Edited by Iain Robertson, Derrick Chong

By the time you read this book, the art world may have witnessed the sale of its first $500 million painting. Whilst for some people money is anathema to art this is clearly a wealthy international industry, and a market with its own conventions and pressures.

Drawing on the vast experience of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, The Art Business exposes the realities of the commercial trade in fine art and antiques. Attention is devoted to the role of auction houses, commercial galleries and art museums as key institutions, with the text divided into four thematic sections covering:

• technical and structural elements of the art market
• cultural policy and management in art business
• regulatory legal and ethical issues in the art world
• the views, through interviews, of leading art market experts.

This book provides a thorough examination of contemporary issues in the art business, and the mechanisms and influences which underpin its evolution. It is essential reading for students of art history or international business, or anyone with an interest in pursuing a career in this area.

ISBN: 9780415391573

Published April 01 2008 by Routledge.

Placing the Subject in Art and Architecture

Edited by Dana Arnold, Joanna Sofaer Derevenski

Bringing together a collection of high-profile authors, Biographies and Space presents essays exploring the relationship between biography and space and how specific subjects are used as a means of explaining sets of social, cultural and spatial relationships.

Biographical methods of historical investigation can bring out the authentic voice of subjects, revealing personal meanings and strategies in space as well as providing a means to analyze relations between the personal and the social. Writing about both actual (architectural) and imagined (pictorial) space, the authors consider issues of gender, childhood, sexuality and race, highlighting an increasing fluidity and interaction between theory, methods and history.

Biographies and Space is an original and exciting new book, with direct relevance to both architectural and art history.

ISBN: 9780415365512

Published December 14 2007 by Routledge.

By Grant Pooke, Diana Newall

Art History: The Basics is a concise and accessible introduction for the undergraduate approaching the history of art for the first time at college or university, and for anyone with a general interest in the subject.

It will give you answers to questions like:

• What is art and art history?
• What are the main methodologies used to understand art?
• How have ideas about form, sex and gender shaped representation?
• What connects art with psychoanalysis, semiotics and Marxism?
• How are globalization and postmodernism changing art and art history?

Each chapter introduces key ideas, issues and debates in art history, including information on relevant websites and image archives. Fully illustrated with an international range of artistic examples, Art History: The Basics also includes helpful subject summaries, further ideas for reading in each chapter, and a useful glossary for easy reference.

ISBN: 9780415373098

Published November 30 2007 by Routledge.

The Key Concepts

By Catherine McDermott

This is the essential student’s guide to Design – its practice, its theory and its history. Drawing from a wide range of international examples, respected design writer Catherine McDermott explores key topics including:

• international design – from Europe to Africa
• design history – from Art Nouveau to punk
• sustainable design, recycling and green design
• design theory – from semiotics to gender, to postcolonialism
• design technology, graphic design and the web.

Fully cross-referenced, with up to date guides for further reading, Design: The Key Concepts is an indispensable reference for students of design, design history, fashion, art and visual culture.

ISBN: 9780415320153

Published November 20 2007 by Routledge.

Aesthetics Naturalized

By Jennifer A. McMahon

In Aesthetics and Material Beauty, Jennifer A. McMahon develops a new aesthetic theory she terms Critical Aesthetic Realism - taking Kantian aesthetics as a starting point and drawing upon contemporary theories of mind from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The creative process does not proceed by a set of rules. Yet the fact that its objects can be understood or appreciated by others suggests that the creative process is constrained by principles to which others have access. According to her update of Kantian aesthetics, beauty is grounded in indeterminate yet systematic principles of perception and cognition. However, Kant’s aesthetic theory rested on a notion of indeterminacy whose consequences for understanding the nature of art were implausible.

McMahon conceptualizes "indeterminacy" in terms of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and computational theories of mind. In doing so, she develops an aesthetic theory that reconciles the apparent dichotomies which stem from the tension between the determinacy of communication and the indeterminacy of creativity. Dichotomies such as universality and subjectivity, objectivity and autonomy, cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and truth and beauty are revealed as complementary features of an aesthetic judgment.

ISBN: 9780415378307

Published October 30 2007 by Routledge.

By Christine Battersby

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art.

Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh

The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.

ISBN: 9780415148108

Published October 11 2007 by Routledge.

Exploring Fieldwork and Applications

Edited by Robert Jerrard, David Hands

Quantifying and assessing the value of an organization’s design department can be problematic. The tools traditionally used by auditors are usually insufficient to ‘measure’ either the value of design projects or their influence within an organization. This book demystifies the design development and design management process, scrutinising it against a new set of auditing principles which illuminates its true value in a contemporary context.

Featuring a series of international case studies, Design Management: Exploring Fieldwork and Applications argues that assessment of the design function within any organization must incorporate both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The book explores a number of key themes, such as new product development, risk in design and corporate identity. Moreover, by drawing on a range of techniques from the social sciences, the authors rigorously develop means by which design may be understood accurately.

This book represents an important and timely contribution to our knowledge of the management of product and service innovation. It will be an invaluable text for students and researchers working in design and management.

ISBN: 9780415393331

Published September 17 2007 by Routledge.

A Changing Discipline and its Institutions

Edited by Elizabeth Mansfield

Making Art History is a collection of essays by contemporary scholars on the practice and theory of art history as it responds to institutions as diverse as art galleries and museums, publishing houses and universities, school boards and professional organizations, political parties and multinational corporations.

The text is split into four thematic sections, each of which begins with a short introduction from the editor, the sections include:

• Border Patrols, addresses the artistic canon and its relationship to the ongoing 'war on terror', globalization, and the rise of the Belgian nationalist party.
• The Subjects of Art History, questions whether 'art' and 'history' are really what the discipline seeks to understand.
• Instituting Art History, concerns art history and its relation to the university and raises questions about the mission, habits, ethics and limits of university today.
• Old Master, New Institutions, shows how art history and the museum respond to nationalism, corporate management models and the 'culture wars'.

ISBN: 9780415372343

Published May 16 2007 by Routledge.

Video – Installation – Performance

By Nick Kaye

Multi-media charts the development of multi-media video, installation and performance in a unique dialogue between theoretical analysis and specially commissioned documentations by some of the world’s foremost artists. Nick Kaye explores the interdisciplinary history and character of experimental practices shaped in exchanges between music, installation, theatre, performance art, conceptual art, sculpture and video.

The book sets out key themes and concerns in multi-media practice, addressing time, space, the resurgence of ephemerality, liveness and ‘aura’. These chapters are interspersed with documentary artwork and essays by artists whose work continues to shape the field, including new articles from:

• Vito Acconci
• The Builders Association
• John Jesurun
• Pipilotti Rist
• Fiona Templeton.

Multi-media also reintroduces a major documentary essay by Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro in a new, fully illustrated form. This book combines sophisticated scholarly analysis and fascinating original work to present a refreshing and creative investigation of current multi-media arts practice.

ISBN: 9780415283809

Published April 12 2007 by Routledge.

A Reader in Architectural Theory

Edited by William W. Braham, Jonathan Hale

This essential reference for all students of architecture, design and the built environment provides a convenient single source for all the key texts in the recent literature on architecture and technology.

The book contains over fifty carefully selected essays, manifestoes, reflections and theories by architects and architectural writers from 1900 to 2004. This mapping out of a century of architectural technology reveals the discipline's long and close attention to the experience and effects of new technologies, and provides a broad picture of the shift from the 'age of tools' to the 'age of systems'.

Chronological arrangement and cross-referencing of the articles enable both a thematic and historically contextual understanding of the topic and highlight important thematic connections across time.

With the ever increasing pace of technological change, this Reader presents a clear understanding of the context in which it has and does affect architecture.

ISBN: 9780415346535

Published December 19 2006 by Routledge.