If they're not available from MU Library, we can get you the books or articles you need from another library! Visit the Interlibrary Loan information page to get started!.
A Short Guide to Writing about Art by
Are you writing about art? This best-selling text has guided tens of thousands of art students through the writing process. Students are shown how to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, and are prepared with the tools they need to present their ideas through effective writing.
Use the Catalog to search for books in the Monmouth University Library.
Many art books, particularly those with photographs and reproductions, are found in the Oversize section, located on the Library's main level. Most Main collection art books are located on the third floor.
Art books are great for browsing. Check the following areas in Oversize and Main.
N Visual arts
NA Architecture
NB Sculpture
NC Drawing. Design. Illustration
ND Painting
NE Print media
NK Decorative arts
NX Arts in general
TR Photography
TT Handicrafts, Arts and Crafts
Recommendations for books to be added to our collection are welcome. For information about the process, check out the form found here.
Please note: many art and photography books are oversize!! You'll see this information as part of the book's call number when you click its title and view the publication details. The oversize books are located on the main floor near the restrooms. If you need help, ask a librarian!
The Aesthetics of Power by
The Aesthetics of Power gathers together the key articles and essays by Carol Duncan, one of the pioneers of a new socio-political approach to art history and criticism, and one of the strongest feminist voices to emerge in the 1970s and '80s. These essays, many of which have become classics, explore a wide variety of subjects: images of mothers, fathers, and children in eighteenth century art and culture; the image of the female nude in the context of the modern museum; and the role of modern art criticism in today's art market. Other essays examine the contexts in which art is seen, taught, and made. Whatever her theme, Duncan treats art as a working part of a larger social reality and a pathway to understanding its deepest tensions, fears, and desires. A final section of this book is devoted to the life and collected critical writings of Cheryl Bernstein, a fictitious critic created by Duncan as parody, but who was taken as a real and eventually influential, critic.
Artworld Prestige by
Artworld Prestige examines the ways in which cultural arguments about value develop: the processes by which some practices, artists, and media in the artworld win and others lose. Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen argue that the concept of prestige, although uncomfortable and consistentlyoverlooked, is an essential model for understanding artworld values, as important as the more common models centered on economics or power. Prestige shapes the forms of attention art is given, as well as the processes by which some affects dominate art discourse and others fall away. But prestigedoes its work silently, and its principles are used unself-consciously. People effortlessly display the protocols of being an insider.A form of socially constructed agreement, prestige shapes what we see, and does so with great power. Prestige is inescapable, a version of Althusserian ideology or Foucauldian power that both constrains and enables. It is also flexible, defining the seriousness of artists as diverse as Dan Petermanand Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter and Takashi Murakami, Elizabeth Peyton and Joseph Kosuth, Howard Finster and Frank Gallo. Cultural argument about value in art is a matter of deference and conferral, performed through thousands of tiny acts of estimation that suggest one cultural form is lessrelevant, worthy of attention than another; acts that instinctively grant more attention to reviews in Artforum over Artnews; to the Tate Modern over the Hirshhorn; to anxiety over pleasure; to Duchamp over Matisse; to conceptual art over abstract painting, and abstract painting over figurepainting; to painting over ceramics, and video over painting.In order to argue candidly about cultural value, the artworld needs to understand the subtleties of prestige, of such things as what it means to be "serious." Not an expose but an explanation, Artworld Prestige offers such an understanding
Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture by
This edited volume examines the role of visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships from the late 1970s to today.
Full-text and online, these books can be accessed anywhere on campus or remotely, using your university username and password to log in.
The Monmouth University library has access to eBooks via our book catalog and several library databases.
To access eBooks through our catalog:
To access eBooks through our library databases:
Other options
Free eBooks are available on the web via Google Books and organizations like the HathiTrust Digital Library and Project Gutenberg. You may also access open textbooks - free, online learning materials with Creative Commons licenses - using various curated collections. Visit the Open Source Education Resources library research guide for details.
As an MU student, you are eligible for a library card through the Monmouth County Library, which offers eBook borrowing.
