.9 Must-Have Art Books.
Back to School: 9 Must-Have Art Books For the Fall 2016
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The “back to school” feeling when September rolls in is ineradicable. A fresh season calls for fresh ideas, and the art world’s top publishers have plenty. With ever-improving access to archival material, this means plunging into the past to revisit and reframe history, and collecting the fast-paced research that has proliferated on and offline - such as in a collection of artists’ writing from the last 15 years, or a survey of 25 years of frieze magazine’s content. Advances in the creative world in the age of social media also means publishing more daring titles by lesser known artists: photographer Ren Hang is just 28 years old, but this Fall releases his 8th publication, while a new book from Taschen’s Sexy Book editor explores a century of male sexuality. Art books are not, of course, only visual: there are some prominent titles by art world experts to look out for this season, from critic John Berger’s latest tome on landscapes, to compilations of artists’ musings on art and ideas on the most timeless of topics: the secret of success. As the nights draw in, these books are bound to inspire in many different ways.
Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000-2015
Edited by Jennifer Liese
Published by The Paper Monument
Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000-2015.
Artists have always written about art: the earliest theorists in the field were often its first practioners. They’ve developed manifestos and statements that have shaped movements and defined periods in art history. In the last 15 years, with the steady rise of digital opinions, we’re more accustomed than ever to reading artists’ words. Perhaps because they are radical, creative, and, often, secretive thinkers, we’re fascinated by what artists have to say about their practice and what they think of the art world. Releasing next month, Social Medium: Artists Writing 2000-2015 brings together all kinds of writing in all kinds of formats – from tweets and blog posts to long form essays – by diverse international artists including Ai Weiwei, The Yes Men, Tania Bruguera, Tacita Dean, Tauba Auerbach, Juliana Huxtable, Mike Kelley, Glenn Ligon, Takashi Murakami and Nástio Mosquito.
100 Secrets of the Art World: Everything You Always Wanted to Know from Artists, Collectors and Curators, But Were Afraid to Ask
Edited by Thomas Girst, Magnus Resch
Published by Thames & Hudson
100 Secrets of the Art World: Everything You Always Wanted to Know from Artists, Collectors and Curators, But Were Afraid to Ask.
The premise of this book is simple: what is the secret of the art world’s most successful people? Thomas Girst and Magnus Resch have asked the art world elite to reveal the real reason they’ve got to where they are. Expect anecdotes and advice from artists (Jeff Koons, Marina Ambramovic, and John Baldessari among them), personal stories from gallerists, curators and museum directors (contributors come from the Tate, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou and the MET, to name but a few), and insights from auction house insiders and collectors (Larry Gagosian and Jeff Deitch have a few tips). Out in October.
frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art
frieze magazine
Published by frieze and Phaidon
frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art.
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Phaidon and frieze are releasing a joint hardback publication, A to Z of Contemporary Art, giving the fair/magazine franchise’s perspective on contemporary art since its founding in 1991. Featuring more than 50 key interviews, essays and think pieces selected from its back catalogue, it is a reflection on the trajectory of contemporary art until now – and on the role the magazine has played in shaping it. Also included are new texts by editors Dan Fox, J?rg Heiser, and Jennifer Higgie.
Published by Taschen
Ren Hang.
Photographer and poet Ren Hang’s five-year career has been explosive: in his native China, his provocative work has faced censorship, while abroad, he has been celebrated in a myriad of solo exhibitions everywhere from Athens to Los Angeles. Currently based in Beijing, Hang’s gender-fluid, organ-oriented photography, with its distinctive use of red and blue color, and recurrent symbols such as birds, flowers and penises, merges American influences (Mapplethorpe, Kern, McGinley) with his Chinese bodies, settings and symbolism. This book is his first major international collection.
Paul Gaugin: Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter
Introduction by Donatien Grau
Published by David Zwirner Books
Paul Gaugin: Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter.
“Criticism teaches us how to think: we are grateful, and would like to teach critics something. Impossible, they know everything.” There is art criticism, and then there is criticism of art criticism. Paul Gauguin’s final essay – Racontars de Rapin – was a searing take down of critics and their misinterpretations of artists and their work, in which the painter posits a new approach to understanding art. This new English translation is illustrated by Gauguin’s work. This is the first title in a new reader series, (Ekphrasis) from David Zwirner Books.
Hans Christian Andersen & Yayoi Kusama: The Little Mermaid: A Fairy Tale of Infinity and Love Forever
Edited by L?rke Rydal J?rgensen, Marie Laureberg, Michael Juul Holm
Published by Distributed Art Publishers
Hans Christian Andersen & Yayoi Kusama: The Little Mermaid: A Fairy Tale of Infinity and Love Forever.
If you missed the release of this delightful book in July – a collaboration between the Japanese artist and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art – be sure to pick one up as it hits the stores in September. There couldn’t be a better artist to illustrate and interpret Christian Andersen’s classic 1839 tale of a mermaid who meets a disastrous fate when she attempts a new life on land.
Ellsworth Kelly: Photographs
Published by Aperture
Ellsworth Kelly: Photographs.
Ellsworth Kelly is widely known for inventing a new kind of painting, inspired by chance compositions with the world and nature, yet his process was always rooted in photography; from 1950, he began to take photographic notes of the things he saw that inspired him, using a borrowed Leica camera. Though the photographs were not direct references for his celebrated paintings and sculptures, they are nonetheless a glimpse into his vision of the world. This Aperture publication is the first book on Kelly’s photography, and takes in 40 years of photographs.
Landscapes: John Berger on Art
John Berger, Edited by Tom Overton
Published by Verso Books
Landscapes: John Berger on Art .
Eighty-nine-year-old Marxist art writer John Berger – the Booker Prize winner whose 1970s TV series Ways of Seeing was the most successful television show about art of all time, and who is the subject of a new documentary directed by Christopher Roth – has always taken his own path in the art world. His latest book, Landscapes, is, in part, a tale of that journey, and is, as ever, a narrative of personal passion, politics and art history, all beautifully woven together in Berger’s inimitable style: compelling and clever.
Lesbians for Men
Dian Hanson
Published by Taschen
Lesbians for Men.
Going against the contemporary interest in the female gaze, Lesbians for Men explores the work of mostly male photographers who have taken pictures of faux lesbian couples performing for the heterosexual male gaze. It features over 300 photographs spanning 125 years by photographers and pornographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Guido Argentini, Petter Hegre and Richard Kern, compiled by Taschen’s Sexy Book editor, Dian Hanson (who formerly produced men’s mags such as Leg Show and Juggs). While the images themselves are as popular as they are provocative, what might be surprising about this book is not the content of the images but the statement it makes about the fetishistic nature of the camera and the assumptions it creates about masculine sexual desire.
—Charlotte Jansen
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