Yes you can! Give the gift of art. Give the gift of creativity. Give the gift of fun. Because now we can all paint with the best of them. Drawn from the annals of America's fondly remembered pastimes, Real Art! is an all-new, cleverly designed paint by number kit and the coolest gift of the season. Open the box and discover everything an artist needs to create a gallery of paintings suitable for framing--ten white "canvas" boards, 18 oversized pots of acrylic paint, and two brushes, one narrow and one medium. The images, newly created by artist Nancy Stahl, are iconic: a still life of luscious pears. A clipper ship in full sail. Tropical parrots in a study of exuberant hue. The geisha. The bustling street scene. And two bona fide masterpieces: van Gogh's Sunflowers and, yes, the Mona Lisa. Plus, pulling the full experience together is a 64-page full-color book of history, appreciation, and instruction. Illustrated throughout, it traces the canon of PBN subjects and artists, including the original brouhaha over its place in the culture; and provides a how-to-paint primer--including how to improvise, from choosing a varied color palette to leaving parts of the canvas blank, à la Warhol; plus tips on displaying your work and, ultimately, becoming a PBN collector.

The Colors covers the past three decades of the American art scene, a period during which the prevailing artistic fashion has shifted as often as the focus of the Whitney Biennial, when art and money, talent and celebrity have often been confused. During this period, figures such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and Keith Haring have crossed over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture, and art dealers, like Hollywood power agents, have often claimed as much attention as those they represented. Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within this world, known the players, and delivers here an authoritative and deliciously inside account.Focusing on the lives and personalities of the art world's main players, and with a sure critical component, Haden-Guest gives us vivid portraits of the period's key artists as they strive to fulfill their ambitions. He does justice as well to the machinations of those who have come to control the larger drama -- the dealers, collectors, and museum curators. Filled with incredible anecdotes, dramatically told stories, and subtle critical assessments, True Colors tells the story of the art world that we have never heard before.

Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) delivers a lucidly written elaboration of "interactive aesthetics" first broached in her examination of the revival of beauty in contemporary art, Venus in Exile (2001). Here the focus is the artist's model, broadly conceived as a paradoxical site of reality/artificiality and power/lack of power. Steiner incorporates a wide range of material to explain early history (the Pygmalion myth, Galatea, Eve, and Pandora), the postmodernist turn (Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan), and recent developments (Second Life, blogging, Wikipedia, bioethics). Concepts (mimesis, spectacle), literature (Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl of 2008, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year of 2007, Milton, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, Nathaniel Hawthorne); art (Michelangelo, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hannah Wilke, Vanessa Beecroft, Gillian Wearing, Oron Catts, Helena Almeida, Ann Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frederick Hart, John Kindness, Peter Eisenman, Rachel Whiteread), theory (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Rene Girard), and art history (Michael Fried, Sir Kenneth Clark) are woven into a rich tapestry informed by Steiner's favorite semioticians, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by E. K. Mix.

This book shows a series of portraits found in the trash bin of the "Gulu Real Art Studio," the oldest photographic studio in Gulu, Northern Uganda. The studio only has a machine that makes four ID images at a time, a number that most clients cannot afford, so the photographer takes single analog pictures, punches out the head with a special device, and discards the rest. In these faceless prints, one's focus shifts to the subject's individual posture and clothing, forming a typological portrayal of a community. Martina Bacigalupo also interviewed clients of Gulu, and their stories, many deeply moving, describe the political, economic, and social conditions common to contemporary East Africa.

Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role playing game that she spends most of her free time on. It's a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It's a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends. Gaming is, for Anda, entirely a good thing. But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer -- a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake. From acclaimed teen author Cory Doctorow and rising star cartoonist Jen Wang, In Real Life is a sensitive, thoughtful look at adolescence, gaming, poverty, and culture-clash. This title has common Core connections. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

This is a companion volume to an exhibition which examines how today's most promising artists are exploring our shifting experience of reality. The book explores our constantly changing sense of what is real, and the consequences of not understanding the difference.