Venus in Exile by Wendy Steiner
In Venus in Exile renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art--the female subject and ornament--became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes Venus in Exile on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice.
Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in interrelations between visual and verbal art. She is the author of numerous books including The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (2010) and Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (2001). Tom Moran is the chief curator and artistic director at Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. A sculptor in his own right, he has lectured on public art around the country and has taught at Rutgers University as well as at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780684857817 |
| ISBN 10 | 0684857812 |
| Title | Venus in Exile |
| Author | Wendy Steiner |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Free Press |
| Year published | 2001-08-27 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |