No comments about Modeling in Clay.

1 comments about COBALT AND LUSTRE: The First Centuries of Islamic Pottery (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, VOL IX).

1. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection contains some 2000 items of pottery, representing a millenium of ceramic production across the Islamic world. The catalogue of these holdings is to be published in two volumes. The first concentrates on the beauty of the work of the early Muslim potters, of which the Collection holds many attractive examples. The Collection is particularly rich in Saljuq lustrewares of the 12th and 13th centuries AD, and in the pottery of the Timurid period. Illustrations of all major types of early Islamic pottery are presented with brief introductory essays on each category, detailed discussions of individual objects, and a scholarly apparatus providing references to comparative pieces and to further reading.

3 comments about The Kama Sutra Box: The Rules of Love and Erotic Practice with Other.

1. I bought this for my fiance for V-Day. We've had a lot of fun reading it together. It isn't a kinky idea book...it is a bit deaper than that, but if you are close with your partner, it can bring you closer...and it's got some interesting things to learn too!



2. I bought this for my husband for Valentine's Day to try something different. I had heard about Kama Sutra from others, but didn't really know what to expect.
   The book isn't very long, but contains a lot of interesting ideas and basic Kama Sutra history. If you are really in tune with your partner and are open to new things and new ideas, it's a great book. If you're just looking for kinky new sexual position, it probably won't help you out much. Kama Sutra is a large percent based on ideas and mindsets.
   We have and continue to enjoy the book a lot.



3. Once again Manuela Dunn Mascetti strikes the right note - in this case an erotic note - just wonderful - unbeatable.

5 comments about Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.

1. If at times overly academic, Douglas Kahn's seminal work "Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts" should be required reading for any course related to sound and such audio-visual domains as film and television.
   
   In his book Kahn adresses the historical changes (or, development?) in noise abatement, looking at noise as a cultural, musiological and essentially political phenomenon (with an apparent inspiration from Jacques Attali). Accompanying the different types of noise abatement in Western modernity (as voiced e.g. by Arthur Schopenhauer), are also - as Kahn illustrates - different experiments into the use of noise, whether defined as a strictly musical or cultural phenomenon. In music we thus find such experimental composers as John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer (exploring different types of musique concrète), in film we find early auteurs as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov (through the use of natural sounds, asynchronism and different sonic counterpoints). Even in other - less obviously sonic - arts may we find otherwise elaborate experiments with sounds and noise(s). Take for example the vivid attempts at breaking the rigid rules of communication and narration through distinctly phonetical, verbo-literary experiments in the works of James Joyce and William Burroughs - or the creative disruption of the organic line in the paintings of say Gerhard Richter.
   
   Further examples could be found ad nauseum, and Douglas Kahn goes to great length in his interesting and well-documented explorations. Noise IS a part of the arts as much as our close environment, whether we register or hope to reject it.
   
   Kahn's pioneer-footsteps, thus, leave a vivid trail for others to follow, for in his book - if nothing else - he has shown how different sonic experiments (and, more specifically, different types of noise) are all around us. Instead of conservative strategies of silencing and abatement, we should listen!



2. The subject and content of this book is of great interest to me, and the book delivers quite well. The only fault I could find was in the use of a superfluously extensive vocabulary.

   I would compare it to listening to comedian Dennis Miller do stand up. It's often funny, but the guy is so knowledgeable as to leave me blank too often. It is so good, in fact, that I'm discouraged by what I perceive as something having a limited audience potential.

   Still, I give 5 stars without hesitation, since the book is a great read that got my creative juices flowing and brought me up-to-date regarding the history of art forms in which I am deeply involved.

   Setting aside the excessively rigorous verbiage, it is very well written. I highly recommend it.




3. The subject and content of this book is of great interest to me, and the book delivers quite well. The only fault I could find was in the use of a superfluously extensive vocabulary. I would compare it to listening to comedian Dennis Miller do stand up. It's often funny, but the guy is so knowledgeable as to leave me blank too often. It is such a good book that I'm discouraged by what I perceive as a limited audience potential.

   Still, I give 5 stars without hesitation, since the book is a great read that got my creative juices flowing and brought me up-to-date regarding the history of art forms in which I am deeply involved. Setting aside the excessively rigorous verbiage, it is very well written. I highly recommend it.




4. Kahn's text sprawls over 358 pages, and is filled with innovative insights into the auditory component of the 20th century avant-garde. I found the most brilliant section to be his critique of John Cage. Cage created music with the aim of "quieting the mind, to open it to divine influence." Kahn is the first to articulate what I have felt, that Cage, the zen anarchist, is just as manipulative with this goal as any tonal symphonic architect! As Kahn puts in,

   "...Cagean silence...has silenced other things, as it dwells at the problematic edge of audibility and attempts to hear the world of sound without hearing aspects of the world in a sound" (p. 4) Kahn turns on its head Cage's stated aim of "just letting sound be," speaking rather of "Cage's dominion of all sound and always sound," a project to turn all sound into music! (p. 197)

   Much of the rest of the book, the sections on "Water Flows and Flux" and "Meat Voices," is a wandering chronicle of various avant forms, and Kahn has fun with organic analogies. But it's a fascinating trip through little-known terrain, and Kahn is a fearless and creative guide!




5. This astonishing history of twentieth century art offers a deep and profound view of intermedia and multimedia through the aspect of sound. Kahn's narrative is beautifully written and well researched. He supports the text with a wealth of documentary sources that permit further research. This book is a seminal contribution to research in intermedia, multimedia, and media studies. KF

   Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 8, Aug 2001 ISSN 1473-3862.

1 comments about Strip Flips! A Series of Erotic Flipbooks (Lyle).

1. I am an avid flipbook collector but this tedious book was added to my trash can - not my collection. If nudes is what you are after, stick to the work of Eadweard Muybridge.

No comments about Working with Clay: An Introduction.

1 comments about The Sevres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847 (Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design & Culture).

1. I have been searching for at least a decade for a book on the Sevres production during the Napoleonic Years. This book is exactly what I was looking for and the essays and tremendous illustrations are what made this book worth the search!

4 comments about Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics from Function to Fantasy.

1. As a longtime sculptor and beginning potter, I feel I am light years ahead by owning this book. I will never tire of studying the work of the best of contemporary potters. Like all true art, they continue to unwind their rythmns, proportions, restraints and distortions bit by bit as I study those images. Thank you.



2. This book is beautiful. What a shame the show was only a temporary exhibition at the Newark Museum. It has a fabulous variety of work from artists around the globe. Buy it while you still can!



3. Great Pots: Contemporary Ceramics From Function To Fantasy by Ulysses Grant Dietz (Curator of Decorative Arts, The Newark Museum) is an eye-catching full-sized artbook showcasing studio ceramics ranging from the late 1930s down to the modern day. American, European, Asian, African, and Native American pots of all shapes and all colors, and ranging in design from elegant simplicity, to brilliant color, to intricate fine detail, are pictured on virtually every page by full-color photographs and accompanied by an extensive text commentary. Great Pots is very strongly recommended speciality artbook which would prove a seminal contribution to 20th Century Art History reference collections in general, and informative reading for either amateur or professional potters in particular.



4. This is the most beautiful book on studio ceramics ever produced! Not only that, it focuses on a collection that dates back two generations, but which most people have never seen published anywhere else. Of course the pictures and the design of this book make it worthy of any coffee table--but it's far more than that. The photographs are wonderful, but the texts (one long and one short essay) are both readable and informative. Perhaps the most "radical" aspect of this book is its point of view. There is no judgmental hierarchy about whether one potter's work is "more art" than another's. In fact, the author purports not to be talking about art at all. But it is all about art, in spite of those protests to the contrary. It shows how the traditionalist potters of the late 1930s worked their way into being modernists--and how they took their homage to Asia with them on that journey. The great radicals of the late 1950s--Voulkos, Autio, Price--are all given their due, but this break from tradtionalist potting is not seen as something inherently "better," nor is it portrayed as the be-all and end-all of studio ceramic history. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the great Japanese studio potters, and the great Native American studio potters, are given the same sort of respect and careful consideration as the European and American potters that most collectors today are familiar with.

   The book is broadly divided into three thematic sections: the Beautiful Pot, the Useful Pot, and the Wise Pot. Each of these is then subdivided, by means of an easily flowing narrative, into about a dozen smaller sections. It is a well-written and lucid account of how the humble pot came to be great art, in spite of the art world and all its prejudice.

   For anyone who likes pottery--even the plain old hand-made coffee mug from the local craft fair--this book will tell a great story about why people love to work with clay, and all the ways they come to express themselves with clay.

No comments about The Conservation of Glass and Ceramics: Research, Practice and Training.

No comments about Teresa Hubbard, Alexander Birchler: Wild Walls.