Join the art critic Ben Eastham on a private tour of an extraordinary museum. Let him walk you through a building constructed from memory and filled with a series of bewildering art works, while he delivers a guide comprised of personal experience, professional expertise and sympathy. In this stunningly original book, an introduction to contemporary art is combined with the author's own memories and reflections on what art means. With the help of a cast of interfering security guards, pretentious curators, sceptical visitors, angry protestors and elusive ghosts, Eastham proposes that the art of today offers a way of understanding our increasingly strange and complex times.&nbsp; Eastham doesn't&nbsp;ask you to like the artworks in his imaginary&nbsp;museum, but offers the tools for you to formulate and express your&nbsp;own opinion of them.&nbsp;He argues that art should be judged by the feelings it provokes and the&nbsp;conversations it generates: in talking about art, we learn to talk about ourselves and the world in which we live.

The Imaginary Museum: A Personal Tour of Contemporary Art featuring ghosts, nudity and disagreements (Tls Books)

Eastham, Ben

Reference

TLS Books

In this new book, Ed Ruscha distills the archetypal signs and symbols of the American vernacular into typographic and cinematic codes that are as accessible as they are profound. These powerful works, all completed in 2016, are reproduced in this stunning new volume in beautiful color-saturated plates to which black and white installation photos, as well as studio shots, provide a striking contrast. New texts by art historian Yve-Alain Bois and art critic Ben Eastham situate these new works within Ruscha’s larger oeuvre and provide detailed insight into particular works. In the restrained paintings that comprise Extremes and In-Betweens, Ruscha sets into motion a dynamic interplay of words and their meanings in ascending and descending shifts of scale and tone that echo the relation of macrocosm to microcosm. Although his images are undeniably rooted in the signs and symbols of American reality closely observed, his elegant and laconic art speaks to more complex and widespread issues regarding the appearance, feel, and function of the world and our tenuous and transient place within it.

Ed Ruscha: Extremes and In-betweens

Arts & Photography

Bois, Yve-Alain

History & Criticism

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Why is this art? The world of contemporary art can seem intimidating, absurd, and self-obsessed, while the sums of money exchanged are baffling. Writing on contemporary art is often tortured and confused, ignoring the important questions: What is contemporary art? How does it relate to money and power? How is it made? Will it survive? To answer these questions, Katya Tylevich and Ben Eastham offer a series of short biographies on eight great works of twenty-first century art by Martin Creed, Barry McGee, Camille Henrot, Marina Abramovic, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, Erwin Wurm, Michaël Borremans, and Gregory Crewdson. They follow these paintings, films, installations, experiences, experiments, sculptures, and performances through all the key stages of their existence so far – from the delicate quiet of the studio to the grand chaos of the art world. A funny, engaging, personal guide through the world of art today, My Life as a Work of Art takes as its starting point the only really important thing: the work of art itself.

My Life as a Work of Art: The Art World from Start to Finish

TYLEVICH, Katya

Laurence King Publishing

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Books by Eastham, Ben