The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics
Author: Arthur Kroker File Type: pdf The Postmodern Scene is a series of major theorisations about key artistic and intellectual tendencies in the postmodern condition
Author: Angharad Lewis
File Type: pdf
The Purple Book is a luxurious compendium of contemporary illustration that explores fantasy, sensuality, and the erotic imagination. It highlights visual art and the written word as media for representing human desires relationship with the dream-state, make-believe, and symbolism.The title of the book is inspired by The Yellow Book, the periodical published in the 1890s and initially art directed by Aubrey Beardsley. While the color yellow represented the daringly salacious in the 1890s, today the color purple is synonymous with opulence and sensuality.**
Author: Joseph Leo Koerner
File Type: pdf
Caspar David Friedrich (17741840) is heralded as the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, and Europes first truly modern artist. His mysterious and melancholy landscapes, often peopled with lonely wanderers, are experiments in a radically subjective artistic perspectiveone in which, as Freidrich wrote, the painter depicts not what he sees before him, but what he sees within him. This vulnerability of the individual when confronted with nature became one of the key tenets of the Romantic aesthetic.Now available in a compact, accessible format, this beautifully illustrated book is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of one of the most fascinating and influential nineteenth-century painters.This is a model of interpretative art history, taking in a good deal of German Romantic philosophy, but founded always on the immediate experience of the picture. . . . It is rare to find a scholar so obviously in sympathy with his subject.Independent **
Author: Robert McNally
File Type: pdf
Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilization, ranking alongside food as one of our most critical commodities. It drives geopolitical, economic, and financial affairs, as well as environmental debates and policymaking. As the place of oil in our global economy has evolved, so too has the way we buy and sell it, with rudimentary transactions at the wellhead developing into a sophisticated and complex global market. Yet while todays oil market bears little resemblance to the one born in the valleys and creeks of western Pennsylvania more than 150 years ago, one core feature remains a natural tendency toward boom and bust price cycles that can devastate economies, trigger or prolong recessions, and undermine growth and investment.Tracing a history marked with conflict, intrigue, and extreme uncertainty, Robert McNally shows howeven from the very first years of the marketwild volatility in oil prices led to intensive efforts to stabilize price fluctuations and manage supply. First Rockefellers Standard Oil, then U.S. state regulators along with major international oil companies, and finally OPEC each enjoyed varying degrees of success in the pursuit of oil price stability. But the spectacular boom of 2008 and bust of 2015 have revealed a structural shift back to extreme oil price swings, the likes of which havent been seen for nearly a century. Crafting an engrossing journey from the gushing New England oil fields to the fraught and fractious Middle East, Crude Volatility provides a crucial perspective that discards distractions and tired myths, shows lessons learned from prior mistakes, and provides the historical foundation we need to face, understand, and surmount the challenges ahead.
Author: Scott Sowerby
File Type: pdf
Though James II is often depicted as a Catholic despot who imposed his faith, Scott Sowerby reveals a king ahead of his time who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution was in fact a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.