Hans van Maanen is professor of art and society at the Department of Arts, Culture & Media Studies of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.

Symbolic interactionism, resolutely empirical in practice, shares theoretical concerns with cultural studies and humanistic discourse. Recognizing that the humanities have engaged many of the important intellectual currents of the last twenty-five years in ways that sociology has not, the contributors to this volume fully acknowledge that the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities has begun to dissolve. This challenging volume explores that border area.

Using a wealth of data collected in Israel, this study depicts a complete system in which art is created and evaluated--the scale of Israeli society allowing for a comprehensive and detailed description of all the agents involved in the production and consumption of modern art. The author analyzes the patterns of social relations and behavior created around two art worlds--the world of abstract avant-garde art and the world of traditional figurative painting. She argues that the two worlds differ radically both in terms of the factors that affect the formation of taste, the process of evaluation and the patterns of success in them and in the ways in which these factors exert their influence.

The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) in Buenos Aires operated for less than a decade, but by the time of its closure in 1971 it had become the undeniable epicenter of Latin American avant-garde music. Providing the first in-depth study of CLAEM, author Eduardo Herrera tells the story of the fellowship program--funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Di Tella family--that, by allowing the region's promising young composers to study with a roster of acclaimed faculty, produced some of the most prominent figures within the art world, including Rafael Aponte Ledeé, Coriún Aharonián, and Blas Emilio Atehortúa. Combining oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources, Elite Art Worlds explores regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism and the embrace, articulation, and resignification of avant-garde techniques and perspectives during the 1960s. But the story of CLAEM reveals much more: intricate webs of US and Argentine philanthropy, transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and the role of art in constructing elite identities. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and philanthropic project, Herrera illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in Latin America and the United States against the backdrop of the Cold War.