Books >> Arts & Photography
 

In this enriching collection of eleven interrelated essays, A Way of Working explores the ancient relationship of art, order, and craft. Craft is considered as a "sort of ark" for the transmission of real knowledge about being, and about our deep creative aspirations. The book includes contributions from D. M. Dooling, Joseph Cary, Paul Jordan-Smith, Michael Donner, Harry Remde, Jean Kinkead Martine, Jean Sulzberger, Chanit Roston, and P. L. Travers. This group of authors write not as individuals but as members of a community — a guild effort. As one chapter heading put it: the alchemy of craft.

Now recognized as one of today's greatest theater directors and winner of two Tony Awards-and director of this season's most acclaimed play, Democracy, by his frequent collaborator Michael Frayn-Michael Blakemore followed a unique path to success. In this book, he discusses his boyhood in Australia and his start in England as an actor-his life changed by a tour of Titus Andronicus with Laurence Olivier at the height of his powers-and continuing up to his first success as a director with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. In recounting his early life, Blakemore provides "a pitch-perfect account of dreaming youth, driven, frustrated, and eventually deepened by a realistic love of the theatre" (David Hare).

This fascinating text presents what is probably the largest selection of antique lamps illustrated anywhere — 647 in all. Included are "Betty" lamps; petticoat and tumbler lamps; pierced tin lanterns; candle lanterns; Sandwich glass candlesticks; mantle and astral lamps; luster lamps, Bennington ware; chandeliers and other lighting devices in use up to the 1880’s. Introduction.

Art is a major political weapon of our times. Today, peoples around the world use art to boost their own identity and to attack the ways others represent them. At a time of increasing intercultural exchange, art has become a primary means through which groups reinforce their challenged sense of culture.

This pioneering book breaks with the tradition of the anthropology of art as the depoliticized study of aesthetics in exotic settings. Transcending artificial distinctions between the West and the Rest, it examines the increasingly significant relations among art, identity and politics in the modern world.

Among the themes investigated by the contributors:

· how African painters undermine racist stereotypes yet remain dominated by the Western art market

· the role of anthropology museums in the perpetuation of the Western market in 'tribal art'

· the internal and external political disputes underlying the 'repatriation' of cultural property.