Losing Helen is a moving and inspiring essay that tracks an adult daughter through the many complex phases of grief as she anticipates the inevitable loss of her elderly mother. Finding strength and guidance in the spiritual insights of writers, artists, Western religion, and Eastern philosophies, the narrator undergoes a profound transformation while striving to design an end-of-life experience that is meaningful and sacred not only for her mother but also for herself.

In The Subversive Imagination , professional writers, artists and cultural critics from around the world offer their views on the issue of the artist's responsibility to society. The contributors look beyond censorship and free speech issues and instead emphasize the subject of freedom. More specifically, the contributors question the ethical, mutual responsibilities between artists and the societies in which they live. The original essays address an eclectic range of subjects: censorship,...

Carol Becker, preeminent arts educator and contributor to leading art magazines, offers a beautifully poignant meditation on the role of place in artistic creativity. She focuses on place as a historical, physical entity and a conceptual site where ideas come into meaning. The book explores places from the coal-mining towns of western Pennsylvania, to the Birla House where Gandhi was shot, to the sinking city of Venice. A cross between theory, memoir, and history, her writing creates the e...

In her newest book, leading social critic Carol Becker offers a timely analysis of the nature of art and its role in politics and society. Completed just before the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center catastrophe, Surpassing the Spectacle is now especially relevant in its analysis of the spectacle society that was omnipresent before that fatal day. This book is remarkably prescient of the new concerns that have now become foremost in our thoughts since the attack. This collectio...

9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of "outsider" and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself.Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.

Should artists be activists? Is activist art one of an artists primary responsibilities or a pointless sideshow on the fringes of serious politics? The philosopher, writer and art historian Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck explore this theme in collaboration with other thinkers and doers in his new book Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization. In a time of globalization, populism, hypercapitalism, migration, War on Terror, and global warming, artistic engagement...

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect "antidote to mansplaining" ( The Stranger).In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing...

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal....

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, e...

How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce theatre and performance for global audiences.

The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators, following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularity with quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of the lost radical conscience of art and culture.Art is a recreation of our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped by its ‘otherness’ and by history. All stories are crime stories, all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness. And all art contains a narrative. Radical...

In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, ...