James Elkins
News:
If you're in Chicago and interested in experimental literary fiction, join the new writer's group. Latest book: What Heaven Looks Like. Passed the 300,000 word mark on my work in progress. Writing every day! Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. I'm using Academia.edu as a message board. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.
I have decided not to find a publisher for The Impending Single History of Art. (Too many years spent pursuing academic publishers.) It's the last of my art history books, and the one with the most information about global art history. I'm going to be posting it in its entirety on this site and on Academia. The chapters are on Google Drive, so they're live and always up to date. Please send comments & criticism here.
Latest uploads:
The book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?; the book How to Use Your Eyes; and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. (There is also a website with reviews of contemporary piano music.)
Live Writing Projects:
I am experimenting with writing live on the internet. These texts update live, and you can contribute to them & be thanked when the book is published. (1) What is Interesting Writing in Art History?, (2) Writing with Images. Other live writing projects are finished: Visual Worlds, and The Impending Single History of Art. Thanks everyone for contributing!
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An essay on the overuse, or misuse, of Charles Sanders Peirce's sign system in art history.
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On the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, and his use of color, which was neither entirely unnatural nor abritrary.
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Is "art history" the name of a discipline, or an area of interest, that is practiced throughout the world? Or is it a Western interest, currently spreading along with capitalism?
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There is no such thing as "outsider art" because naive and untrained art has been a traditional accompaniment of modernism since its inception.
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On the confused uses of fractals by artists, and some mathematicians' sense of art: on productive misunderstandings.
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A perennially unfinished project: an essay (or a lecture, or a book) giving reason why art historians should practice what they study.
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A reply to a very eccentric proposal: that the Venus of Willendorf and associated "Venus" figurines are self-portraits.
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A lecture on the limits of historians' acknowledgment of their own involvement and motives in their work.
