Why are our pictures puzzles?
The entire book is available online. This is a book about the curious fact that it’s only been about fifty years since it has seemed reasonable to write an entire book about an individual work of art. One of the longest texts about an artwork written before the late 20th century is Giorgio Vasari’s descirption […]
The Art Seminar series
Download the Series Preface Download the Series Afterword The book Photography Theory The book State of Art Criticism The book Landscape Theory The Art Seminar is a series of seven books, involving hundreds of scholars from around the word. All the titles are available online. The idea of the series was to be conversational and open-ended, producing […]
Anthologies in Russian, Spanish, German
Download the full text of the Russian anthology. Three anthologies, with different selections of work and different introductions, were underway around 2008-10. 1. RussianThe Visual World: A Collection of Writing by James Elkins, edited by Almira Ousmanova and Anastassiya Denishchik (Vilnius, Lithuania: European Humanities University, 2009). Джеймс Элкинс Исследуя визуальный мир (под ред. Альмиры Усмановой […]
Art History versus Aesthetics
Download the excerpt, “Why Don’t Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Conferences?” This book is vol. 1 of the Art Seminar series (see the series page for more information). The relation between aesthetics and art history is partly institutional (the two are divided in Western universities, although they have often been mingled in east Asian universities) […]
Master Narratives and Their Discontents
The Introduction. Chapter 3 on stories of modernism that turn on politics. Chapter 4 on the idea of skill. The concluding seminar. The entire book is on Amazon. This is a look at the major accounts of visual art, and especially painting, in the last hundred years. The idea is to collect and compare the […]
Visual Practices Across the University
Introduction Chapters 1-9 Chapters 10-16 Chapters 17-25 Chapters 26 to the end This book was published, in English, by the German press Wilhelm Fink. I am posting it here in its entirety because it is almost entirely unknown outside German-speaking countries. Visual Practices Across the University is a study of the range of image-making and […]
Art and Globalization
Art and Globalization on Amazon The Introduction The Afterword Each book in the Stone Art Theory series is unusually long and complex: they result from a week of seminar conversations, all taped and transcribed, and then given to dozens of people who did not attend the seminars. The result is a cross-section of contemporary ideas on a given […]
What is an Image?
The Introduction Selections from the Seminars What is an Image? on Amazon The books in the Stone Art Theory series are unusually long and complex: they result from a week of seminar conversations, all taped and transcribed, and then given to dozens of people who did not attend the seminars. The result is a […]
What do Artists Know?
The Introduction and seminars. What Do Artists Know? on Amazon The books in the Stone Art Theory series are unusually long and complex: they result from a week of seminar conversations, all taped and transcribed, and then given to dozens of people who did not attend the seminars. The result is a cross-section of contemporary ideas […]
Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic
Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic on Amazon The Introduction The Seminars This is vol. 4 of the Stone Art Theory seminars. Since the rise of postmodern, socially engaged art in the 1960s, and especially since the codification of that art in the 1980 book The Anti-Aesthetic, there has been an unresolved tension between art that […]
Farewell to Visual Studies
Farewell to Visual Studies on Amazon The seminars and responses. The final volume in the Stone Art Theory Seminars is an attempt to assess the history and current forms of the field known as visual studies, visual culture, or visual culture studies. The three co-editors (James Elkins, Sunil Manghani, and Gustav Frank) represent different perspectives on the […]
The Stone Art Theory Institutes
This is a series of five large volumes, each involving over fifty scholars. Each book has a separate page on this site. Links below go to pages on this site for more information. 1 Art and Globalization: a study of the ways art is written about, around the world. (On Amazon: Art and Globalization) […]
Artists with PhDs
Read five chapters, and leave comments, here. Or buy the book from Amazon. This book is intended as a comprehensive introduction to the subject. Part 1 includes definitive essays by specialists and observers of the PhD, including the first list of PhD programs around the world. Part 2 presents extracts from PhD dissertations in […]
Pictures and the Words That Fail Them
Chapter 3, on figure and ground Chapter 6, on non-Western concepts of the image Buy the book This book is about the nature of images. It begins with a theory about how semiotics is more or less ruined by images, even though parts of it can be recovered in an historically specific fashion. The […]
Visual Literacy
See the Keynote slides given at the event. Read the Introduction. Or buy on Amazon. Visual Literacy surveys the meanings of the expression of the title. Some contributors are interested in the theory of literacy when it pertains to the visual; others in its rhetoric; and others in its implementation at college and secondary school […]