Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it. Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising places—as in a stand-up comic’s routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one’s ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery; artist Andy Warhol; and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society. Deming interrogates how acts of the imagination by these people, and others, become the means for transforming the alienated ordinary into a presence of the everyday that constantly and continually creates opportunities of investment in its calls on interpretive faculties. In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

Focuses on an everyday item - blue jeans - to learn what one simple article of clothing can tell us about our individual and social lives and challenging, by extension, the foundational anthropological presumption of the normative.

"Proving that everyday, ordinary sights and objects are the icons that comprise the heart and soul of our lives is painter Paul Milosevich's strength."—Santa Fe New Mexican Under Milosevich's extraordinary eye and hand, the workworn objects and everyday heroes of his beloved landscape become realistic paintings that tell the story of life in West Texas. In this 30-year retrospective, Sasser traces the various themes of Milosevich's work and provides biographical insights into the artist's development of West Texas Realism.

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition ... held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2013-Jan. 12, 2014, the Menil Collection, Houston, Feb. 14-June 1, 2014, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, June 29-Oct. 12, 2014.

Artists, critics, curators, and scholars develop theories of craft in relation to art, chronicle how fine art institutions understand and exhibit craft media, and offer accounts of activist crafting.

Rem Koolhaas : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Denise Scott Brown : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Yoshiharu Tsukamoto : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Enrique Walker : retroactive manifestoes