Books
Is There a Right Way to Look at Art?
Is looking at a work of art for up to fifteen minutes with no context the best way to appreciate and understand it?
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An Enigmatic Literary Icon of Modern China
Although Lu Xun eventually cast his lot with the communist revolutionaries, he took a dim view of literature that attempted to recover a national identity or culture.
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Urban Poems of Yearning and Heartbreak
John Godfrey’s poems are like pointillistic patterns more than traditional narratives, suggesting an attitude over a story.
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Mónica de la Torre's Poems Reimagine an Iconic Martin Kippenberger Artwork
In these enigmatic poems, de la Torre’s mode of direct address seeks to put the reader into a trance.
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Expect Catastrophe in Poems Built from Tension
In Heisenberg's Salon, Susan Lewis reveals the irrational lurking within every gesture, symbol, structure, and sentiment.
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The Geodesic Dome Dreams of Quebec
In the 1950s, architect Jeffrey Lindsay led a little-known era of geodesic dome design in Québec, which is explored in the new book Montréal's Geodesic Dreams.
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The Dynamic Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s and '30s
Susan Pack's Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde celebrates the experimental film posters from the pre-Stalin Soviet Union.
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Andy Warhol's Whimsical Drawings Before He Went Pop
A new book collects Warhol's early hand-drawn illustrations and accompanying texts, reproduced faithfully and filled with wit and whimsy.
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How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century
In Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates how the fatal symptoms of tuberculosis became entwined with feminine ideals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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An Illuminating History of Modern Graphic Design
The Brooklyn-based publishing company, Standards Manual, has produced a series of meticulously crafted facsimiles of design manuals, from the New York City Subway to NASA.
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The Calling Cards of the 1970s and '80s British CB Radio Subculture
Eyeball Cards: The Art of British CB Radio Culture compiles hundreds of calling cards from the renegade 1970s and '80s Citizens Band (CB) radio scene.
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Ukraine's Monumental Soviet-Era Mosaics
Often unremarked or dismissed as state propaganda, Ukraine's Soviet-era mosaics are also artworks in themselves that speak to a complex history.