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Criticism eBooks

If you like Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • The Design of Everyday Things

    by Don Norman ...
    **The essential guide to human-centered design“Even more relevant today than it was when first published.”—Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO**Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores ... Read more

    $15.99 USD

  • Medium Design

    Knowing How to Work on the World

    How to Design the World: Working Without SolutionsIn Medium Design everyone is a designer. But design, in this case, inverts the typical focus on object over its settings to concentrate on the medium—the matrix space between objects, events, and ideological declarations. It disrupts habitual modern approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Picture This

    How Pictures Work

    Molly Bang's brilliant, insightful, and accessible treatise is now revised and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Bang's powerful ideas—about how the visual composition of images works to engage the emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story—remain unparalleled in their simplicity and genius. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Art Is Life

    Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

    by Jerry Saltz ...
    From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted ... Read more

    $4.99 USD

  • Takedown

    Art and Power in the Digital Age

    by Farah Nayeri ...
    Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics.For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon--kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art.Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • In Visible Archives

    Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

    Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualitiesIn 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Swedish Design

    A History

    Swedish Design: A History provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the development of design in Sweden from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first.Leading design historian Lasse Brunnström traces the move from artisanal crafts production to the mass production and consumption of designed objects, a process by which the role and profile of the designer became ... Read more

    $29.99 USD

  • Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

    by Emily Black ...
    A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • See/Saw

    Looking at Photographs

    by Geoff Dyer ...
    A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human ConditionSee/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The synthetic proposition

    Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

    by Nizan Shaked ...
    Series series Rethinking Art's Histories
    The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Elements of Art

    Ten Ways to Decode the Masterpieces

    by Susie Hodge ...
    The Elements of Art deconstructs great works of art into manageable components so that you can better understand and appreciate them.Knowing how to interpret art is one of the biggest issues facing casual gallery-goers. They may ask themselves questions like: Why is the Mona Lisa so small? Why are some frames gilded in gold while others are non-existent? What can the use of material say about a ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Ordinary Notes

    A finalist for the National Book Award in NonfictionA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in NonfictionNamed a Best Book of 2023 by The New York Times, NPR, New York magazine, Kirkus, and Barnes and NobleThe critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, “Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangeme... ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies

    Edited by Gregor Fitzi ...
    Series series Routledge International Handbooks
    The Routledge International Handbook of Simmel Studies documents the richness, variety, and creativity of contemporary international research on Georg Simmel’s work. Starting with the established role of Simmel as a classical author of sociology, and including the growing interest in his work in the domain of philosophy, this volume explores the research on Simmel in several further disciplines ... Read more

    $68.99 USD

  • Shapely Bodies

    The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France

    Series series Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture
    Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, ... Read more

    $36.99 USD

  • In a Good Place

    How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive

    If you want to be in a better place, start with physical space. This essential guide gives us new tools to powerfully improve our mindset by making small shifts in the settings where we spend our lives.From home to work and everywhere in between, behavioral scientist Leidy Klotz demonstrates that a thriving inner world requires thoughtful engagement with our surroundings. Our physical environment ... Read more

    Was $15.99 USD Now $1.99 USD

  • Seeing Differently

    A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts

    by Amelia Jones ...
    Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a ... Read more

    $51.99 USD

  • Making Disability Modern

    Design Histories

    Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • The Grand Valley

    by Morgan Meis ...
    Series series Three Paintings Trilogy
    In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human ... Read more

    $10.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Things Worth Keeping

    The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World

    A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce wasteRampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • Architectures of Spatial Justice

    by Dana Cuff ...
    A field-defining work that demonstrates how architects are breaking with professional conventions to advance spatial justice and design more equitable buildings and cities.As state violence, the pandemic, and environmental collapse have exposed systemic inequities, architects and urbanists have been pushed to confront how their actions contribute to racism and climate crisis—and how they can ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • The Golden Thread

    How Fabric Changed History

    **Book Authority • 36 Best Textile Design eBooks of All TimeA briskly told, 30,000-year history of textiles that “will make you rethink your relationship with fabric” (Elle Decoration).**From colorful threads found on the floor of an ancient Georgian cave to the Indian calicoes that fueled the Industrial Revolution, The Golden Thread illuminates the myriad and fascinating histories behind the ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Tough Gynes

    Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men

    by Stan Goff ...
    In Borderline, Stan Goff unpacked the association of masculinity with war. In Tough Gynes, using an incisive and often darkly humorous study of nine films featuring violent female leads, he untangles the confusion about "masculinity constructed as violence" when our popular stories feature women as violent protagonists. Whether read individually or with a group, Tough Gynes raises compelling ... Read more

    $14.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Citizen Designer

    Perspectives on Design Responsibility

    What does it mean to be a designer in today’s corporate-driven, overbranded global consumer culture? Citizen Designerattempts to answer this question with more than 70 debate-stirring essays and interviews espousing viewpoints ranging from the cultural and the political to the professional and the social. Edited by two prominent advocates of socially responsible design, this innovative reference ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • Inside the Business of Graphic Design

    60 Leaders Share Their Secrets of Success

    Inside the Business of Graphic Design casts a precise and realistic light on the risks, requirements, and rewards of running a creative and successful design business. Six sections discuss the entire cycle of business ownership, including goal setting, finding the right management style, cooperating with employees, triggering growth, rethinking one's business in the face of major changes, and even ... Read more

    $13.99 USD