific images?
Download or read book What Happened to Art Criticism written by James Elkins and published by Prickly Paradigm. This book was released on 2003 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Photography Theory written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photography Theory presents forty of the world's most active art historians and theorists, including Victor Burgin, Joel Snyder, Rosalind Krauss, Alan Trachtenberg, Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Squiers, Margaret Iversen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau in animated debate on the nature of photography. Photography has been around for nearly two centuries, but we are no closer to understanding what it is. For some people, a photograph is an optically accurate impression of the world, for others, it is mainly a way of remembering people and places. Some view it as a sign of bourgeois life, a kind of addiction of the middle class, whilst others see it as a troublesome interloper that has confused people's ideas of reality and fine art to the point that they have difficulty even defining what a photograph is. For some, the whole question of finding photography's nature is itself misguided from the beginning. This provocative second volume in the Routledge The Art Seminar series presents not one but many answers to the question what makes a photograph a photograph?
Download or read book Is Art History Global written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Domain of Images written by James Elkins and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects--painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking--to the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as any canonical painting. Using scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization.Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.
Download or read book What Do Artists Know written by James Elkins and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, curators, artists, and educators to ask how art is and should be taught. Explores the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Six Stories from the End of Representation written by James Elkins and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six Stories is a radically new look at the intersection of science and art through “failed” images.
Download or read book What is an Image written by James Elkins and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, postcolonial theorists, and curators to ask how images, pictures, and paintings are conceptualized. Issues discussed include concepts such as "image" and "picture" in and outside the West; semiotics; whether images are products of discourse; religious meanings; and the ethics of viewing"--Provided by publisher.
