The discoveries in Crete, Greece, and the Aegean islands that began a century ago were nothing less than stunning, and seemed to give shape and substance to tales of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, of Theseus and Ariadne, of Minos and Icarus.  Ancient Aegean Art is the first comprehensive historical introduction to the art and architecture Crete, mainland Greece, and the Cycladic islands in the Aegean, beginning with the Neolithic period, before 3000 BCE, and ending at the close of the Bronze Age and the transition to the Iron Age of Hellenic Greece (c.1000 BCE). Covering a broad range of objects and artefacts, from sealstones to pots to buildings and settlements, Preziosi and Hitchcock discuss both the historiography of the field of ancient art history and explain the artefacts original intentions and functions.  In chronologically organized chapters, the authors emphasize the more widely known images and structures, with a glimpse at the lesser-known but important discoveries, explaining their design, uses, meanings, and formal developments.  Ancient Aegean Art incorporates the latest archeological discoveries and theoretical and methodological developments, in the only volume to examine both Crete and the mainland.

Aegean Art and Architecture (Oxford History of Art)

Arts & Photography

Preziosi, Donald

Hitchcock, Louise

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

This is the first comprehensive introduction to the art and architecture of mainland Greece, Crete, and the Cycladic Islands from 3300 to 1000 BCE. Ancient Aegean culture has a particularly important place within European history and art history because of its profound links to the origins of European civilization. Paintings, pottery, objects made from gold, silver, and ivory, carved reliefs, textiles, and architecture, are all fully illustrated and discussed. The authors reveal the many different functions that this vast range of arts and artifacts served within the cultural and social context of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Combining the latest research and critical approaches with an up-to-date historiography this book gives readers a clear understanding of Ancient Aegean visual arts and of our changing interpretations of this extraordinary era.

Hitchcock, Louise A.

An overview of the theoretical and institutional history of the discipline of art history which refutes the image of art history as in crisis, asserting rather that many of the dilemmas of the discipline today can be traced back to its founding, institutionalization and expansion since the 1870s. 269p. Index. Bibliography.

Rethinking art history: Meditations on a coy science

Study & Teaching

Yale University Press

A general overview of the theoretical and institutional history of the discipline of art history. Refuting the image of art history as a discipline in crisis, Preziosi asserts that many of the dilemmas and contradictions of art history today are not new but can be traced back to problems surrounding the founding of the discipline, its institutionalization, and its academic expansion since the 1870s. “Donald Preziosi has written a timely and incisive study of the methods and assumptions of art history in the modern period. As the book unfolds, one realizes that art history was never as unitary and monolithic as the phrase ‘the discipline of art history’ suggests, but is in fact a complicated and highly contradictory range of practices whose disciplinary coherence may be more mythical than real. This is a deliberately discomforting book; however, for its clear-sightedness, rigor, and wit, it is a book to be welcomes by everyone concerned with the present condition and future direction of visual studies.”―Norman Bryson, Harvard University “An important and courageous book, Rethinking Art History is a rigorous and original contribution to the current post-structuralist and postmodernist debates in cultural studies here and abroad.”―Steven Z. Levine, Bryn Mawr College “Through this kind of reading of the discourse of art history, Preziosi provides some acute analysis of the metaphors and stratagems which continue to discipline the discipline of art history.” Donald Preziosi is a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles

Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science

By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text. In re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author's own introduction, mirroring the multiple interpretations within the essays themselves.

In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

Lamoureux, Johanne

Routledge

In the Aftermath of Art (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity

Art, Religion, Amnesia addresses the relationship between art and religion in contemporary culture, directly challenging contemporary notions of art and religion as distinct social phenomena and explaining how such Western terms represent alternative and even antithetical modes of world-making. In this new book, Professor Preziosi offers a critique of the main thrust of writing in recent years on the subjects of art, religion, and their interconnections, outlining in detail a perspective which redefines the basic terms in which recent debates and discussions have been articulated both in the scholarly and popular literature, and in artistic, political and religious practice. Art, Religion and Amnesia proposes an alternative to the two conventional traditions of writing on the subject which have been devoted on the one hand to the ‘spiritual’ dimensions of artistry, and on the other hand to the (equally spurious) ‘aesthetic’ aspects of religion. The book interrogates the fundamental assumptions fuelling many current controversies over representation, idolatry, blasphemy, and political culture. Drawing on debates from Plato’s proposal to banish representational art from his ideal city-state to the Danish cartoons of Mohamed, Preziosi argues that recent debates have echoed a number of very ancient controversies in political philosophy, theology, and art history over the problem of representation and its functions in individual and social life. This book is a unique re-evaluation of the essential indeterminacy of meaning-making, marking a radically new approach to understanding the inextricability of aesthetics and theology and will be of interest to students and researchers in art history, philosophy and religion and cultural theory.

Religion & Spirituality

Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity

What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body." Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history,museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms--and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.

Reference

Univ. of Minnesota Press

What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body." Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history,museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms--and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.

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

Books by Preziosi, Donald

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

Aegean Art and Architecture (Oxford History of Art)

Aegean Art and Architecture (Oxford History of Art)

Rethinking art history: Meditations on a coy science

Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science

In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

In the Aftermath of Art (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity

Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity

Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity

Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity