A collection of inspiring essays by the photographer Robert Adams, who advocates the meaningfulness of art in a disillusioned society. In Art Can Help, the internationally acclaimed American photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) offers over two-dozen meditations on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that "encourages us to gratitude and engagement,...

From Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to provocative dung-splattered madonnas, in today's art world many strange, even shocking, things are put on display. This often leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art? In this invaluable primer on aesthetics, Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are so highly valued in art, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many engrossing examples. Writing clearly and perceptively, she...

Teacher, philosopher, and author Guy Tal has written several best-selling books on photography, creativity, and expression. While it would be understandable to label Guy a "photographer," it is more accurate to call him a philosopher and artist who has forged a creative life on his own terms: a life shaped by his love of nature, his interest in science and philosophy, his individualistic temperament, and his desire to create art that is expressive...

"For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us. Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription,...

"On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries"--

"At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) placed beauty at the center of his worldview. It revolutionized Western philosophy. Thinkers such as Hume, Leibniz, Voltaire, Goethe, and Humboldt were all indebted to Shaftesbury's pioneering explorations of the experience of beauty and the role it can play in moral judgment, religious worship, and appreciation of the systems of nature. By the...

Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest...

"Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden,...

"Was it always like this? What if your self portrait was a collection of weird shapes? Have you ever felt like an abstract painting? Do you ever simultaneously wish and worry that the boundaries of your body will melt away and you'll become a magnificent horse? Becoming Horses is a book about squinting hard and looking from the right angle to find that everything around you sparkles--just a little--and the shapes of things are not firm but fuzzy....