"One of the first books by a serious art critic to confront the social situation of contemporary art, to describe the resonance between the myriad styles, forms, and attitudes of contemporary art and the moral and economic setting in which this art occurs"--back cover.

If 'Has Modernism Failed?' was critical and provocative, its readers also found it inspirational. Arguing for a renewed moral, social and spiritual dimension in art, Gablik pointed to some encouraging developments. Now, in this revised and expanded edition, Gablik assesses the state of contemporary art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Though there is still a commodified modernist and postmodernist art world - a world for which Gablik’s trenchant analysis is as relevant as ever - there is a burgeoning commitment to socially relevant and spiritually informed art. In a new prologue and two new chapters, Gablik looks at the promises and the problems of globalization, and the attempts of artists to integrate the concerns of the environment and the world with their art.

The contributors to The Failure of Modernism are influenced by the view that modernism has failed, and most of the essays attempt to critique specific features of modernism, often from a more traditional perspective. Modernism in philosophy is characterized by skepticism and anti-realism in epistemology, and by relativism in ethics and politics.

From Henry James' fascination with burnt manuscripts to destroyed books in the fiction of the Blitz; from junk mail in the work of Elizabeth Bowen to bureaucratic paperwork in Vladimir Nabokov; modern fiction is littered with images of tattered and useless paper that reveal an increasingly uneasy relationship between literature and its own materials over the course of the twentieth-century. Wastepaper Modernism argues that these images are vital to our understanding of modernism, disclosing an anxiety about textual matter that lurks behind the desire for radically different modes of communication. At the same time that writers were becoming infatuated with new technologies like the cinema and the radio, they were also being haunted by their own pages. Having its roots in the late-nineteenth century, but finding its fullest constellation in the wake of the high modernist experimentation with novelistic form, "wastepaper modernism" arises when fiction imagines its own processes of transmission and representation breaking down. When the descriptive capabilities of the novel exhaust themselves, the wastepaper modernists picture instead the physical decay of the book's own primary matter. Bringing together book history and media theory with detailed close reading, Wastepaper Modernism reveals modernist literature's dark sense of itself as a ruin in the making.

Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.