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 sketch for an ideal textbook of modern and postmodern art, and why it can't be written.
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An essay on the reasons why it is difficult to write about modern art outside the traditional trajectories (Europe, North America, the North Atlantic).
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A book project on the spread of North American- and western European-style art history around the world, and on the impossibility of writing a history of world modernisms.
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A short text on the fact that English is art history's lingua franca, and how that limits scholars worldwide.
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A text on the problematic terms "Western," "non-Western," "Euramerican," "North Atlantic," and others.
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A project for two books—or two sets of class notes—on writing that uses images. The first project is about art history, and the second is on novels and experimental writing.
A large book project on the visual world in art, science, and visual theory.
A perpetually unfinished project on different criteria of success and failure.