Pierre Bourdieu: The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993)

“The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu’s most important writings on art, literature, and aesthetics. Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary, art, and cultural criticism in the late twentieth century: aesthetic value and judgement, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: the writers, artists, publishers, critics, dealers, galleries and academies. He analyses the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power. The essays in this volume deal with such diverse topics as Flaubert’s point of view, Manet’s aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power. The Field of Cultural Production will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.”

Edited by Randal Johnson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1993
ISBN 0231082878, 9780231082877
viii+322 pages

Reviews: Tom Huhn (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1996), Sigrid R⊘yseng (International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2010).

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Hal Foster: Prosthetic Gods (2004)

“How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine.

Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These “new egos” are further contrasted with the “bachelor machines” proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober.

Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262062429, 9780262062428
455 pages

Key terms:
Max Ernst, Art Nouveau, Robert Gober, Medusa, Ornament and Crime, Wyndham Lewis, surrealist, psychoanalysis, primitivist, phallus, modernist, Hans Bellmer, Adolf Loos, Dadaist, Le Corbusier, apotropaic, Dada, Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, vorticist

Reviews: Cohen (CAA Reviews 2005), Bowring (Frieze 2005), Hopkins (Papers of Surrealism 2005), Cooper (Art Bulletin 2006).

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Jacques Rancière: The Future of the Image (2007)

A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies. He suggests that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution will always embrace egalitarian ideals.

Published by Verso, London, 2007
ISBN: 1844671070, 9781844672974
160 pages

Review (Robert Porter)
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