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Landscape After Ruskin

Redefining the Sublime
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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Landscape After Ruskin examines the evolving relationship between art and nature in the face of industrial advancement and environmental crisis. Inspired by John Ruskin's Victorian ideal of "truth to nature," the book showcases contemporary artists who reveal new dimensions of beauty and terror in the natural world altered by human hands. Featuring over fifty striking artworks and essays from diverse experts, it explores sites ranging from industrial parks to urban bombsites, revealing a modern sublime that mixes joy with dread.
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Format: Hardback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for readers interested in art, environmental studies, and contemporary cultural critiques, as well as those fascinated by the intersection of nature and human impact through a creative lens.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

John Ruskin was an influential English art critic and social thinker of the Victorian era, who famously argued that the principal concern of the artist is "truth to nature." For Ruskin, this truth entailed more than merely adept technical representation: artists should, in fact, depict the natural world as mankind experiences it, with all the sensations of both beauty and terror it elicits.

Today, in a world overwhelmed by industrial development and environmental uncertainty, contemporary artists are discovering new beauties and terrors associated with nature, invoking a sense of the sublime that is uniquely modern. Landscape After Ruskin explores how a joyful experience of nature is now mixed with a particular dread, as the earth and its atmosphere are increasingly touched by human activity.

This striking volume probes the contemporary sites of the new sublime—from a steel factory couched in a nature park to the aerial view of a bombed city, and from mutating chromosomes to construction sites in suburbia—through essays by artists, photographers, and art historians, as well as experts in environmental studies and philosophy. Featuring more than fifty awe-inspiring artworks, Landscape After Ruskin offers compelling—and chilling—insight into the truth of the natural world today.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

"The works here speak to our complex, conflicted relationship with the natural world. They are grim, absurd, darkly beautiful, humorous, and poignant by turns. [...] Yet this stimulating show ultimately evokes hope rather than despair," praised Nineteenth Century Prose. Hyperallergic noted, "The show's gift is the ray of hope that comes from seeing in each work a glimmer of beauty and a touch of human creativity that could offer a way out of this mess."

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9783777429892

Publisher: Hirmer Verlag

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 10 May 2018

Country: Germany

Imprint: Hirmer Verlag

Illustration: Illustrated in colour throughout

Contributors:

  • Edited by Hall Art Foundation

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 255.0mm

Height: 278.0mm

Weight: 1140g

Pages: 160

Collections

Arts & Culture Non-Fiction

About the Author

Joel Sternfeld is a renowned and influential artist and photographer who lives and works in New York City. He has won two Guggenheim fellowships.

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