Books, Arts & Photography, Schools, Periods & Styles, Modern

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Don Thompson
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
by Palgrave Macmillan (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-09-16)

Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?             Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.            This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on  interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the ...

Lynn H. Nicholas
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
by Vintage (Paperback) (Release Date: 1995-04-25)

Al Seckel
Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion
by Sterling (Paperback)

Rings of seahorses that seem to rotate on the page. Butterflies that transform right before your eyes into two warriors with their horses. A mosaic portrait of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau made from seashells. These dazzling and often playful artistic creations manipulate perspective so cleverly that they simply outwit our brains: we can’t just take a quick glance and turn away. They compel us to look once, twice, and over and over again, as we try to figure out exactly how the delightful trickery manages to fool our perceptions so completely. Of course, first and foremost, every piece is beautiful on the surface, but each one offers us so much more. From Escher’s famous and elaborate “Waterfall” to Shigeo Fukuda’s “Mary Poppins,” where a heap of bottles, glasses, shakers, and openers somehow turn into the image of a Belle Epoque woman when the spotlight hits them, these works of genius will provide endless enjoyment.

Edward Dolnick
The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
by Harper (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-06-24)

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art. It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life. ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes ...

Carol Strickland
The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern
by Andrews McMeel Publishing (Paperback)

This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media.Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible—even at a cursory reading. From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.

Gloria K. Fiero
The Humanistic Tradition, Book 6
by McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages (Paperback)

Beginning with the startling twentieth century developments in physics and the Freudian revolution, this book of The Humanistic Tradition addresses 100 years of precipitous change. The exciting conclusion to the six-book series, Modernism, Globalism, and the Information Age can also be used as a literary or cultural supplement to courses on the art or the history of the period from 1900 to 2000.

Barry Blinderman, Germano Celant
Keith Haring (Art & Design)
by Prestel Publishing (Paperback)

This first comprehensive compilation on Haring shows the full range of his prolific output, with illustrations and essays.

Charley Harper
Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper
by Flower Valley Press (Hardcover)

Cornelia Butler, Richard Shiff, Matthew Monahan, Marlene Dumas
Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave
by D.A.P./Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-06-01)

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, desire, despair and confusion in order to slyly critique social and political attitudes toward women, children, people of color and others who have historically been victimized. From her evocative portraits, based on photographs of friends and family as well as figures culled from printed pornography, to her large-scale images highlighting charged relationships within groups, Dumas' work explores the contradictions behind the physical reality of the body, merging acute social commentary with personal experience and art-historical antecedent to create unsettling and ambiguous psychological statements.Accompanying Dumas' first major mid-career survey in the U.S., with stops in three major American cities, (one yet to be announced) this substantial, fully-illustrated publication features a newly commissioned ...

Barry Schwabsky
Vitamin P
by Phaidon Press (Hardcover)

Vitamin P is an image-filled book that provides an international overview of the state of painting today. Documenting the most recent concerns, ideas and trends, Vitamin P explores the work of a vibrant new generation that is revitalizing this traditional, but continually updated, medium. Included are 114 of painting's leading practitioners, who were nominated by esteemed critics, curators and other experts from around the world. Each artist is represented by numerous examples of his or her work, accompanied by an explanatory text and short biography. Vitamin P illustrates the richness, eclecticism and dynamism of painting today. It is a critical sourcebook and reference work for seasoned art world veterans as well as newcomers to contemporary art. A stimulating introductory text is provided by Barry Schwabsky, who writes regularly for Artforum. He is currently Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

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