Glittering Images
A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
WIth full-color illustrations throughout
From the best-selling author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn and one of our most acclaimed cultural critics, here is an enthralling journey through Western art’s defining moments, from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas’s volcano planet duel in Revenge of the Sith.
America’s premier intellectual provocateur returns to the subject that brought her fame, the great themes of Western art. Passionately argued, brilliantly written, and filled with Paglia’s trademark audacity, Glittering Images takes us on a tour through more than two dozen seminal images, some famous and some obscure or unknown—paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces, and digital art that have defined and transformed our visual world. She combines close analysis with background information that situates each artist and image within its historical context—from the stone idols of the Cyclades to an elegant French rococo interior to Jackson Pollock’s abstract Green Silver to Renée Cox’s daring performance piece Chillin’ with Liberty. And in a stunning conclusion, she declares that the avant-garde tradition is dead and that digital pioneer George Lucas is the world’s greatest living artist. Written with energy, erudition, and wit, Glittering Images is destined to change the way we think about our high-tech visual environment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
We are living in an age of visual "vertigo" and "must relearn how to see," argues academic and critic Paglia (Sexual Personae) in this highly reflective and imaginative history of images in Western art. Paglia begins with the Luxor paintings of Queen Nefertiti's journey to the afterlife and ends with Revenge of the Sith by filmmaker George Lucas, who she argues is the greatest contemporary master of synthesizing art and technology. Intentionally organized as a devotional where the reader observes and contemplates one image at a time, Paglia traces the major periods of Western art image by image, so that each brief chapter could be a stand-alone essay. While some of Paglia's choices are somewhat predictable (Bernini's Chair of Saint Peter as an example of the baroque; David's Death of Marat for neo-classicism; Jackson Pollock's Green Silver as an example of abstract expressionism) her image choices for romanticism (The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich) and surrealism (The Portrait by Ren Magritte) are less so. Paglia writes with energetic lucidity, and her entries on the Laoco n and Donatello's Mary Magdalene are standouts in this absorbing volume. Both a valuable cultural critique and an elucidating history, Paglia's latest would suit the general reader, as well as those looking for an alternative approach to contemporary ways of seeing. Illus.
