Art & Its Shadow

Description

Art and its Shadow is an extraordinary analysis of the state and meaning of contemporary art and film. Ranging across the work of Andy Warhol, cyberpunk, Wim Wenders, Derek Jarman, thinking on difference and the possibility of a philosophical cinema, Mario Perniola examines the latest and most disturbing tendencies in art.Perniola explores how art - notably in posthumanism, psychotic realism and extreme art - continues to survive despite the hype of the art market and the world of mass communication and reproduction. He argues that the meaning of art in the modern world no longer lies in aesthetic value (above the art work), nor in popular taste (below the art work), but beside the artwork, in the shadow created by both the art establishment and the world of mass communications. In this shadow is what is left out of account by both market and mass media: the difficulty of art, a knowledge that can never be fully revealed, and a new aesthetic future.

Mario Perniola is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Rome at Tor Vergata, Italy. His books in English include Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art and Ritual Thinking: Sexuality, Death, World. He has also written for Art Forum, Zone and Traverses and is editor of the journal of aesthetics and cultural studies, Agalma.