Redefining Modernism for sure
588181
In my opinion, Claire McCardell is USA's best designer of all time. Her fashions would be in style today, more than 60 years later. Even her styling looks modern. Why no one has refreshed this brand is beyond me.
3320950
A technically written but beautifully abstract piece of literature.  There is nice mixture of detail and ambiguity to the prose so that the setting is timeless (40's NYC??- but think the movie Brazil's 'somewhere in the 20th  century') and characters are universal but somewhat personable (a la  Kafka's 'Joesph K').  As an architect, this book has me looking at the  building code, as well as catalogues by Otis and Dover in a different  light.  (I personally have not witnessed the animosity he describes  between elevator and escalator inspector roles- but it is quite amusing  with creative banter!) I've seen this novel get compared to 'Crying of Lot  49' a couple of times, however only time will tell if Whitehead's got the  goods that Pynchon has.  Hopefully if he proves does, this author's  output  will be more timely and voluminous.
4116238
I read this somewhat as a prelude to "Posession", more as an  introduction to Byatt's style than as an undertaking of itself. I was  pleasantly surprised.
In all I've read spanning the ages from classical  philosophies to post-modernist contemporary fiction, I found this novella  higly satisfying. It is brief, concise, yet wants for nothing in either  style or quality of thematic content. Using controversial impressionist  paintings as a backdrop for finely-crafted fictional shorts is a grand idea  and it has been executed in a true literary artist's fashion here.
I must  strongly suggest this book to almost any reader of literature or fiction.
1099279
Postmodernity is a condition of profound and growing injustice and postmodernism is its legitimating ideology. And while most Western thinkers lie to themselves and argue that postmodernism is a new non-reductive,  non-totalising theory of liberation the reality is that it is a condition  which means ethnic restaurants and world music for the Western elite and  devastation, utter devestation, for much of the Rest.
The book ranges  across areas like architecture, film, television, pop music and philosophy  to faddish new age religions and includes specific analysis of everything  from Disney's Pocahontas to Rushdie's Satanic Verses; Mira Nair's The Perez  Family; the Body Shop and Microsoft Bookshelf to tourism and  terrorism.
In every instanace Sardar brings compelling evidence (and his  own exceptional intelligence) to support his argument that while  postmodernism appears to embrace plurality it in fact functions to  legitimate the acceleration of Western imperialism.
This is book is more  than just an effective antidote to Baudrillard and Rorty. It's a very  serious, convincing, compelling and overdue attack on the way the world is.  It's also a very necessary antidote to the selfrighteous smugness of most  Western 'critics' and particularly those who are so blinded by luxury that  they really do believe that we are entering a postpolitical  age.
Postmodernism and the Other can be read with the work of people like  Noam Chomsky, Christopher Norris, Lesego Rampolokeng, John Pilger, Jeremy  Cronin, Anthony Richmond, Breyten Breytenbach, Vandana Shiva and Pierre  Bourdieu. The Post-Development Reader is excellent too. And of course  Frantz Fanon's classic, The Wretched of the Earth, still speaks as urgently  as ever.
1792229
To fully appreciate Egan, a must read review:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/pankaj-mishra/modernitys-undoing
621074
What a great collection  its so different from his other collections, at least at the level of form. I love the aphoristic, collective, ironic, and prosaic feeling of the collection. My favorite poems were the ones that breached genre, that felt like a bleed-between of poetry and essaying or poetry and fiction. My favorite poem in the collection, Scarecrows, is entirely aphoristic. Perhaps one of the reasons I love this poem is its complete disregard for making conventional meaning, for its absence of a cohesive thesis. I may be alone in my lack-of-craving for homogenous rhetorical situation or even for discernible argument, but, alone as I might be, this poem embodies the delight of the aesthetic objectification of poetry, in the sculpture and painting whose motion is unique to poetry but whose allegiances aren't necessarily tied to the rhetorical obligations of essaying or even of fiction.
For those who are new to poetry, Larsens poetry is accessible and his diction is clear. For those who are well read, What the Body Knows is an invaluable addition to contemporary poetics. I would highly recommend this collection as well as Larsens others to a new student of poetry looking to orient themselves in the contemporary tradition. Larsens contributions to American Literature are undeniable.
I loved this collection and found myself lost in more than one of its poems. Its funny, its smart, its genuine, its new. I cant begin to emphasize the five in the five star rating I gave it above. Do yourself a favor and buy this collection.
254076
This is a book for the serious historian of design or architecture -- while the many photographs are all oustanding, and, in particular, the photos from Country Life are truly some of the most extraordinary interior photos of the 20th century [notwithstanding the complaints of the prior reviewer] --- this is not in the least a coffee table book and those seeking such should look elsewhere.  Rather, this superlative volume is a landmark in the intellectual history of Anglo-American design aesthetics and will likely not be equalled in the future. Of course, it's not at all surprising that the book is OOP --- the sophisticated audience for this subject is quite distinct from the acquisition-minded, typical subscriber to Architectural Digest.
3943257
This book covers established mid-century figures such as Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and also more recent experimental poets such as Nathaniel Mackey and Lyn Hejinian, with, in-between, chapters on John Ashbery, Derek Walcott, and the beat generation--a wide range that doesn't disappoint. In my opinion, the most significant sections are two of Gray's largest chapters, on Ashbery and Walcott.  The former, while it covers some of Ashbery's best-known poems (including what has to be the definitive reading of "The Instruction Manual"), offers a fresh approach to Ashbery, whose famous irreferentiality is illuminated through Gray's attention to themes and figures of travel and displacement.  In the Walcott chapter, the Caribbean poet's voluminous work is framed within the dialecticof stasis/rootedness/solidarity vs. travel/deracination/betrayal.  Gray's argument throughout the book suggests that while travel is  betrayal from a home-bound viewpoint, it is also the royal road to an anti-essentialist understanding of subjectivity.  In Walcott, this struggle is fought within far more poems than anyone previously realized, particularly in books such as The Bounty, Midsummer, and The Arkansas Testament.

There are some other, unexpected pleasures in this book, among them the analysis (in "Dandies and Flaneurs: the Center-Margin Debate") of U.S. criticism's (and U.S. culture's)attachment to the margins as the place of authenticity; the close reading of Lyn Hejinian's Oxota, as a case of linguistico-geographical travel in Russia; and the account of Lowell's disastrous trips to South America and Mexico, particularly the analysis of Lowell poems seldom discussed and practically never taught, the "travel" sonnet sequences-e.g. "Mexico" and "Leaving New York for England"-- of For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin.

This is the best book in quite awhile on post WW II poetry, whether connected to travel or not.
1017637
It was the word Culture in the title that made me buy these fascinating books.  I wanted something that explained American creativity in the broadest sense and I thought, having used them both for some time now, that the text and images succeed brilliantly.

What really made the books come alive for me was the extensive use of long sidebars to explain how the various strands of art and culture evolved.  They are placed to support the relevant material mentioned in the main text and written by fourteen contributors who professionally deal with the subject they are writing about.  To give you a flavor of this here are the sidebars for the Thirties:
Architecture of the New Democracy
Federal Writers Project--The American Guide Series
Music in the 1930s
Colonial revival--Idealising the Past
Cinematic Documentaries for the People
Photo-Essays
Big Band Sound
Depression-Era Social Dance
Choreography in Film
Thirties Genre Films
Literary Responses to Catastrophe
Theater in the 1930s
Biomorphism and Organicism in Design
Domestic Architecture--Towards a New Geometry
Industrial Design--Streamline Moderne
Architecture--The Streamlined Future.
All of the sidebars are complemented with some excellent pictorial material.

Another reason I like the two books is because of the elegant straightforward design that makes the paintings, photos and graphic material very accessible.  The very clean look only throws up the quality of the pictorial material, printed on glossy paper.  Most of the paintings would seem the obvious choice to represent the dozens of artists mentioned but I was very impressed with the photo and graphics selection to accompany the main text and sidebars.

Both books celebrate a hundred years American art and culture and perhaps, in a small way, they are excellent examples of this very creativity.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
1687200
I came to this book via a reference in an excellent critique of Baudrillard, by Richard J. Lane, who, in short, suggested that perhaps Baudrillard's use of the term " potlatch" was inaccurate, or based upon a faulty reading of primitive societies. Mr. Lane effectively deconstructs Baudrillard's notion of primitive societies, and along that path made me rethink Bataille and Mauss as well. In my opinion, this is exactly what Christopher Bracken does here, in a scholarly, masterful, and pioneering way. He rethinks our approach to the term potlatch, but perhaps also to our entire approach to anthropology itself.
Quoting from page 88, where the author explicates part of his purpose: "My aim is not to define it(potlatch) but to read a set of definitions deployed in a specific historical -and colonial- context of debate and contestation. "
If you are looking for an old-school history of the potlatch, for example, Boas and his interpretations of it, be aware that this is not the book for you. It is demanding and requires that you want to learn about the thinking of Derrida, Hegel, Bataille, and many others to gain a fresh and more meaningful modern view of anthropological theory. Interestingly, Mr. Bracken is an English teacher who investigates the actions that language and discourse bring about. I don't know if this brings him into the camp of the various approaches to linguistics and anthropology, but his cross disciplinary insight is astounding, exciting, and ultimately so rewarding I have to call this a defining work of modern anthropology. To me, it signals and is emblematic of a shift towards non-colonialist, non-imperialist attitudes and views of not only our own culture, but towards other cultures that we should not hold up as mirrors to our own hyperreal delusion.
516163
Employing a crypto-academic style that is by turns baffling, enervating but often frequently stimulating, Buell puts modernists classics of literature through their paces through the optics of "environmental criticism," a movement of which he and a few others appear to be the primary practictioners (from what I can glean from the book, the bibliography and the liner notes).
For example, his environmental criticism of Moby Dick is really quite a marvelous way to re-imagine the Melville classic as a text in which the boundaries between the consciousnesses of whales and men are elided through Melville's sympathetic and candid reportage of the whaling expedition and his inclusion of chapters on whaling lore.  He does another marvelous job on Faulkner's "The Bear" and the collection in which it originally appeared, noting that the narrator's description of the abandoned sawmills, the clear-cut forests and the resulting floods and related catastrophes create an emblematic context for the telling of the vexed, multi-layered story of the end of the Southern elitist hunting tradition through the agency of extractive industrialization.  His reading of DeLillo's White Noise restores its enviromental concerns (the Airborne Toxic Event) to its rightful place at the forefront of the DeLillo's topos -- unlike many other recent readings which do not mention this theme.  (Buell notes that such ommissions in what is rapidly becoming a touchstone work in the realm of cultural criticism is a disservice to the book and to DeLillo's environmental concerns demonstrated in his other works such as Underworld, a view that I entirely agree with: I was working at DeLillo's publisher at the time of White Noise's release, and it's publication happened to coincide with a real airborne toxic event in New Jersey, a happy coincidence which not only highlighted this imporant aspect of the work, but, happily for the publishers spurred sales of the book in its prescience.)
There are other interesting readings of notable works of fiction and non-fiction through the lens of environmental criticism as well.  Too, the introductory chapters which examine the various types of "toxic" discourses and describe how they restrict how we think of our relationship to the natural and man-made worlds are quite good as well.  So are the final chapters which deal with changing our conceptions of nature (once primary nature, now a second-hand, or second-nature, which he argues should include manmade enviroments as well).  Here he also encourages using the idea of the watershed as an organizing principle of locality and the most appropriate frame of our environmental imagination -- not arbitrary boundaries placed on the landscape either in theory or in practice.
But as you might suspect from the above, Buell covers a lot of territory with this book.  Perhaps this is because in advancing the notion of environmental criticism he feels compelled to treat a lot of areas than would normally be necessary in a more deeply populated field of criticism.  Don't get me wrong.  Just because there's a lot to chew over in this book, doesn't mean it's bad.  Much of it quite good, in fact.  For instance, Buell is very attentive and inventive in his readings of Whitman, Thoreau, Williams Carlos Williams, Joyce, et. al.  He also includes a number of well-selected non-canonical works which illustrate his theses imaginatively.  To summarize, good readings, an interesting, if too somtimess too diffuse programme, a defect which can be easily forgiven.  Now if only the style was more "grounded."
161961
This is an oversized oversized book, weighing about 15 pounds. It's obviously not meant for toting around, nor for learning about the art of the era it covers in the standard educational way. Leafing through the book and stopping at places to take in visual content, one gets a sense of the new encounter with art works this volume is meant to create. This encounter and the ideas and craft bringing it is related to some extent in an accompanying pamphlet by the publisher on the series this volume is a part of. Baroque, Romanesque, and Art Nouveau (the latter two in preparation at this time) are the others in the series named the Collection of Art Epochs so far, with the presumption the publisher will come out with others if these go well.

The form of the publisher's pamphlet is an interview with the series general editor Rolf Toman. In answer to a question about the new approach, Toman explains that the varied genres of art of any period/epoch such as architecture, painting, sculpture, and crafts are typically studied individually, discretely, whereas this book on Gothic arts, like the others in the series, brings out the interconnections among the varied types of art. While this focus on interconnections is not novel in itself, the approach in this book is novel and different. Whereas the matter of interconnections among the diverse and multitudinous art of any period is inexhaustible and mostly covered by collected essays by academics and critics which can at best present only facets seeming like shards of the comprehension touched on, the text of this "Gothic" and the related series' titles is written by a single author versed in the academic and critical views who brings together the interconnectedness in a single sensibility, style, and voice.

The text by the professor Bruno Klein presents the interconnected perspective so the reader sees a unity to the varied art works in what is a grand embellishment of the customary perspective toward the gothic art of the Middle Ages as varieties of Christian religious art gradually evolving into humanist, secular art as it approaches the Renaissance. Professor of Christian Art of the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages at Dresden University was one of the positions Klein held in his academic career.

The text is fresh and elucidating. But one does not look to a book of this size and evident copious visual content including fold-out mainly for its text. When it comes to the publisher's advanced (which some may see as evolutionary), ambitious conception of visual content, the quality of this, and the eye and technical knowledge and ability of the photographer Achim Bednorz for photographs, the coordinated editorial hand in selecting appropriate illustrations of art of the period, and the book designer for the formatting, this is seen as a success too. The book is distinctive and effective.

From the publisher's pamphlet again, Toman says the book's aim is to convey Gothic art "in a particularly vivid and accessible manner, to take you as close as possible to the history and artworks--sometimes even closer than is possible in reality, on the spot." The size of the book is seen as both required and desirable for getting  one "as close as possible" to many art works. Bednorz's photographs (he specializes in architecture and sacred spaces) of selected representative architectural features and art works have been enhanced to balance subject, proportion, and light so the viewer can take them in optimally. These techniques minimally making use of computer technology for photographs are applied also to features and art works high in cathedrals or in dark recesses which a viewer could otherwise hardly make out or not even see on a tour.

The book brings Gothic art to the reader in a unique and memorable way. The large size seems to beckon as a doorway to lead the reader to new terrain of this important art in Western culture--a promise delivered.
4783592
This is a really fine piece of work by Michael Sappol, that takes the scientific / medical illustration techniques of Fritz Kahn developed during the early / mid 20th Century and explores them in the context of modernism / modernity and complex interplay between style and information. The book expertly shifts between a detailed history of the illustrations themselves, their scientific, artistic and socio-political contexts and, ultimately, ideas of embodiment and the ways in which we understand our own bodies.

As someone who (amongst many other things) taught anatomy for 30 years, two things struck me in particular as I approached the end of the book. First, the interplay between modernity / illustration / technique described for Kahn et al is being repeated in a similar way now with digitial technology, where often the technology (or at least its potential allure) is rated over the content and context. There is much we can learn from the past here.

Second, the closing discussion of  the identity of the "I" and its relation to neuroscience underpins a core issue in the teaching of anatomy to medical students: whose body are they learning: the cadaver? the picture in the book? the plastic model? their own? the patients they hadn't seen yet?Modern neuroscience tells us that the more you are familiar with the look and physical feel of an external object, including another body, the more it becomes internalised in some sense. Sappol's discussion of these issues brings his historical analysis firmly into the realm of modern teaching practice, with a foundation deep within current philosophical and cognitive science ideas of embodied knowledge.

And in case you think this all sounds too heavy, the book itself is beautifully written and richly illustrated, making it an easy and alluring read.
325771
I got very excited when I saw some extracts of this book and the promotional videos on youtube, so I ordered it on Amazon. As I was very eager to begin, I did not want to wait, so I also bought the audiobook version, read by the author, available on Google Drive, and so was able to start reading immediately. The book has two parts: the first part is a general introduction to the four world ages of European art, and the second is composed of specific analyses of individual artists of the post-modern epoch. Ebert points out that there is no single center or capital of art in the contemporary world, and that the major artists are geographically dispersed, so one can call the two parts Chronos and Gaia.

1) Chronos. The book begins with a very interesting synthesis of the typology of historical periods proposed by Jean Gebser and of that proposed by Peter Sloterdijk in the SPHERES trilogy. His synthesis includes the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Marshall Mcluhan, Hans Belting, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Danto, Cornelius Castoriadis, Vilem Flusser, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and many more thinkers. Ebert distinguishes 4 major epochs in the semiotics of art, and more generally of our relation to being: the pre-metaphysical period - the artist is a shaman, the metaphysical or perspectival period - the artist is an optician in Euclidean visual space, the modernist or aperspectival period - the artist is an archetypologist of geometric or anthroplological forms in multi-dimensional space, the contemporary or post-aperspectival period - the artist is a monadologist in a liquefied quantized fom-space.

2) Gaia. Ebert argues that the contemporary period began not in 1962 with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Boxes", but in the period immeditely after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists. Pollock and Rothko correspond to a moment of effacing and liquefying the modernist "iconotypes", and dissolving the shared multi-dimensional macrosphere of modernity. They herald in the contemporary period, where the artist can no longer presuppose a universal organised semiotic system, and is obliged to select and combine the signifiers of the present and the past, and hybridise them with new signifiers, into idiosyncratic, temporary, partial, multiple organisations, with no universal legitimacy. Initially the living center of art moves from Paris to New York, only to be disseminated into a mobile polycentric dispersive phenomenon spread over the whole planet. From Parisian art has become Gaiatic. Ebert devotes chapters also to Basquiat, Beuys, Richter, Kieffer, Beksinski, Nerdrum, Bacon, Hirst, Kapoor, Kounellis, Boltanski and situates their singular work within the general episteme of the contemporary world.

This is an ambitious work taking in a vast period of history, from the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians to the contemporary world. Geographically Ebert moves from New York through the German artists to London, Rome, and Paris. The artists examined are very diverse, and allow Ebert to fill in his general frame with many more fine-grained analyses. Further, his categories are interdisciplinary or transversal, in that they apply to much more than artists and art works. To be sure, art has become a proliferation of singular semiotic processes, but frequenting the diverse art works that are elucidated with the help of Ebert's categories we find that our own lives are elucidated too. This is more than an academic manual, it is allso a useful guide to our own individuation in the pluralist ocean of foam that constitutes the semiotic and ontological background of our contemporary world.
1119801
Suffering poses one of the central dilemmas of the modern age -- an era that, arguably, with its world wars and mass genocides has inflicted more of it and on a vaster scale than any other in recorded history. What meaning can human suffering have in a world paradoxically devoted to notions to salvation through technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, to an aesthetics of despair that, in the name of authenticity, refuses all invitations to hope?

"A Broken Beauty" boldly enters into this nexus with a presentation of contemporary figurative painting and sculpture that both engages with contemporary themes and, with equal if not greater daring, shows with what power and versatility classical artistic forms and iconography still speak to the human condition today.

There's nothing facile about the work or the attitude on display in these pages. The art of this landmark exhibition does not assume that Christianity, or that artists of faith have easy answers to either the dilemmas of modernity or to the ongoing crises of postmodernist aesthetics. What "A Broken Beauty" does assume is that classical Christian and artistic perspectives direct an important challenge to an art world that appears to have lost faith in itself, and, indeed, perhaps in the value of the artistic enterprise. In "A Broken Beauty," there is the fragmentation, the "brokenness," that is part and parcel of modern consciousness, but there is also beauty, the perception, however "darkly" glimpsed, of original wholeness, of the transcendent value of the body, and of human life itself.

While there is much to praise, the catalogue's essays, particularly the defining ones by editor Theodore Prescott and the exhibition's curator Gordon Fuglie, are worth the price of admission. They rarely settle arguments, but none of the five essays plays it safe, either; none casts anxious glances in the direction of the latest academic theories (that alone is refreshing!). Each essay is full-blooded, passionate and informative as it tries to situate this landmark effort in the context of its historical antecedents, and, even more importantly, in the context of today's profound aesthetic crisis. If we ever manage to free ourselves from the debilitations of a half century or more of the aesthetics of despair, it will be due to efforts such as this, to the kind of bravery and vision exhibited in "A Broken Beauty."
397020
In order to describe Postmodernism, one has to first explain what Modernism was -- since Postmodernism is something that comes after Modernism.  In fact, until I read this book, I was not sure about what Modernism was, let alone what Postmodernism was.  The author of this book does a superb job elucidating the entangled relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism, and their relationship to Christian faith.  As the author points out, there is no one singular definition of Postmodernism, since it is a phenomenon that envelops art, literature, music as well as philosophy. I think Postmodernism is something that you FEEL, rather than THINK.  So it is terribly difficult to describe what it is, let alone explain its relationship to Christianity. Nevertheless it is a task somebody has to accomplish in order to equip Christian apologetics in this Postmodern era.  But I had one question as I was reading this book: if Postmodernism can be defined, for the sake of simplicity, as "Any Way You Make It," and it can aid our Christian faith, does it mean that the Christian truth is also any way you make it?  I think not.  We believe in absolute truth, and it is written in the Bible and capsulated in the person of Jesus Christ.  It is not negotiable and not open to any twists and turns of human interprepation.  However, I agree with the author that, in so far as Postmodernism destroys the tower of skepticism that Modernists had set up so high, Postmodernism can help our Christian faith and advocacy.
2008686
American Designers' Houses by Dominic Bradbury is a wonderful book. It features the work of consummate designers, in each of its three chapters: "Classic", "Fusion", and "Contemporary", and is replete with wonderful photographs of these artists' domestic "canvases".

Equally at home on your coffee table as in your library shelf, the casual lay reader will enjoy leafing through the handsomely illustrated pages, but the most significant benefit will be had by the professional designer and more capable aesthete. The latter will be able to draw concepts and glean insight by studying the various effects demonstrated in the photos.

Those who understand that taste has very little to do with fashion, and that details are a significant part of the whole will particularly enjoy this book. The designers are perfectionistic in that nonchalant manner that can only be attained with true talent, skill, and experience.

The "Fusion" chapter was arguably the most notable, and I found that I had particular affinity to the work of Marietta Himes Gomez, and Vincente Wolf - the effect of a gilded bench in a generously empty, white space in Mr. Wolf's apartment was simply spectacular. The Neo-Classicist designer, Thomas Pheasant could also transform a three-dimensional space in the most extraordinary of ways.

The texts are competent and informative, and the photography accomplished. It has everything required of a book worth owning, and I cannot but recommend it.