A lively and accessible study of what happens when the ‘serious’ world of art collides with celebrity.

First published in German by DuMont in 2008.

Explores the vibrant visual and theatrical culture of eighteenth-century England. Focuses on the central role of images in the invention of modern celebrity culture.

It is Cats' Visiting Night at the Art Gallery, and cats want to see paintings with cats in them - six funny reworkings of famous paintings, each shown alongside the original masterpiece.

Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.

This book illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art.

One hundred photographs from "Rolling Stone" magazine celebrate the art of the tattoo in shots of musicians, actors, and other pop icons, including Drew Barrymore, Eminem, Melissa Etheridge, and Ozzy Osborne.