The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning - Softcover

Nelson, Maggie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393343146 ISBN 13: 9780393343144

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Synopsis

Reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state or aid in the creation of a just social order. Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates the contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo and permissibility.

About this title

Review:

"Nelson makes a compelling case for taking a new look at cruelty."

--Patrick Langley, The Times Literary Supplement

"She [Maggie Nelson] performs the feat of writing a very discursive text, meandering around its subject in wide loops and turns, and at the same time producing an incisive and astute consideration, not only of the art of cruelty but of art itself, and our relationship to it as spectators, participants and humans." --Times Higher Education

"An important and frequently surprising book...could be read as the foundation for a post-avant-garde aesthetics."

--The New York Times Book Review

"...full of rigorous thinking on the interplay between art and ethics."

--Exeunt Magazine

"...fascinating and supremely intelligent account.." --The Herald

About the Author:

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books, including her most recent work, Bluets. She teaches at CalArts.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0393343146
• ISBN 13: 9780393343144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304