James Elkins

James Elkins

After 20 years of work, my experimental novel called Five Strange Languages is being published by Unnamed Press. It’s a large, complex project in five volumes. Lots more information here (scroll down).

Pages with information about the novel update live. Please send all questions & comments to jelkins@saic.edu.

Recent uploads of academic work: the books Pictures and Tears, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, How to Use Your Eyes, and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. Another entire book free, on Academia: What is Interesting Writing in Art History? It’s on ways to write experimental art history.

I have put 75 short videos on art theory to Youtube. These are for art students. They cover media, politics, gender, the sublime, skill, formal analysis, craft, time, narrative, Eurocentrism, style, research, the body… lots of subjects.

I have a number of texts and lectures on this topic. On this site, see especially:

The general theme, the mutual misunderstanding of art and science, remains pertinent in visual art, and someone should write a non-polemical piece about it: misunderstandings like the ones chronicled here can be productive, and so they are not like the mistakes that Sokol and Bricmont chronicle. The differences point to different discourses. Such an analysis might go some distance to relieving the reductive pressure that the “Sokal affair” put on interdisciplinary conversations.

(4) This lecture, which sums up some issues in the relations between the two fields:

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