Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács: Aesthetics and Politics (1977/1980)

The most remarkable aesthetic debates in European cultural history, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson.

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács
Afterword by Fredric Jameson
First published in 1977
Publisher Verso, London, 1980
ISBN 860917223, 902308386
221 pages

PDF (updated on 2020-12-10)

Ken Friedman (ed.): The Fluxus Reader (1998)

“Fluxus began in the 1950s as a loose, international community of artists, architects, composers and designers. By the 1960s, Fluxus has become a laboratory of ideas and an arena for artistic experimentation in Europe, Asia and the United States. Described as ‘the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s’, Fluxus challenged conventional thinking on art and culture for over four decades. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. Despite this influence, the scope and scale of this unique phenomenon have made it difficult to explain Fluxus in normative historical and critical terms. The Fluxus Reader offers the first comprehensive overview on this challenging and controversial group. It is written by leading scholars and experts from Europe and the United States.”

Publisher Academy Editions, UK, 1998
Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 3.0 Unported licence
ISBN 0471978582, 9780471978589
309 pages
The version of the text provided for download here contains updates on the original 1998 edition.
via Joseph Nechvatal

Reviews: Elizabeth Beckman and Jonathan Applefield (Art J, 1999), Beáta Hock (Artpool, n.d.).

PDF (37 MB, updated on 2012-7-30)
PDF chapters

Sergei Eisenstein: Selected Works, 1: Writings, 1922-34 (1988)

This volume is a collection of writings by Sergei Eisenstein, considered by some to be cinema’s most important theorist and author of aesthetic writings in the 20th century. Some of the writings are of his early silent masterpieces, The Strike and The Battleship Potemkin.

Edited and translated by Richard Taylor
Publisher British Film Institute, London, 1988
ISBN 0851702066, 9780851702063
343 pages

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)