But Is It Art?

• More responsive to the actual world of art today than are most books on aesthetics.
• Up-to-date and future-oriented: devotes a chapter to art on the web, video art, art museum CD-ROMs and various theorists of the new media and of postmodern art
• Packed with real-world art examples
• Discusses topical artists like Andres Serrano and Damien Hirst as well as more historical examples like Goya and Velazquez
• Includes discussion of some recent research by neuroscientists on how the brain is involved in our perceptions of art
• Illustrated with a wide range of salient images - important because many aesthetics books by philosophers actually have few or even no images
• The style is clear, lively, and humorous

Readership: The general public; art collectors and audiences; working artists and art teachers; students (in philosophy, the arts, art theory and aesthetics, communication, film studies, media studies, architecture, cultural studies, anthropology, women's and gender studies, literary theory, music theory and musicology)

Cynthia Freeland, University of Houston, Texas

Review(s) from previous edition

"So many of the questions that define us as a culture have been raised through and by the art of recent decades, that without coming to terms with our art, we can scarcely understand ourselves. Cynthia Freeland has written a very smart book, in which high philosophical intelligence is applied to difficult questions raised by real works of art. It immediately situates the reader where thought and action meet, and since the issues are inescapable, it should be required reading for everyone. 'I know of no work that moves so swiftly and with so sure a footing through the battle zones of art and society today.' - Arthur C. Danto, Columbia University, author of After the end of art

"This pocket potboiler provides some answers, a lot of questions and plenty of entertainment along the way" - TNT Magazine 25/03/2002

" this is a pacy and readable introduction to art history" - Independent on Sunday 10/03/2002

"admirable for its scope, compactness and exceptional clarity. Reader-friendly and thought-provoking" - The Independent, 23/02/2002

"a book of simplicity and clarity that may well come to rival John Berger's Ways of Seeing as a reader's digest of the rubric of theories that make up contemporary art criticism . . . This is a valuable book for anyone perplexed by the arcane theorising of contemporary art" - Sue Hubbard, The Independent 14/03/01

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List of Illustrations
1: Blood and Beauty
2: Paradigms and Purposes
3: Cultural Crossings
4: Money, Markets, Museums
5: Gender, Genius, and Guerrilla Girls
6: Cognition, Creation, Comprehension
7: Digitizing and Disseminating
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Index