James Elkins
News:
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. (There are also more texts posted on Academia.) See "Lectures" page for the travel schedule. (Updated June 24, 2017.)
Latest uploads:
New reviews and essays are on Goodreads and on Writing with Images. Latest texts on this site: 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!
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 24253
A book about people who have had strong emotional reactions (including crying) looking at paintings, and about the relatively tearless twentieth century.
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 42645
A book about the hypnotic attraction of oil and tempera: why painters love paint, even before the painting is half-finished.
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 12270
An unpublished book of commentary on a beautiful and mysterious manuscript.
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 16472
An answer to the perennially popular book by E.H. Gombrich, Stories of Art.
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 20232
A book written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This is a pendant, of sorts, to What Painting Is.
- Details
- Parent Category: Writing
- Hits: 16055
A large-format book with color pictures of common objects often overlooked: sand, a twig, the night sky, the inside of your own eye.
