Kunsttheorie

Violent Images

1. Bas Fontein

Kunst in Thrillers die mijn vader las

One of the remarkable things about my father (1948 – 2016) was that, as long as I knew him, he read several books a week, mainly thrillers. About half a year after his death, I started reading them and found derogatory descriptions of art.   Bas Fontein creates art that largely addresses the social position of both art and the artist. At the same time, through various roles and initiatives, he seeks to infiltrate art into society and everyday life. Bas Fontein (he/him, born in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, in 1978) graduated from the University of Arts in Utrecht (Fine Arts) and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (Language & Image). As a conceptual artist, he always uses a specific collection as a starting point for a new work. A collection of words, sentences, photos, books, light boxes, artworks, artists, etc. The outcome can vary from book (that he publishes under his own label BASBOEK) to audio tour, from performance to installation, from guided tour to library or museum. His work largely addresses the social position of both art and the artist. At the same time, through various roles and initiatives, he seeks to infiltrate art into society and everyday life.

1. Alva Noë

The Entanglement

"Winner of the Outstanding Monograph Prize, American Society for Aesthetics"

1. Oscar Wilde

A Poet Can Survive Everything But a Misprint

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement.Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

1. Albert Camus

Create Dangerously

Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

1. John Berger

Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His acclaimed works of both fiction and non-fiction include the seminal Ways of Seeing and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, to live in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.