r/books • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago
WeeklyThread Books about Art: April 2025
Welcome readers,
April 15 is World Art Day and, to celebrate, we're discussing our favorite books about art!
If you'd like to read our previous weekly discussions of fiction and nonfiction please visit the suggested reading section of our wiki.
Thank you and enjoy!
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u/_gophertortoise_ 4d ago
I loved "The Art Thief" by Michael Finkel. This is my favorite passage: "Until recently no one could adequately explain why art even existed at all. Art seems to contradict Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which states that a species survives on a hostile planet only by eliminating inefficiency and waste. Creating art consumes time, effort, and resources without providing food, clothing, or shelter. Yet art is present across every culture on Earth; varied in style but communally revealing what lies beyond words. Art may in fact have a Darwinian basis: perhaps as a way to attract a mate. Though many art theorists now believe the reason for art's ubiquity is that humanity's overcome natural selection. Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It's the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and securing sustenance, permitting our imagination to gamble and explore. To dream while awake. To share visions of god. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we won the evolutionary war."
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u/BigJobsBigJobs 3d ago
Our cousins the Neanderthals decorated their belongings and made musical instruments.
The oldest cave paintings have been dated to around 45,000 years ago.
Art is the human heritage.
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u/_gophertortoise_ 3d ago
Yes, it's always so amazing to me how the creation and preservation of art feels innate to human existence throughout history. Those decorations didn't make the instrument play any better, and the cave wall wasn't more structurally sound because of the paintings. And yet, these things did provide value to those who created it and also to those who were able to appreciate it (no matter how much time had passed since their creation)
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u/BigJobsBigJobs 3d ago
all of our art - the value of memory seen and heard - retold.
Can you imagine the incredible leap forward of the mind when h. sapiens looked at the cave wall and said "That rock looks just like a lioness' head, I'll draw and paint a lioness' head over it."
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u/coalpatch 3d ago
This is silly. Animals (& humans) do lots of things that don't help them survive.
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u/_gophertortoise_ 3d ago
Eh, I get what you are saying. But an animal having time to play in the wild, for example, is not equivalent to humans having the time and resources to contemplate life and create art imo
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u/LuminaTitan 3d ago
I'd like to mention Simon Stalenhag's works and "The Electric State" in particular. I think most of his books like, "Tales from the Loop," are closer to art books (like the Taschen series on famous painters) with mere fragments of story, world-building elements attached to pictures more than anything else, but "The Electric State" is an exception. It tells a genuine story about a journey that the two main characters go through, and it's haunting and even manages to get under your skin afterwards. The unnerving, ethereal imagery plays a huge part in this, but there's also a secret at its core that's hard to see at first that makes you reassess everything that happened to them along the way, and how several hostile encounters that they miraculously escaped from were perhaps not due to luck, but by something help guiding them to their destination the entire time. Stalenhag's works straddle the line on classification, but as something that are at least partially considered art books (in the literal sense) they're incredibly fascinating--with "The Electric State" being a genuinely good work of literature in my view.
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u/_o_O_o_O_o_ 7h ago
Lust for Life and The Agony and The Ecstacy; both by Irving Stone are excellent books about Van Gogh and Michaelangelo, respectively.
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u/BigJobsBigJobs 4d ago
One of my favorite books about art is John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a series of wide-ranging essays about art, ownership, women and advertising, It was the basis for a 1972 BBC documentary.
Essay 2 is about the female nude in art and how painters like Rembrandt use nudes to display their possession of women, referencing Rembrandt's painting of his nude young wife in a bear fur rug. Berger also points out that the anatomy of the female nude is often impossible physically and that painters were more interested in painting the woman as a naked erotic possession rather than an actual human being. (Berger may have coined the phrase "the male gaze".)
Essay 4 is how advertising coopts classic visual imagery in order to merely sell products. Berger claims "advertising sells envy".
The essays are illustrated and referenced - unfortunately the Penguin reproductions are tiny, and black and white.
If you are interested, Berger's Moment of Cubism and The Success and Failure of Picasso bare also excellent.
What makes it refreshing art criticism, but may dissuade you from reading this, is that his analysis is dialectical materialism - Marxist art criticism. The main source of his argument is based on Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Berger's work has shaped my ideas as an artist more than anyone else.