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The Aesthetics of Comics

Arts & Photography

Carrier, David

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Principles of Art History Writing

Principles of Art History Writing traces the changes in the way in which writers about art represent the same works. These differ in such deep ways as to raise the question of whether those at the beginning of the process even saw the same things as those at the end did. Carrier uses four case studies to identify and explain changing styles of restorations and the history of interpretations of selected works by Piero, Caravaggio, and van Eyck.

Employing the methodologies of the new art history as well as some tools provided by poststructuralism, historiography, and analytic philosophy, Poussin's Paintings offers a novel approach to the art of Poussin. David Carrier begins with a comprehensive analysis of Poussin's self-portraits, which provides the starting point for a critical discussion of the traditional strategies of Poussin scholarship and for an evaluation of the status of this artist. Carrier shows that Poussin can be properly understood only by seeing how his visual and political culture differs from ours.Carrier examines the traditional approaches of Poussin scholars, noting the limitations of their views and showing how they not only shape our image of the artist but also restrict out ability to properly grasp his concerns. Carrier also considers the important conceptual claims of connoisseurs and reveals how their work invokes an implicit theory of Poussin's development.Carrier then focuses on a group of paintings concerned with erotic themes, demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional accounts of these pictures.He extends his analysis to a discussion of Poussin's landscapes, which have a different and more important place in his development than the older accounts claim.Carrier places Poussin within the artistic and political culture of seventeenth-century Rome. He asserts that artists of the time were concerned with the problem of belatedness and that Poussin attempted to return to the tradition of the High Renaissance, reworking images from that tradition in response to his own visual culture. Carrier argues that Poussin's art is thus best understood as a response to that setting for baroque art, and he relates Poussin's work to the later tradition of French history painting.

Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In The Aesthete in the City David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship between two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, T. J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed accounts of a number of painters, among them Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully, whose development he followed closely. Carrier argues that the greatest American artistic tradition, Abstract Expressionism, provides the basis for an ongoing tradition of abstract painting, a rich system whose potential has not yet been exhausted. 
Carrier's earlier work was concerned with a philosophical study of the methods of art criticism. This book turns to the theory and practice of art criticism, concentrating on a concrete discussion of individual theorists and artists.

The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s

Reference

The great poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was also an extremely influential art critic. High Art relates the philosophical issues posed by Baudelaire's art writing to the theory and practice of modernist and postmodernist painting. Baudelaire wrote in an age of transition, David Carrier argues, an era divided by the Revolution of 1848, the historical break that played for him a role now taken within modernism by the political revolts of 1968. Moving from the grand tradition of Delacroix to the images of modern life made by Constantin Guys, this movement from "high" to "low," from the unified world of correspondences to the fragmented images of contemporary city life, motivates Baudelaire's equivalent to the post-1968 turn away from formalist art criticism. Viewed from the perspective of the 1990s, Carrier argues, the issues raised by Baudelaire's criticism and creative writing provide a way of understanding the situation of art writing in our own time.

High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting

From Gary Larson’s The Far Side to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, comic strips have two obvious defining features. They are visual narratives, using both words and pictures to tell stories, and they use word balloons to represent the speech and thought of depicted characters. Art historians have studied visual artifacts from every culture; cultural historians have recently paid close attention to movies. Yet the comic strip, an art form known to everyone, has not yet been much studied by aestheticians or art historians. This is the first full-length philosophical account of the comic strip.
Distinguished philosopher David Carrier looks at popular American and Japanese comic strips to identify and solve the aesthetic problems posed by comic strips and to explain the relationship of this artistic genre to other forms of visual art. He traces the use of speech and thought balloons to early Renaissance art and claims that the speech balloon defines comics as neither a purely visual nor a strictly verbal art form, but as something radically new. Comics, he claims, are essentially a composite art that, when successful, seamlessly combine verbal and visual elements.
Carrier looks at the way an audience interprets comics and contrasts the interpretation of comics and other mass-culture images to that of Old Master visual art. The meaning behind the comic can be immediately grasped by the average reader, whereas a piece of museum art can only be fully interpreted by scholars familiar with the history and the background behind the painting. Finally, Carrier relates comics to art history. Ultimately, Carrier’s analysis of comics shows why this popular art is worthy of philosophical study and proves that a better understanding of comics will help us better understand the history of art.

Comics & Graphic Novels

How To Create Comics & Manga

Is writing a world art history possible? Does the history of art as such even exist outside the Western tradition? Is it possible to consider the history of art in a way that is not fundamentally Eurocentric? In this highly readable and provocative book, David Carrier, a philosopher and art historian, does not attempt to write a world art history himself. Rather, he asks the question of how an art history of all cultures could be written - or whether it is even possible to do so. He also engages the political and moral issues raised by the idea of a multicultural art history. Focusing on a consideration of intersecting artistic traditions, Carrier negotiates the way meaning and understanding shift or are altered when a visual object from one culture, for example, is inserted into the visual tradition of another culture. "A World Art History and Its Objects" proposes the use of temporal narrative as a way to begin to understand a multicultural art history.

A World Art History And Its Objects

“Wild Art” refers to work that exists outside the established, rarified world of art galleries and cultural channels. It encompasses uncatalogued, uncommodified art not often recognized as such, from graffiti to performance, self-adornment, and beyond. Picking up from their breakthrough book on the subject, Wild Art, David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro here delve into the ideas driving these forms of art, inquire how it came to be marginalized, and advocate for a definition of “taste,” one in which each expression is acknowledged as being different while deserving equal merit.
Arguing that both the “art world” and “wild art” have the same capacity to produce aesthetic joy, Carrier and Pissarro contend that watching skateboarders perform Christ Air, for example, produces the same sublime experience in one audience that another enjoys while taking in a ballet; therefore, both mediums deserve careful reconsideration. In making their case, the two provide a history of the institutionalization of “taste” in Western thought, point to missed opportunities for its democratization in the past, and demonstrate how the recognition and acceptance of “wild art” in the present will radically transform our understanding of contemporary visual art in the future.
Provocative and optimistic, Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics rejects the concept of “kitsch” and the high/low art binary, ultimately challenging the art world to become a larger and more inclusive place.

Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained

PISSARRO, Joachim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carrier, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Carrier, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carrier, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Aesthetics of Comics

Principles of Art History Writing

Poussin's Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology

The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s

Principles of Art History Writing

High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist Painting

The Aesthetics of Comics

The Aesthetics of Comics

A World Art History And Its Objects

Aesthetics of the Margins / The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained