Given, 10 Art, 20 Crime

Given, 10 Art, 20 Crime Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture - Critical Inventions

Paperback (01 Sep 2022)

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Publisher's Synopsis

Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp's fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, 'Étant donnés', and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder; Walter Benjamin's description of Eugene Atget's famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting 'the scene of the crime'; and Ralph Roff's 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective's outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe.

Book information

ISBN: 9781845191122
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Imprint: Liverpool University Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 809.933556
DEWEY edition: 22
Language: English
Number of pages: 228
Weight: 364g
Height: 228mm
Width: 153mm
Spine width: 14mm