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The Annunciation: a specific event recounted in the Bible and often represented in artworks, but also the prototype of many other announcements throughout the history of Western culture. This volume proposes new readings of pictorial Annunciations from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period – treating aspects such as witnesses, inscriptions and architecture – as well as analyses of some visual echoes, reenactments of the announcement to Mary in sacred and profane contexts up to the twenty-first century. Among the latter are included Venetian decoration glorifying the state, a Jean-Luc Godard film, a video art piece by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and a saint’s bedroom turned into a pilgrimage site.
Rooted in the creative success of over 30 years of supermarket tabloid publishing, the Weekly World News has been the world's only reliable news source since 1979. The online hub www.weeklyworldnews.com is a leading entertainment news site.
Body Trade exposes myths surrounding the trade in heads, cannibalism, captive white women, the display of indigenous people in fairs and circuses, the stolen generations, the 'comfort' women and the making of the exotic/erotic body. This is a lively and intriguiung comtribution to the study of the postcolonial body.
In 1990 Jacques Chirac, the future president of France and a passionate fan of non-European art, met Jacques Kerchache, a maverick art collector with the lifelong ambition of displaying African sculpture in the holy temple of French culture, the Louvre. Together they began laying plans, and ten years later African fetishes were on view under the same roof as the Mona Lisa. Then, in 2006, amidst a maelstrom of controversy and hype, Chirac presided over the opening of a new museum dedicated to primitive art in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: the Musée du Quai Branly. Paris Primitive recounts the massive reconfiguration of Paris’s museum world that resulted from Chirac’s dream, set against...
In the past century Western attitudes toward the soldier’s death have undergone a remarkable transformation. Widely accepted at the time of the First World War – when nearly ten million soldiers died in uniform – as a redemptive sacrifice on behalf of the nation, the soldier’s death is increasingly regarded as an unacceptable tragedy. In Dying for France Ian Germani considers this transformation in the context of the history of France over the expanse of five centuries, from the Renaissance to the present. Blending military history with the history of culture and mentalities, Germani explores key episodes in the history of France’s wars to show how patriotic models of the soldier�...
The Fashion Insiders’ Guides are carefully curated compendiums of the current hotspots, classic haunts, and hidden gems of the world’s greatest fashion destinations. A former Parisian living in New York, French Vogue correspondent Carole Sabas was often approached by friends and colleagues on their way to Paris for Fashion Week, looking for the best place for a quick facial, early morning yoga, or to meet a friend for a drink. So many people asked, in fact, that she produced a small guide filled with advice, which she gave out for free. Requests for more information and other cities came pouring in. Abrams is now making Sabas’s Paris and New York guides available to everyone, with expa...
In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values. Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their taste—and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of ...
The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some of our most important cultural institutions and the vital function they serve as stewards of human and natural history. Reflecting on art galleries, science and history institutions, and collections all around the world, Nicholas Thomas argues that, in times marked by incredible insecurity and turbulence, museums help us su...
Despite the common belief that art galleries will naturally become more gender equitable over time, the fact is that many art institutions in Canada have become even less so over the last decade, with female artists making up less than 25 per cent of the contemporary exhibitions of several major galleries. In the first large-scale overview of gender diversity in Canadian art exhibitions, Anne Dymond makes a persuasive plea for more consciously equitable curating. Drawing on data from nearly one hundred institutions, Diversity Counts reveals that while some galleries are relatively equitable, many continue to marginalize female and racialized artists. The book pursues an interdisciplinary app...