Books, Arts & Photography, Schools, Periods & Styles, Contemporary Art

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Sarah Thornton
Seven Days in the Art World
by W.W. Norton & Co. (Hardcover)

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion.In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile ...

Banksy
Wall and Piece
by Random House UK (Paperback)

The collected works of Britain’s most wanted artist.Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable (except maybe when it’s squatting in the New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Museum of Modern Art.) Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world.Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough you’ll find your own. His statements, incitements, ironies and epigrams are by turns intelligent and witty comments on everything from the monarchy and capitalism to the war in Iraq and farm animals.His identity remains unknown, but his work is prolific. And now for the first time, he’s putting together the best of his work—old and new—in a fully illustrated color volume.Banksy, ...

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 ...

Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Spectrum (Underwood Books))
by Underwood Books (Paperback)

With art drawn from a wide variety of sources — books, graphic novels, video games, films, galleries, and advertising — Spectrum 15 reinforces both the importance and prevalence of fantasy art in today’s culture. Featuring over 300 exceptional works by artists from around the globe, this gorgeous full-color collection celebrates a cadre of creators working in every style and medium. Included are luminaries such as Brom, James Gurney, Marc Gabanna, Shaun Tan, and 2008’s Grand Master Award winner, John Jude Palencar.

Calvin Tomkins
Lives of the Artists
by Henry Holt and Co. (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-10-28)

Whether writing about Jasper Johns or Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman or Richard Serra, Calvin Tomkins shows why it is both easier and more difficult to make art today. If art can be anything, where do you begin?For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.”Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist ...

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.

Andy Goldsworthy
Time
by Abrams (Paperback)

Takashi Murakami, Dick Hebdige, Midori Matsui, Scott Rothkopf
Murakami
by Rizzoli (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2007-10-23)

Takashi Murakami is one of contemporary art’s most innovative and important figures. Drawing from street culture, high art, and traditional Japanese painting, Murakami takes the contemporary art trend of mixing high and low to an unprecedented level (critics call him the new Warhol), producing original paintings and sculptures as well as mass-produced consumer objects such as toys, books, and most famously, a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton. A committed supporter and spokesperson for Japanese artists and a powerful commentator on postwar culture and society, Murakami has organized influential exhibitions of Japanese art as well as a biannual art fair in Tokyo. Murakami has positioned himself as a new type of artist for the twenty-first century: a hybrid of creator, entrepreneur, and cultural ambassador.In conjunction with the first major retrospective of his work, Murakami traces Murakami’s global impact socially, culturally, and art historically. Essays focus on ...

Danzig Baldaev
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia
by Steidl (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2004-03-02)

Once upon a time, before the advent of the indie rocker and the alternative chick, before primitivism became a style trend and tattoo parlors set up shop on the good avenues, tattoos were the secret language of a restricted world, a world of criminals. ~The photographs, drawings and texts published here are part of a collection of 3,600 tattoos accumulated over a lifetime by prison attendant Danzig Baldayev. Tattoos were his entrance into a secret world, a world in which he acted as an ethnographer, recording the rituals of a closed society. The icons and tribal languages he documented are artful, distasteful, sexually explicit and sometimes just simply strange, reflecting as they do the lives and mores of convicts. Skulls, swastikas, harems of naked women, a smiling Al Capone, assorted demons, medieval knights in armor, daggers sheathed in blood, benign images of Christ, mosques and minarets, sweet-faced mothers and their babies, armies of tanks, and a horned Lenin--these are ...

Elisabeth Sussman
Keith Haring
by Taschen (Hardcover)

In 1980, mysterious chalk drawings of simple outline figures began appearing on unused advertising space in New York City subway stations. Combining the appeal of Disney cartoons with the sophisticated "primitivism" of such artists as Jean Dubuffet, these underground artworks were bold, humorous, accessible, subversive -- and unmistakably the work of one man, Keith Haring.Over the next decade, Haring went on to create a body of work that would capture the energy and excitement of New York's brash street culture -- and transmute punk, new wave, hip-hop, graffiti art, and break dancing into an instantly recognizable pop iconography. He frequently bypassed the gallery scene, preferring to address people directly through drawings and paintings in public spaces and with mass-produced items based on his designs. By the time of his death from AIDS at age thirty-one in 1990, he had become New York's most celebrated artist since Andy Warhol.Keith Haring is the first look back at this ...

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