Books by James Elkins

In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for the changes in writing about art, from passionate to academic.

Elkins's intimate history of art demonstrates persuasively that there can never be one story of art. The story of art is the story of different cultures, and our own different experiences of art - perspectives that art history usually ignores.

Examines the curious endeavor to teach the unteachable that is generally known as college-level art instruction. This book traces the development (or invention) of the modern art school and considers how issues such as the question of core curriculum and the intellectual isolation of art schools affect the teaching and learning of art.

In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects-painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking-to the vast array of "nonart"...

Perspective has been a divided subject, orphaned among various disciplines from philosophy to gardening. In the first book to bring together recent thinking on perspective from such fields as art history, literary theory, aesthetics, psychology, and the history of mathematics, James Elkins leads us to a new understanding of how we talk about...