Donald Kuspit

The Art of Paradox

Don Eddy

The Dialectic of Decadence examines art's dialectic between advance and decline, reason and desire, artificial wholeness and decadent disintegration.

Between Advance and Decline in Art

The Dialectic of Decadence

This book examines the psychological dimension of visual culture in the twentieth century.

Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art

The Art of Marjorie Strider

Dramatic Gestures

Photographs by Yasumasa Morimura

Daughter of Art History

Jamali

"In this volume, Jamali describes the visionary dreams that began after his father's death in 1976 and initiated his artistic vocation of Art and Peace. As Jamali himself says, these are not personal dreams, they are communal dreams, shared with all dreamers. They are the source of his art - Mystical Expressionism." "In the essay published here - his second major interpretation of Jamali's art - Kuspit explains the ritual character of both Jamali's dreams and his paintings, Citing the Indian art historian A. K. Coomaraswamy, Kuspit reminds us that historically all art derives from ritual, sacrificing the old to bring in the new. Jamali's dreams are actually a prevision of spiritual fulfillment, says Kuspit. They anticipate a self that has evolved to its deepest, most autonomous state." "For Jamali, the dream is followed by the ritual act of painting, where symbolic violence and new life are inextricably fused in his paintings' surfaces. These surfaces, says Kuspit, give physical form to Jamali's spiritual life with their ironically dense materiality - what Kuspit calls their "chthonic presence." By daily plunging his hands and feet deeply into the materials of earth, Jamali stirs up a quantum soup. He mixes paint with dirt, twigs, and leaves, so that like a living thing the surface bulges, recedes, explodes, collapses, and breathes in and out with the breath of the universe. The sensuous is imbued with the spiritual, and they become one and the same."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Donald Kuspit argues here that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by "postart," a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is in its final state. In contrast to modern art, which expressed the universal human unconscious, postmodern art degenerates into an expression of narrow ideological interests. In reaction to the emptiness and stagnancy of postart, Kuspit signals the aesthetic and human future that lies with the old masters. The End of Art points the way to the future for the visual arts. Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History at SUNY Stony Brook. A winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner. His most recent book is The Cult of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 1994).

The End of Art

Giannina Braschi

Michael Somoroff

"Two Crowns of the Egg" is an ode by the world-famous photographer Michael Somoroff to his wife Irina Somoroff. A collaborative work of art, the book offers a psychological and spiritual journey.

Michael Somoroff: Two Crowns of the Egg

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist examines the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic premises for avant-garde art and its subsequent evolution and corruption in the late twentieth century. Arguing that modernist art is essentially therapeutic in intention, both towards self and society, Donald Kuspit further posits that neo-avant-garde, or post-modern art, at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and fortune are valued above anything else. Stripping avant-garde art of its missionary, therapeutic intention, neo-avant-garde art instead converts it into a cliché of creative novelty or ironical value for its fashionable look. Moreover, it destroys the precarious balance of artistic narcissism and social empathy that characterizes modern art, tilting it cynically towards the former. Incorporating psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those concerned with narcissism, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist offers a reinterpretation of modern art history. Donald Kuspit, one of America's foremost art critics, is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of many books.

Donald Kuspit

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