Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?
Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
Geoff Dyer has won fans writing about everything from jazz to D. H. Lawrence, from photography to neurotic enlightenment, from Cambodia to Rome. The Missing of the Somme, his remarkable book on the significance of the First World War, is a gem for D...
How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle's incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide ran...
Narrator: Eric Michael Summerer Published: 08/14/2018
No one skewers the popular movements of American culture like Tom Wolfe. In 1975, he turned his satirical pen to the pretensions of the contemporary art world, a world of social climbing, elitist posturing, and ingeniously absurd self-justifying the...
In this series of essays written over the past twenty years, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art. His wide range of subject...
Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and in...
Bestselling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things—and what small things tell us about our larger world.“[Simon Garfield is] an exuberant tru...
Narrator: Adrian Scarborough Published: 03/12/2019
Why do citizens vote against their own best interest?Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice an...
In Reason in Art, Santayana explores the social and psychological origins of art. He examines its moral and ideal functions, its lapses into tastelessness, and the distinctive character of music, speech, poetry, and prose. The Spanish-born philosoph...
Without an understanding and appreciation of the culture we seek to preserve and protect, the defense of Western civilization is fundamentally futile; a culture that believes in nothing cannot defend itself, because it has nothing to defend. The pas...
{"id":"1983389","ean":"9781515989219","abr":"Unabridged","title":"The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning","subtitle":"A Reckoning","author":"Maggie Nelson","rating_average":"0","narrator":"Tavia Gilbert","ubr_id":"1983389","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"17.99","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"10.79","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"Tavia Gilbert","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 8 hr 50 min","abr_length":"Abridged: "}
