Author(s): Camille Paglia

Art + Design

Modern life is a sea of images. With so much visual data bombarding us--from personal devices to mass media--our brains must rapidly adapt to make sense of it all. Here to guide us is America's premier intellectual provocateur, Camille Paglia. In these pages, Paglia returns to the subject that made her famous, situating our current visual environment within the epic scope of all of art history. With trademark audacity, Paglia tours through more than two dozen seminal paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces, and digital art works that have transformed our world. Combining close analysis with historical context, she trains our eye to each image--from an Egyptian tomb to Jackson Pollock's abstract "Green Silver" to RenEe Cox's daring performance piece "Chillin' with Liberty." And in her stunning conclusion, she declares the avant-garde tradition dead and film director George Lucas the world's greatest living artist. Written with energy, erudition, and wit, "Glittering Images" will profoundly change the way we see.