Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects fifty-four pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers what he calls 'heavy entertainment' – strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.

"A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press."--Introduction

"The greatest painting collection in the Western United States" was the Los Angeles Times Magazine's accolade for the Norton Simon Museum, a stunning group of masterpieces assembled by one man in the brief span of thirty-five years. -- A brilliant businessman with a keen mind and remarkable instincts, Norton Simon built a consumer conglomerate that included Hunt-Wesson Foods, McCall Publishing, Canada Dry Corporation, May Factor cosmetics, and Avis Car Rental, When his interests turned to art, he used his business acumen, inquisitive intellect, and aggressive style to pursue and purchase more than 8,000 works of art, For Hunt Foods, Norton Simon adopted the advertising slogan, "Hunt for the Best". The catchphrase also came to symbolize Simon's zealous pursuit of impeccable artworks as he built one of the greatest art collections of the twentieth century. -- Collector Without Wall is a concise and complete illustrated history of Norton Simon's odyssey, Chronicling his acquisitions from his first $300 purchase through more than 1700 separate transactions. The reader glimpses Simon's intriguing and charismatic personality and gains insight into the collector and his collection. A fully-illustrated catalogue of all of Simon's acquisitions and deaccessions provides an invaluable tool for scholars. -- The book draws from the extensive Norton Simon Museum archives and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, art dealers, and museum professionals, as well as unpublished conversations with, and writings by, Norton Simon. --Book Jacket.

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.” In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

In 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its greatest champions. Drawing on a range of contemporary publications, he adopted images and responded to ideas. Indeed, Malraux’s book on the floor is a variation of photographer André Vigneau’s spectacular Encyclopédie photographique de l’art, published in five volumes from 1935 on—years before Malraux would enter this field. Both authors were engaged in juxtaposing artworks via photographs and publishing these photographs by the hundreds, but Malraux was the better sloganeer. Starting from a close examination of the photograph of Malraux in his salon, art historian Walter Grasskamp takes the reader back to the dawn of this genre of illustrated art book. He shows how it catalyzed the practice of comparing works of art on a global scale. He retraces the metaphor to earlier reproduction practices and highlights its ubiquity in contemporary art, ending with an homage to the other pioneer of the “museum without walls,” the unjustly forgotten Vigneau.

Examines the introduction of Mexican muralism to the United States in the 1930s, and the challenges faced by the artists, their medium, and the political overtones of their work in a new society.