
Written in Water
The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Graybill
About this listen
A deeply personal yet broadly relevant exploration of the ephemeral life of the classic in art, from the eighteenth century to our own day
Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.
Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt.
©2024 Rochelle Gurstein (P)2024 TantorRelated to this topic
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Revolusi
- Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
- By: David Van Reybrouck
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 22 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after WWII.
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Solid Historical Survey
- By DavidPrestonokwu on 06-05-24
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Our Enemies Will Vanish
- The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
- By: Yaroslav Trofimov
- Narrated by: David Furr
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia, one of the world’s great military powers, in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath.
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Love it or not, endure it, my beauty
- By John Thorne on 01-12-24
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Cue the Sun!
- The Invention of Reality TV
- By: Emily Nussbaum
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can’t we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
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Weak, semi-unconnected stories
- By KDN on 07-20-24
By: Emily Nussbaum
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The Invention of Good and Evil
- A World History of Morality
- By: Hanno Sauer
- Narrated by: Callum Coates
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.
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Was good until author got political
- By c0stab on 03-01-25
By: Hanno Sauer