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- Good for serious fans of tattoo
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Skin Shows III: The Art of Tattoo
Chris Wroblewski
Manufacturer: Virgin Publishing
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Skin Shows: The Art of Tattoo
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philosophy hope in a jar daily moisturizer
ASIN: 0863696775 |
Customer Reviews:
Good for serious fans of tattoo.......2000-05-02
This is a wonderful book for anyone who appreciates the art of tattoo. The subject matter is much more varied & interesting than that found in newsstand tattoo magazines.
There are 128 pages of high quality photos on heavy stock. These include many close-ups of beautifully & intricately tattooed people. Also, many tattoo artists from around the world are shown working.
One of the most interesting features of the book is several pages of old clippings and cartoons. There are some fascinating and bizarre stories here. Otherwise, there is no text. Sources & tattoo artists are listed in the back.
The book does contain some nudity, but it is not overwhelming. The emphasis is on the art. The variety here makes it exciting to turn each page.
Customer Reviews:
Fell apart the first time we read it.......2007-04-02
The photos are brilliant but the book is so poorly bound that it fell apart the moment we opened it. The book should have been a hard cover. It was cheaply produced. A real let down.
If you are considering for public library purchase.......2006-08-17
This book has full frontal nudity. The binding is terrible. The whole book fell apart after a dozen circs. It does have lots of color photos in it.
cei
* For the illiterate enthusiast *.......2006-01-05
This book is good for the tattoo enthusiast that knows NOTHING about tattoos.It shows you a glimpse into tattoo art around the world,and also gives you a bit about the history and reasoning behind them. Bottom line,if you want a great tattoo picture boo,this is NOT the book. If you know hardly anything about tattoos and want to learn more,this book is NOT for you. If you want to learn a bit more about the culture behind the art,and know little to nothing about it at this point,this book will as they say be your "bible".
Amazon.com
Once revered as semidivine beings and collaborators in the hard work of transporting goods and materials, Thailand's elephants have fallen on hard times. With the destruction of their forested habitats, a consequent nationwide ban on hardwood logging, and the decline of traditional agriculture in the rapidly urbanizing country, their numbers have declined from tens of thousands just a decade ago to only a few thousand today. Many of the surviving elephants have been put to work in traveling circuses or used for black-market labor, subject to overwork and all manner of abuse.
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian expatriates who have been working together for more than 30 years, have a knack, writes art curator Mia Fineman, for "transforming the solemn rituals of high art into high comedy." It was with the utmost seriousness, however, that the two, on reading of the elephants' plight, traveled to Thailand and established the Thai Elephant Art School, through whose offices elephants create pop-art masterpieces with palette, brush, and trunk. (Elephants, it seems, have a well-known gift for the visual arts and, in the Thai case, adore the work of Vasily Kandinsky.) Sold to collectors on the world market, pachyderm-painted pieces generated $75,000 at a single early auction, the proceeds of which were used to establish and maintain sanctuaries throughout Thailand.
Illustrated with elephantine artwork and more than 100 photographs documenting Komar and Melamid's project, this book makes a wonderfully offbeat gift, and one of a very good cause. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
For centuries elephants in Thailand have been revered as a nationalsymbol, worshiped as living gods and employed as beasts of burden in the nation's thriving timber industry. But when logging was banned in Thailand in 1990, these noble animals fell on hard times. Reduced to performing tricks for tourists by day and illegal heavy labor by night, Thailand's elephants were exhausted, malnourished, and dying in alarming numbers.
Hearing of their plight, a pair of unlikely heroes came to the rescue, Wildly eccentric Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid devised a brilliant scheme: to create the world's first quadruped occupational retraining program-a network of art schools for unemployed elephants. Taking a cue from elephant trainers in a number of American zoos, Komar and Melamid taught the animals to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. And the results were astonishing: Not only did the elephants' paintings closely resemble the expansive gestural work of such Abstract Expressionist artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, but the pachyderm painters also began to develop clearly distinct regional styles-lyrical and expressive in the northern Thai school, subtle and atmospheric in the east, dynamic and angst ridden in the central school.
Sanctioned by the World Wildlife Fund, the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project has been a remarkable success; paintings by some of the most talented elephant artists have been auctioned at Christie's for thousands of dollars, generating funds to provide proper care for the elephants and support for their trainers.
When Elephants Paint follows Komar and Melamid and their eclectic entourage through Thailand's lush jungles and steaming cities, describing the odd encounters and creative cajoling that helped turn this seemingly whimsical idea into a concrete, beneficial reality. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs, including actual elephant paintings, this riotously funny and provocative book offers a valuable lesson in wildlife conservation and startling revelations about the nature of art itself.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting and Beautiful.......2006-03-28
This book has many pictures and covers the material well. My only disappointment was that it was written to appeal to a slightly younger audience than I had hoped. However, I do not regret my purchase. I would highly recommend this book.
Beautiful Book.......2006-02-19
This lovely book is important proof of the highly evolved state of consciousness in elephants -- mental and emotional. It has wonderful photos of actual paintings by elephants, and is written in an amusing and witty style. It is an inspiring read for anyone interested in animals, but I think also helps cross the gap between those who already attuned to animals and those who need to have their eyes opened to what animals are really like.
Dissapointing.......2001-03-03
Beautiful photography and interesting text, but I was interested in the actual art as painted by the elephants, but there is very little of that. Mostly pictures of jungles. If you like that you will like the book. If you want to see the acutual artwork you will be very dissapointed.
Average customer rating:
- A Laugh, a Guide and a Result to be proud of...
- Fascinating Look into Tastes in Art
- Wonderful
- The Art of Statistical Culture
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Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Paint by Number
ASIN: 0520218612 |
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Since the days of the ancient Greek philosophers, people have asked the eternal question "What is beauty?" It took the insight of Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid to apply modern scientific principles to this problem and finally to produce an answer. Using polls conducted by telephone in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Komar and Melamid were able to determine what each country wanted to see in a painting, and what was least likely to please the public. They then produced canvases based on their polling, creating the most and least wanted paintings in the world. The results are not only funny, they are also oddly disturbing. Almost every nation had the same preferences: people wanted landscapes, and did not want abstract art. Only one nation bucked the trend, but you'll have to read the book to find out which. Painting by Numbers has more insight into art and commerce than any 10 dry studies of aesthetics, and is one of the most significant documents on popular taste ever produced--plus it's a laugh riot. And that, Plato, is beauty.
Book Description
What is art? Who defines it? And why is high art so remote from most people? With the same puckish humor and critical genius that made them the bêtes noires of Soviet cultural commissars, the Russian émigré art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid takes on not only the billion-dollar American art industry but also capitalism's most venerated tool: the market research poll. With the help of The Nation Institute and a professional polling team, they discovered that what Americans want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains--a tranquil, realistic, blue landscape.
Painting by Numbers includes the original questionnaire and reproductions of the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" paintings the artists made based on American survey results and on polls they commissioned in ten other countries--including Russia, China, France, and Kenya--representing almost one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as an interview with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodificaion of just about everything.
Customer Reviews:
A Laugh, a Guide and a Result to be proud of..........2007-02-24
After 10 years, I bought the book. I visited the exhibition of the paintings in Rotterdam (Netherlands) back in '97 and was pleasantly shocked by this project and the results. The book was out of stock then, but the surprising results kept haunting my head for a decade. Now I finally have the book and it still makes me laugh.
Although the whole project has an entertaining dosis of irony, it can be a guide in understanding art and demographics - oh well, it can even help you design for the masses !
Lastly, I think every Dutch designer should buy this book or maybe it should be governmentally issued to every Dutch citizen. Why ? Just look at the very last pages of the book. I understood that the "Holland" results came in too late to be submitted to the edited content of the book. But fortunately Komar and Melamid decided that this outcome deserved a very special place, like a well kept secret that defies the other 200 pages...
I'm proud to be Dutch !
Fascinating Look into Tastes in Art.......2002-01-10
This book will get anyone thinking about what qualifies as "art". Have you ever gone to a modern art museum or picked up a modern art magazine and wondered "how can anyone call that art?" Well this book will get you thinking about questions like that. Using scientific polling methods 2 Russian immigrants canvased the U.S. to find out what the average American considers art.
The results are exactly the kind of works most working modern artists or their patrons would be dismayed over. Get this book. It is a fascinating and entertaining read. One interesting note from the book - the editor of The Nation said that when they published the results of this poll it drew an avalanche of reader mail. It generated the largest reader response of anything they'd published in the history of that magazine to date. Several newspapers interviewed owners of prominant NYC art galleries as well as some prominant artists. All of them were horified by the results of this poll. One commentator sniffed the poll just proves Americans are boors when it comes to art - prefering only the safest, most banal subjects. What is interesting is that the book shows the results of this poll were duplicated in many other countries around the globe. Countries as diverse as Kenya and Iceland showed their own polls duplicated the preferences of the average American - i.e. a liking for landscapes with peaceful blue skies.
The book reproduces in full the entire questionaire used by the polling company along with an interview with Momar and Kelamid. The two Russians also gained notoriety by creating pictures of each countries most-preferred and least-preferred paintings. Each painting had the canvas divied up to match the percentages shown in the poll that respondents wanted (or didn't want in the case of the 'Least Preferred' paintings). Thus if the poll showed 65% preferred landscapes with a blue sky then 65% of the painting surface had a blue sky.
Interviews as well as commentary on the nature of art and what this might mean also fill the book. There is even a chapter by one of my favorite modern-day philosophers - Arthur C. Danto (I have several of his books). He asks the question "Can It Be The 'Most Wanted Painting' Even if Nobody Wants It?"
The results in this book lead to many questions. Not the least of these is 'what is art?' and 'what does this say about human nature?'. One article from the Jan/Feb 2002 issue of American Spectator illustrates this problem very well. It seems a few months ago a very famous photographer was holding a one-man exhibit at a London gallery. He is quite famous for the nauseating and offensive subject matter of his work. That night he gathered together the cigarrette butts, empty paper cups, and other assorted trash from the opening-night party and "artfully" arranged it in a pile in a corner and took a picture of it. The pile was promptly announced by a London art-critic to be worth at least 5K (in pounds). Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the janitor that night that the pile was art, not trash. So you can guess the ending of this story.
I recount this to make a point. That is, this book will shed some light on why so many people have trouble - even the U.S. Supreme Court - on saying exactly what Art is. Get this book. It is fun and fascinating look into not only the tastes in art around the world but also a window into the science of polls and polling.
Wonderful.......2000-11-27
This is one of the coolest art books I've seen, Komar and Melamid are geniuses! The whole idea art designed to please isn't that new but the idea using polls and statistics is. By using a random survey from several countries ( THe USA France China Kenya Russia Ukraine ect) they create each countries most and least wanted painting and take you through a wonderful romp discussing what art and expression and stuff are really all about. I gave this sucker out as X-mas presents! I can't reccommend it highly enough. Buy everything by Komar and Melamid...even their souls.... they did a thing in Moscow where they auctioned off their souls.
If you ever get a chance to see their 'Nostalgia' series of paintings, it's a hoot. Sort of satires of Soviet/Stalinist paintings, very good. THey also did a series of NYC as ruins in the jungle....
The Art of Statistical Culture.......2000-07-11
It's hard to express how fantastic this book really is in a review. Komar and Melamid's paintings, which threatened, for a time, to turn the art world on its ear, are supreme farces on what statistics can tell us. Obviously the principle is consiously flawed. The artist's interpretation of the statistical data is largely abstracted, but the paintings themselves are superb and outragiously funny takes on national culture. The question of the book is "What do people want in their art?" It isn't likely that you'll find a more interesting, fascinating, and entertaining answer than "Painting by Numbers."
Average customer rating:
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Tracing Cultures: Albert Chong, Lewis Desoto, I.T.O., Young Kim, Komar & Melamid, Dinh Q. Lee, Gavin Lee, Maria Martinez-Canas, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Carrie Mae Weems (Points of Entry)
Albert Chong ,
Calif.) Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego ,
Rebecca Solnit ,
Michael Read , and
Steven Jenkins
Manufacturer: Friends of Photography Bookstore
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0933286694 |
Book Description
Photographic images by artists of diverse cultural backgrounds further the understanding of contemporary immigration and the changing face of America in Tracing Cultures.
Themes central to the emerging definitions of multiculturalism are explored by recent photography and photo-related installation art that deals with issues of origin, acculturation, adjustment, displacement, and loss within the context of contemporary American life. Participating artists acknowledge that the melting pot ideal no longer suffices to describe their personal experience of cultural dislocation. Their art directly addresses the history and politics of American immigration in a country now obsessed with and, often fearful of, the notion of multiculturalism.
Artists represented include Albert Chong, Lewis deSoto, Shigeki Ito, Young Kim, Komar and Melamid, Dinh Q. Le, Gavin Lee, María Martnez-Cañas, Ruben Ortíz-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kim Yasuda.
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Komar and Melamid
Carter Ratcliff
Manufacturer: Abbeville Press
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Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art
ASIN: 0896598918 |
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- Soviet art, more the Brothers than Karl
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Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Period
Oksana Bulgakova ,
Katya Djogot ,
Boris Groys ,
Hans Gunther ,
Alexander Morosov ,
Erik Bulatov ,
Vitali Komar ,
Alexander Melamid ,
Damien Hirst ,
Ilya Kabakov , and
Kazimir Malevich
Manufacturer: Hatje Cantz Publishers
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ASIN: 377571328X
Release Date: 2003-12-02 |
Book Description
The all-encompassing mass culture of today is not an invention of the late 20th century. Contrary to what might be assumed, given the capitalist under- and over-tones of contemporary mass media, our visual culture has its roots in the totalitarian regimes of the 20s and 30s. Back then, the main venue for visual communication was the reproduction and circulation of pictures via posters and films. Fascism and communism made radical use of these new opportunities for the consistent transformation of culture, even to the point of co-opting such traditional media as painting and sculpture. The centrally organized Soviet mass culture of the Stalin period is one of the foremost example of these highly effective propaganda machines. Beginning with the late realist works of Kasimir Malevich, Dream Factory Communism presents the macrocosm of Soviet art in the Stalin era--still little known in the West--as a unified aesthetic phenomenon that transcended individual media. The later works of Soz-Art, a style in which characteristics of socialist realism are combined with Pop Art, provides a running visual commentary and a critical take on the aesthetics of totalitarianism. The inclusion of works by contemporary Russian artists such as Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov and Komar & Melamid marks the chasm that separates today's artists both aesthetically and politically from their predecessors.
Customer Reviews:
Soviet art, more the Brothers than Karl.......2004-03-12
Boris Groys, one of the editors of this comprehensive survey of Soviet art sets the scene in his essay Utopian Mass Culture by writing 'The most intriguing aspect of Socialist Realism is precisely that no one liked it when it was being produced. This art satisfied no existing tastes, fulfilled no existing social demands. It was produced in the relatively firm conviction that people would come to like it when they became better people, less decadent and less corrupted by bourgeois values than they were at present'. Well, as we all know now, such fanciful notions eventually ended up in the wheelie bin of history
The book examines the presentation of the visual arts in the Soviet Union in ten essays but the writing is very academic, not helped I thought, because the English text has been translated from German. These essays (and artists biographies, chronology and bibliography) form the bulk of the book rather than color reproductions that I would have expected, there are only eighty-four of these in the main display section. The poster section though does have a wonderful showing of thirty-eight examples, fortunately not dominated by Lissitsky or Rodchenko, they only get one each.
Boris Groys is right to say that no one really liked this art, the paintings seem uniformly dull and uninspiring and I suppose this was only to be expected when the output of art was almost exclusively controlled by the Union of Soviet Artists. They decided who was in favor or out and I expect they would have been shocked to see the ironic visual language used in the paintings of Komar and Melamid, the leaders of the Sots Art movement in the sixties and seventies.
This will probably be the standard reference book explaining Soviet art, despite the small number of works shown (and why no index?) and is completely different to a similar book on communist creativity, 'Chinese Propaganda Posters' (ISBN 3822826197) by Michael Wolf. A huge coffee-table book of three hundred colorful posters portraying the bright future for the folks in Mao's China.
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Komar & Melamid
Carter Ratcliff
Manufacturer: ABBEVILLE PRESS PUBLISHERS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000R0LOU8 |
Product Description
Catalogue of art exhibit.
Book Description
The state of the Soviet artist, summed up by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle—“a
great writer is, so to speak, a second government of his country”—is exemplified by the two dissident artists’ parodies of state art collected here for the first time.
The fate of Vitali Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who only recently were allowed to immigrate to Israel, is well known to art critics and historians, if only from the extensive reviews of the shows of their paintings at the Feldman Gallery in New York in 1976 and 1977.
An in-depth discussion of the paintings and of the background of Soviet dissident art is provided by Jack Burnham, chairman of the Department of Art at Northwestern University, in his scholarly Introduction, “Paradox and Politics: The Art of Komar and Melamid.”
For the uninitiated, the Komar-Melamid paintings (their work is a collaborative effort) no doubt will be a surprise and a delight: it is at once sprightly, intricate, and mystical. Called “Sots” art (for Socialist art), it is a kind of Pop that parodies the propaganda posters and street banners designed for public consumption by Russian officialdom. The Sots subjects from the first show include the stern head of a worker holding his finger to his lips and entitled “Don’t Babble,” several banners with such slogans as “Glory to Labor” and “Our Goal Communism,” and a painting of a “Laika” cigarette pack using as its emblem the Soviet dog sent into orbit with “Sputnik II” in 1957.
But Pop is only a part of these versatile artists’ repertory. From the second show, especially noteworthy are “Factory for the Production of Blue Smoke,” an Arcadian scene with mystical as well as social significance; the complex “TransState,” the artists’ creation of a unique form of internationalism open to any person in the world dissatisfied with his own country; and the magical “Farewell to Russia.”
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Monumental Propaganda
Komar & Melamid
Manufacturer: Independent Curators International, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0916365425
Release Date: 1995-02-02 |
Book Description
Edited by Dore Ashton. Instigated by Komar & Melamid- projects to salvage Russia's remaining monuments to totalitarianism. Mixing levity and seriousness presented here are 26 proposals by among others Arman, Ericson & Ziegler,Joseph Kosuth, lesLevine, Ch
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