Voytek Kurtyka is one of the greatest alpinists of all time. Born in 1947, he was one of the leading lights of the Polish golden age of mountaineering that redefined Himalayan climbing in the 1970s and 1980s. His visionary approach to climbing resulted in many renowned ascents, such as the complete Broad Peak traverse, the 'night-naked' speed climbs of Cho Oyu and Shishapangma and, above all, the alpine-style first ascent of the West Face of Gasherbrum IV. Dubbed the 'climb of the century', his route on GIV with the Austrian Robert Schauer is – as of 2017 – unrepeated. His most frequent climbing partners were alpine legends of their time: Polish Himalayan giant Jerzy Kukuczka, Swiss mountain guide Erhard Loretan and British alpinist Alex MacIntyre. After repeated requests to accept the Piolets d'Or Lifetime Achievement Award (the Oscars of the climbing world), Kurtyka finally accepted the honour in the spring of 2016. A fiercely private individual, he has declined countless invitations for interviews, lectures and festival appearances, but he has agreed to collaborate with internationally renowned and award-winning author Bernadette McDonald on this long-awaited biography. Art of Freedom is a profound and moving profile of one of the international climbing world's most respected, complex and reclusive mountaineers.

Documents the author's observations of circumstances reflected in a maximum-security prison and subsequent launch of a humanities college course for dropouts, immigrants and former inmates who eventually became high-achieving contributors to society.

The first English-language publication of writings by the collective artist Claire Fontaine, addressing our complicity with anything that limits our freedom. This anthology presents, in chronological order, all the texts by collective artist Claire Fontaine from 2004 to today. Created in 2004 in Paris by James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale, the collective artist Clare Fontaine creates texts that are as as experimental and politically charged as her visual practice. In. these writings, she uses the concept of “human strike” and adopts the radical feminist position that can be found in Tiqqun, a two-issue magazine cofounded by Carnevale. Human strike is a movement that is broader and more radical than any general strike. It addresses our inevitable subjective complicity with everything that limits our freedom and shows how to abandon these self-destructive behaviors through desubjectivization. Human strike, Claire Fontaine writes, is a subjective struggle to separate from the inevitable harm we do to ourselves and others simply by living within postindustrial neoliberalism. Human Strike is the first English-language publication of Claire Fontaine's influential and important theoretical writings.

Art on trial: exploring the Supreme Court's rulings on free expression

After losing someone she loved, artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood with chalkboard paint and stenciled the sentence, "Before I die I want to _____." Within a day of the wall's completion, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as neighbors stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than four hundred Before I Die walls have been created by people all over the world. This beautiful hardcover book is an inspiring celebration of these walls and the stories behind them. Filled with hope, fear, humor, and heartbreak, Before I Die presents an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life's ultimate question.

"Art and Freedom introduces a novel classificatory system for representation, expression, and formalist theories of art. Sleinis argues that a characteristic defect of contemporary theories of art is their neglect of the issue of value. Probing the issue of progress in art, he also emphasizes the need for art to contribute to positive values."--BOOK JACKET.

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts—musical, literary, and visual—and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us. As people look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. “Art’s relevance,” he writes, “has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance.” Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings—wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture. Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable—that’s the key to its importance. Taking his stand with artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation—the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium—that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we’re experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it’s the interplay between authority and freedom—what Perl calls “the lifeblood of the arts”—that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society.