Nebraska Reading List

The following is a starter list of readings that might useful to the University of Nebraska MFA students. It is by no means complete. In addition, for those so inclined, I would suggest some introductory readings on Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, because they have had a significant impact on art and literature, also John Dewey's "Art as Experience," which I suggested in an earlier reading list. For those of you with a sense of humor, I recommend reading Semiotics. Also, take a look at some of the other reading list I have posted.

Nietzsche contra Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche
Art as the Communication of Feeling: from What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
The Definition of Beauty (from The Sense of Beauty) by George Santayana
The Dehumanization of Art by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
Truth and the Stereotype by Ernst Hans Gombrich
The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger
Abstract, Representational, and so forth by Clement Greenberg
Romantic Survival and Revival in the Twentieth Century by Robert Rosemblum
On the Vernacular of Beauty by Dave Hickey
Boring Art by Frances Colpitt
The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism by Craig Owens
Modernity: an incomplete project by Jürgen Habermas
A Lecture by George Steiner

Books for the Artist

Book suggestions are a frequent request. It would be useful—and probably more interesting—if these requests were included in the comments.

For now, a brief but useful list of books for the artist,

The Power of the Center by R. Arnheim
The Germans and Their Art: a troublesome relationship by H. Belting
Art as Experience by J. Dewey
The Epic of Gilgamesh

Anderson Ranch Reading List

I am enclosing a starter list of books on art and ideas that I consider useful to have read. Don’t look for a common point of view: it is not here: this list does not “add up.”

Art After Modernism by Brian Wallis
The Genius Decision by K. Ottmann
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
The Anti-Aesthetic by Hal Foster
Less than One by Joseph Brodsky
The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art by J. Young
Culture and Value by L. Wittgenstein
Selected Essays by John Berger
Painting as an Art by Richard Wollheim