"On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries"--

Farah Nayeri addresses the difficult questions plaguing the art world, from the bad habits of Old Masters, to the current grappling with identity politics. For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon-kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns....

It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism's dysfunction. In these incisive essays, art critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"--a culture whose forms...

"This volume, with supplements and adaptations, derives from the CD-rom Bellezza, storia di un'idea dell'occident, edited by Umberto Eco, produced by Motta On Line in 2002"--T.p. verso.

"How can art help us make sense--or nonsense--of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery...

Stephen Titus George finds the campus of Cornell University a site for talking cats and dogs, fairies cavorting, an emerald-green dragon, and the too-shallow grave of Rasferret the Grub.

Through a carefully curated selection of quotations, images and interviews, the book reveals what matters most to the masters. With text by the author, readers will discover how the giants of the genre developed their distinctive visual styles and the core ideas that underpin their practice. -- adapted from back cover.