The Art of Looking

How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art

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By Lance Esplund

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  1. ebook $17.99 $22.99 CAD
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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around November 27, 2018. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art

The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich’s 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp’s 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock’s midcentury “drip” paintings; Chris Burden’s “Shoot” (1971), in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle; Urs Fischer’s “You” (2007), a giant hole dug in the floor of a New York gallery; and the conceptual and performance art of today’s Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic. The shifts have left the art-viewing public (understandably) perplexed.


In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund demonstrates that works of modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem. With patience, insight, and wit, Esplund guides us through the last century of art and empowers us to approach and appreciate it with new eyes. Eager to democratize genres that can feel inaccessible, Esplund encourages viewers to trust their own taste, guts, and common sense. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that recent art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who believe that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.
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Genre:

On Sale
Nov 27, 2018
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465094677

Lance Esplund

About the Author

Lance Esplund writes about art for the Wall Street Journal. Previously, he was US art critic for Bloomberg News and chief art critic for the New York Sun. He has taught studio art and art history at the Parsons School of Design and Rider University, and has served as visiting MFA critic at the New York Studio School. His essays have appeared in Art in America, Harper’s, Modern Painters, and the New Republic among others. Esplund lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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