James Elkins
News:
New 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've started using Academia.edu as a message board. If you download something of mine that's posted there, send me a note: I'm always glad to answer questions. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.
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! (Updated August 8, 2017.)
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An essay on the ordinary condition of most artists: being average, statistically normal, moderately successful--and not an outlier like Pollock.
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An essay on reasons to mistrust claims that that (Western) artists have used science in their art, or that current art and science are linked.
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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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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.
