Brutal Beauty

Brutal Beauty PDF

Author: Jisha Menon

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0810144077

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Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet PDF

Author: Eleanor Nairne

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3791359797

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Featuring newly commissioned essays and photography of rarely exhibited works, this book highlights the radicalism of Jean Dubuffet, who was one of the most provocative voices of the postwar avant-garde. In 1940s occupied Paris, Jean Dubuffet began to champion a progressive vision for art; one that rejected classical notions of beauty in favor of a more visceral aesthetic. Taking a pioneering approach to materiality and technique, the artist variously blended paint with sand, glass, tar, coal dust, and string. At the same time, he began to assemble a collection of Art Brut--work that was made outside the academic tradition of fine art--even visiting psychiatric wards from 1945 to collect work by patients. This book features texts from leading scholars and is accompanied by images that illuminate Dubuffet's attempts to move beyond the artistic expectations of his time. The works are grouped into six thematic sections that focus on specific series, from his graffiti-inspired "Walls" and his notorious portrait series, "People are Much More Beautiful Than They Think" to the "Corps de dames," a controversial series of "female" landscapes, and his anthropomorphic sculptures, "Little Statues of Precarious Life." Exquisitely produced, this celebration of Dubuffet's work embraces his world view that art is for everyone, not just the elite.

What Beauty There Is

What Beauty There Is PDF

Author: Cory Anderson

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1250268109

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A 2022 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist, What Beauty There Is is Cory Anderson's stunning novel about brutality and beauty, and about broken people trying to survive—"Intense, brutal, and searingly honest," perfect for fans of Patrick Ness, Laura Ruby, and Meg Rosoff. To understand the truth, you have to start at the beginning. Ava Bardem lives in isolation, a life of silence. For seventeen years, Ava’s father, a merciless man, has controlled her fate. He’s taught her to love no one. But then she meets Jack. Living in poverty, Jack Dahl is holding his breath. He and his younger brother have nothing—except each other. With their parents gone, Jack faces a stark choice: lose his brother to foster care or find the drug money that sent his father to prison. He chooses the money. Suddenly, Jack’s and Ava’s fates become intimately—and dangerously—linked as Ava’s father hunts for the same money as Jack. When he picks up on Jack’s trail, Ava must make her own wrenching choice: remain silent or speak and fight for Jack’s survival. Choices. They come at a price.

Brutal Aesthetics

Brutal Aesthetics PDF

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0691253080

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How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Truth & Beauty

Truth & Beauty PDF

Author: Ann Patchett

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0061754811

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"A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — People New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett’s first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy. Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind. This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

The Eyes of the Cat

The Eyes of the Cat PDF

Author: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Publisher: Humanoids Inc

Published: 2014-03-19

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 1594654735

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The very first graphic storytelling collaboration between two masters of the medium, Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius.

The Beauty

The Beauty PDF

Author: Aliya Whiteley

Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Published: 2024-08-29

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1837862060

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Nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Saboteur awards. The tenth anniversary edition of the critically acclaimed short novel, with an introduction by M. R. Carey. Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women. They are the last generation. One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women’s bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before… Discover the Beauty. Also includes the novella The Arrival of Missives.

Deadly American Beauty

Deadly American Beauty PDF

Author: John Glatt

Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1429904747

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Greg DeVillers was a top biotech executive, and Kristen Rossum was embarking on a career in toxicology at the San Diego Medical Examiner's office. They seemed to be happily married, living the American dream. But only months shy of their second anniversary, Kristen found her handsome husband dead from a drug overdose-his corpse sprinkled with rose petals. By his side was their wedding photo. The scene was reminiscent of American Beauty, one of Kristen's favorite movies. Authorities deemed it a suicide. Until they discovered that the rare poison found in Greg's body was the same poison missing from Kristen's office. Until they discovered the truth about Kristen's lurid affair, about her own long-time drug addiction, and about the personal and professional secrets she would kill to keep hidden-secrets that would ultimately expose the beautiful blonde as the deadly beauty she really was...a Deadly American Beauty

Red Hood

Red Hood PDF

Author: Elana K. Arnold

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 006274237X

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A dark, engrossing, blood-drenched tale of the familiar threats to female power—and one girl’s journey to regain it. Five starred reviews greeted this powerful story from Elana K. Arnold, author of the Printz Honor winner Damsel. You are alone in the woods, seen only by the unblinking yellow moon. Your hands are empty. You are nearly naked. And the wolf is angry. Since her grandmother became her caretaker when she was four years old, Bisou Martel has lived a quiet life in a little house in Seattle. She’s kept mostly to herself. She’s been good. But then comes the night of homecoming, when she finds herself running for her life over roots and between trees, a fury of claws and teeth behind her. A wolf attacks. Bisou fights back. A new moon rises. And with it, questions. About the blood in Bisou’s past, and on her hands as she stumbles home. About broken boys and vicious wolves. About girls lost in the woods—frightened, but not alone.