Books about Aesthete from Amazon.com

In his introduction to this now classic anthology, Karl Beckson traces the development of the Decadent or Aesthetic movement, illuminating the selected work of such as Wilde, Yeats, Symons, and Beerbohm that follows..
Price: $11.66 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the 1980s, when the American art market flourished, critics were heavily concerned with theory. In The Aesthete in the City, David Carrier offers a personal view on the artistic activity of that decade. He begins with a theoretical perspective on the relationship beween two very different forms of artwriting: art criticism and art history writing. Carrier surveys the developments within theory during the 1980s, focusing on constructive critical analysis of the then-fashionable work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, T. J. Clark, and Jacques Derrida. He provides detailed accounts of a number of painters, among them Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Sean Scully, whose development he followed closely. Carrier argues that the greatest American artistic tradition, Abstract Expressionism, provides the basis for an ongoing tradition of abstract painting, a rich system whose potential has not yet been exhausted. Carrier's earlier work was concerned with a philosophical study of the methods of art criticism. This book turns to the theory and practice of art criticism, concentrating on a concrete discussion of individual theorists and artists..
Price: $35.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The popularization of amateur photography and the recognition of photography as an art framed the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Until now, these crucial events in the history of photography surprisingly have been unexamined. Paul Sternberger offers the first thorough investigation of the part played by the amateur photographer and of the struggle to legitimize photography as art. He shows that the change in the perception of photography resulted not from a linear evolution but from an intricate, divergent, and often conflicting barrage of strategies.

He also re-evaluates the role of Alfred Stieglitz and his use of Pictorialism as a means to escape photography's reputation as "merely truth." The photographic illustrations include some by the well-known names of the period--Stieglitz, Steichen, Peter Henry Emerson--and many by photographers now long forgotten. This fascinating study shows the late nineteenth century to have been a complex time for both photographic theory and practice in America. At the same time it enlarges our understanding of photographic history..
Price: $32.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]