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'm 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.
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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A book about people who have had strong emotional reactions (including crying) looking at paintings, and about the relatively tearless twentieth century.
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Religion has a "strange" place in art because work that subscribes to a major religion is not often accepted in the international art market.
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A book about the hypnotic attraction of oil and tempera: why painters love paint, even before the painting is half-finished.
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A book of commentary on a beautiful and mysterious manuscript in a library in Scotland.
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An answer to the perennially popular book by E.H. Gombrich, Stories of Art.
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A book written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This is a pendant, of sorts, to What Painting Is.
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A large-format book with color pictures of common objects often overlooked: sand, a twig, the night sky, the inside of your own eye.
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An argument about what's taught in art schools and departments, and what isn't, or can't be.
