The Art-Architecture Complex

London and New York: Verso, 2011. Cloth, xiii, 302 pages, illustrations (chiefly colour); 22 cm. Near fine. Tight, clean copy. Tips mildly bumped. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. "Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. While architects such as Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron draw on art to reanimate design, architecture has inspired fundamental transformations in painting, sculpture and film, which are also explored here. The book includes an extensive conversation with Richard Serra. At the same time Foster points to a 'global style' of architecture, as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, that is analogous to the 'international style' of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies--a global style that, more than any art, conveys the look of modernity today, both its dreams and its delusions. In these ways Foster demonstrates that 'the art-architecture complex' is a key indicator of broader social and economic trajectories and in urgent need of analysis and debate. / Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A coeditor of October magazine and a number of books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic as well as the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, and Compulsive Beauty." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Image-building; Part I. Global styles: Pop civics; Crystal palaces; Light modernity; Part II. Architecture vis-a`-vis art: Neo-avant-garde gestures; Postmodernist machines; Minimalist museums; Part III. Mediums after minimalism: Sculpture remade; Film stripped bare; Painting unbound; Building contra image.. Hardcover. Very Good/Fine. 8vo. Collectible.