Ugliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, from the cabinet of …
Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in …
From the ‘Monster of Ravenna’ to the ‘Elephant Man’, Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of ‘real’, human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. …
Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and …
In his writing on the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan describes the female body as lacking: a mere symptom of man, an object constructed by male desire. …
Elizabeth Wilson is one of our most radical cultural critics. In "Cultural Passions" she transcends the division between 'high' and 'low' culture, exploring the emotional …
The view from above, or the 'bird's-eye' view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to …
The 'theoretical turn' within the arts and humanities in the 1970s and 1980s has, for many, had its day, with work produced under its rubric all too often feeling tired or even …
Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of 'high art', Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least …
Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present …
