Art as Worldmaking

Critical Essays on Realism and Naturalism

Malcolm Baker editor Andrew Hemingway editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Manchester University Press

Published:23rd Oct '18

Should be back in stock very soon

Art as Worldmaking cover

Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts’s recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art’s truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

‘Art as Worldmaking is a game changer. The essays within cast new light on a striking range of subjects, and the collection as whole completely reframes our current understanding of artistic realism.’
Marnin Young, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History, Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University

ISBN: 9781526114907

Dimensions: 240mm x 170mm x 21mm

Weight: 785g

368 pages