New Books in Art
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art
Episodes
January 6, 2026 • 43 mins
Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.
Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind scien...
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Mount Rushmore is something of an American Rorschach test. Some look at the monument and see American patriotic ideals carved into a mountainside. Others see only the rank hypocrisy of American presidents blasted into an Indigenous sacred site. In A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore, writer and journalist Matthew Davis explores the complexities, moral grey areas, and fascinating history of this most ...
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January 1, 2026 • 57 mins
Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell.
But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence cha...
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Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection asks if it’s possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of secular artworks, this innovative volume turns its attention to the role of the artis...
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December 25, 2025 • 51 mins
What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Dr. Colin Williamson presents a vivid portrait of how developments in bi...
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The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open t...
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December 16, 2025 • 76 mins
How can habits of racialization be affected by art, in its reception and its creation? How can a carnal aesthetics help us understand Latinx life? What if we listen to photographs? How might they undo us? Can we be undone? In Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2025), Mariana Ortega focuses on photography using a hermeneutics of love and critical phenomenology to think about and with creative practices of primaril...
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Jana Byars meets one of her academic heroes when Ulinka Rublack joins her to talk about Dürer's Coats: Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition (Routledge, 2025). During the Renaissance, clothing became more and more elaborately decorated and expensive. It often emphasised the privilege of the male elite. Yet clothing could also subvert or reshape conventional cultural norms. This book draws on the case of Albrec...
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Centering collaborations and frictions around a Japanese town’s pottery industry, Crafting Rural Japan: Traditional Potters and Rural Creativity in Regional Revitalization (Routledge, 2024)n discusses the place of creative village policy in the revitalization of rural Japan, highlighting how rural Japan is moving from a state of regional extinction to regional rejuvenation.
Using the case study of Tamba Sasayama in Hyogo Prefectur...
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This important new work, Buddhist Landscapes: Art and Archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th Centuries (NUS Press, 2023) by Stephen Murphy, build on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys to reveal the Khorat Plateau as having a distinctive Buddhist culture, including new forms of art and architecture, and a characteristic aesthetic. By combining archaeological and art historical analysis with an historical ecology ...
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November 30, 2025 • 63 mins
In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through resp...
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November 29, 2025 • 83 mins
Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.
What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising ind...
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November 28, 2025 • 36 mins
Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Ve...
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November 24, 2025 • 58 mins
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impuls...
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November 23, 2025 • 42 mins
Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022)
edited by Ilan Kelman
Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and represent Antarctica, as presumed and as imagined, alongside what is experienced around the continent and by those watching from afar. These understanding...
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For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In this episode, we sit down with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area (U ...
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November 19, 2025 • 67 mins
An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the unfinished cinematic projects developed and abandoned by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein between 1927 and 1937. Centred on seven major film concepts, the book examines what it means for a work of art—particularly a film—to remain unfinished or unrealised, and how these projects fit within Eisenstein’s broader theoretical and practical ...
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November 15, 2025 • 62 mins
In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford UP, 2023), Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthe...
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November 9, 2025 • 46 mins
In Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capaci...
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November 7, 2025 • 59 mins
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs: historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses.
Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between this self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theor...
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