"From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years. What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book-against a background of today's "sculpture wars"-Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than...

"Winner of the 1998 Eugene M. Kayden National University Press Book Prize, University of Colorado at Boulder" Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) was the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. His books include What Art Is, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Embodied Meanings, Beyond the Brillo Box, and Encounter and Reflections, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism....

""What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts...