Books about Artifice from Amazon.com

From the author of Hiding the Elephant and The Glorious Deception comes a collection of five essays that shows how the great stage illusions were integrally products of their time, based on the traditions and fashions of the people, and the offspring of the incredible, inventive personalities who brought them to the stage. Like no other author, Jim Steinmeyer gives us insight into the timeless appeal of magic. His human subjects include such characters as Steele MacKaye, Maskelyne, David Devant, P.T. Selbit, Horace Goldin, and Charles Morritt. Illusions he discusses include: The Mascot Moth, Sawing a Lady in Halves, and Morritt's Disappearing Donkey.

When the photograph was invented, it was celebrated for its realism Now we are aware as never before that pictures can deceive Talk of “photo opportunities,” “sound bites,” and “spin control” has become standard fare in the media and part of our everyday discourse. But has our growing awareness that pictures can be fabricated enabled us to see through the artifice of professional image makers? In this important book, Kiku Adatto concludes that, in spite of our growing sophistication, we continue to be moved by the pictures we see on television, in movies, and in photographs because they tap into ideals and myths still alive in our culture. Based on hundreds of network newscasts and on interviews with reporters such as Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel, as well as with political consultants such as Roger Ailes and Frank Shakespeare, Picture Perfect shows how the media find themselves in the paradoxical role of getting the best possible picture, even if this makes them accomplices in artifice, and then puncturing the picture to reveal the image as an image. The result is even more exposure for these contrivances. Picture Perfect traces the rise of our image-conscious sensibility beyond politics to art, popular culture, and social criticism, beginning with the invention of the photograph itself. With examples ranging from the Reagan presidency to Andy Warhol’s hyperrealistic pop art to Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Adatto documents the blurring of the boundaries between event and image, and the consequences for our understanding of ourselves.

The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it.

Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile. This harsh training reinforces a stereotype of artisans as rude and uncultured. Moreover, the same stereotypes that marginalize artisans locally also operate to marginalize Cretans within the Greek nation and Greece itself within the international community. What Herzfeld identifies as "the global hierarchy of value" thus frames the nation's ancient monuments and traditional handicrafts as evidence of incurable "backwardness."

Herzfeld's sensitive observations offer an intimately grounded way of understanding the effects of globalization and of one of its most visible offshoots, the heritage industry, on the lives of ordinary people in many parts of the world today.

How the negotiation between poetic and media discourses takes place is the subject of Marjorie Perloff's groundbreaking study. Radical Artifice considers what happens when the "natural speech" model inherited from the great Modernist poets comes up against the "natural speech" of the Donahue "talk show," or again, how visual poetics and verse forms are responding to the languages of billboards and sound bytes. Among the many poets whose works are discussed are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, and Steve McCaffery. But the strongest presence in Perloff's book is John Cage, a "poet" better known as a composer, a philosopher, a printmaker, and one who understood, almost half a century ago, that from now on no word, musical note, painted surface, or theoretical statement could ever again escape "contamination" from the media landscape in which we live. It is under his sign that Radical Artifice was composed.