How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone

An entertaining and lively guide to rediscovering the pleasure in art\nHow to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone provides the tools to understand and enjoy works of art. Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art. Examples from around the world and throughout art history—from works by Fra Angelico and Berthe Morisot to Kazuo Shiraga and Kara Walker—are used to demonstrate how a handful of core strategies and skills can help enhance the experience of viewing art works. With these skills, anyone can encounter any work of art—regardless of media, artist or period—and find some resonance with their own experiences. How to Enjoy Art encourages us to rediscover the fundamental pleasure in viewing art.

Arts & Photography

Street, Ben

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone provides the tools to understand and enjoy works of art. Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art. Examples from around the world and throughout art history--from works by Fra Angelico and Berthe Morisot to&nbsp;Kazuo Shiraga and Kara Walker--are used to demonstrate how a handful of core strategies and skills can help enhance the experience of viewing art works. With these skills, anyone can encounter any work of art--regardless of media, artist, or period--and find some resonance with their own experiences. How to Enjoy Art encourages us to rediscover the fundamental pleasure in viewing art.

This irreverent introduction to art gives children the confidence to respond to art on their own terms, and - most importantly - to have fun with it. Under the playful guidance of Leo, the museum cat, readers encounter abstract, Surrealist, nude and contemporary art, ancient sculpture, still lifes and portraits. But instead of being told facts to memorize, they're equipped with the knowledge that allows them to come up with their own interpretations of famous art works. Knowing how symbols work, they'll decipher clues in Frida Kahlo's self-portrait; understanding Surrealism, they'll decide for themselves what Joan Miró's abstract doodles are all about. This book shows that art isn't about knowing the right answers - it's about having fun, making up your own mind and seeing things from a different angle. With 46 illustrations

How to Be an Art Rebel

Children's Books

Arts, Music & Photography

Thames&Hudson

Trace the history of art through 48 paintings and four colors, woven together to form a fascinating and kaleidoscopic tale. BLUE: the color of the beyond and the divine RED: the color of blood, purity and sensuality GREEN: the color of new life, but also of sickness and death GOLD: the color of wealth, attributed to the things we value most These four colors tell the history of art in a way that few other details can. From the pigments that hold them - sometimes wildly expensive, like Ultramarine, or dangerously toxic, like Emerald Green - to the varied and changing meanings applied to them, these colors grant us access to fascinating stories, both of individual works of art and the world in which they were created

Art Unfolded: A History of Art in Four Colours

Ilex Press

Have you have ever felt at a disadvantage when joining in a conversation on a subject that you aren't confident about? If yes, this new book series is for you. Each book features definitions of two hundred words frequently used to describe and discuss a smart subject. 200 Words to Help You Talk About Art is designed to demystify jargon-based art language and make you at ease holding a conversation on the topic. Art can be intimidating to the uninitiated, but with Ben Street's help you'll know your Dada from your diptych in no time. The book is written with digestible text enabling a quick and easy understanding of various topics while broadening your artistic vocabulary. 200 Words to Help You Talk About Art is one of two new titles beginning a series of smart subjects, also including philosophy, psychology, and music.

200 Words to Help You Talk About Art

Themes

Laurence King Publishing

"Breathless’ is the first monograph on the emerging British painter Benjamin Senior. His paintings conjure up a world that is delightful, curious, and distinctly his own. It is a world in which bathers lounge around pools and swimmers limber up before finally diving in; where we find people doing yoga and various exercise routines both indoors and out; where walkers and joggers take us out into the countryside, or into the city with their dogs. These physical activities – both leisure and sporting – would undoubtedly leave some of their protagonists out of breath, as the title of the monograph suggests, and may well inspire some viewers to shake off any lethargy and get physical too.But despite their clear iconography and endorphin-rousing semiotics, Senior’s paintings are no mere campaign to get, or to keep, art lovers fit and healthy. For they are also carefully conceived and meticulously executed studies of the human body, of shape, line and form, of color, tone, light, and shadow. They are engaging explorations of composition and color, pattern and geometry, textures and materials, the natural and the manmade. This interplay between the natural and synthetic is played out in surprising juxtapositions, such as blue rubber exercise balls in dialogue with various-sized cacti, or between the materials and designs of sports clothing in contrast to the rolling hills of a spring landscape, or to autumnal trees at sunset. There are many other intriguing tropes, devices, and recurring motifs within Senior’s repertoire, from cast iron grilles to unorthodox hats and hairstyles, perhaps leading his stylized vocabulary into the realms of nineteenth-century symbolist painting as much as into the health clubs, spas, leisure centers, and parks of today. Indeed, there is a strange sense of timelessness to Senior’s practice that is matched by a captivating sense of silence, loneliness, and isolation, despite the figures often being present in couples, clusters, or small groups. Behind their toned physiques, stripy towels and goggles, underneath their winter coats, cagoules, and peaked caps, there are, perhaps, some small glimmers of inner lives – of sentient, intellectual, cultured, emotional, sexual beings trapped within. Senior’s oeuvre is, in many ways, preoccupied with repression and expression, freedom and conformity, motion and stasis, balance and inertia, engagement and disengagement. One might even describe his rendering of the human body as a bittersweet analogy for human states of mind, for energy versus futility, effort versus relaxation, health versus decline. Benjamin Senior completed a BA in painting at Wimbledon School of Art before graduating with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include at Grey Noise, Dubai, Studio Voltaire, London, Monica de Cardenas, Milan, James Fuentes, New York, and BolteLang, Zurich.Featuring an introduction by art critic, writer, and curator Sacha Craddock, an essay by art historian, museum educator, and writer Ben Street, and a text by curator, writer, and lecturer Gabor Gyory, this 100-page hardback monograph has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik, edited by Matt Price, and published by Anomie.

Benjamin Senior - Breathless

Craddock, Sacha

Gyory, Gabor

Anomie Publishing

The collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna represent some 5,000 years of human creativity from Ancient Egypt through to European painting around 1800. The Shape of Time presents a group of artworks dating from 1800 to the present day by artists such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Claude Cahun, Mark Rothko, Maria Lassnig, Steve McQueen and Peter Doig. These have been carefully placed within the rooms of the museum's picture gallery, each in dialogue with one work of art from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. As stepping stones they lead visitors from the point at which the museum's collections end, to the present.

The Shape of Time

Sharp, Jasper

Higgie, Jennifer

Haag, Sabine

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Walther König, Köln

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

Books by Street, Ben

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

How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone

How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone

How to Be an Art Rebel

Art Unfolded: A History of Art in Four Colours

200 Words to Help You Talk About Art

Benjamin Senior - Breathless

The Shape of Time