Colleges and universities used to teach art history to encourage connoisseurship and acquaint students with the riches of our artistic heritage. But now, as Roger Kimball reveals in this witty and provocative book, the student is less likely to learn about the aesthetics of masterworks than to be told, for instance, that Peter Paul Rubens' great painting Drunken Silenus is an allegory about anal rape. Or that Courbet's famous hunting pictures are...

Decades before he blew the lid off the high-stakes art world by shredding a work immediately following its purchase at an auction, Banksy was committing acts of artistic protest on the streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. We still don't know who Banksy is, but thanks to this book we have a greater sense of how he works. This book features approximately eighty works from the start of his street art career to today, most photographed...

In November 2001, Chris Marker became intrigued by the sudden appearance of grinning yellow cat paintings on Paris buildings and began to document them , as well as other incidents and protests in the city of Paris while he filmed. The creator is eventually revealed to be an art collective known as Mr. Chat.

Today political protest often takes the form of spontaneous, noninstitutional, mass action. Mass protests during the Arab Spring showed that established systems of power - in that case, the reciprocal support among Arab dictators and Western democracies - can be interrupted, at least for a short moment in history. These new activist movements often use online media to spread their message. Mass demonstrations from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Taksim...

The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy's many city-states. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations of the age. While the assailants were the Medici's rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack. Five centuries later, Marcello Simonetta,...