Showing results by publisher "Naxos AudioBooks" in History & Criticism

Postmodernism claims that "modernity", which grew from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution and Marxism, has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly "contemporary" culture, a virtual world of "hyperreality" containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace, and Fukuyama's proclaimed "end of history".

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of the human mind.