| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Darian Leader is one of the finest popular writers using the psychoanalytical insights of Freud and Lacan to understand the contemporary state of love, life and letters, and in Stealing the Mona Lisa he turns his attentions to art. The book is not really about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. For Leader, the story of the theft provides a leitmotif for his elegant discussion of why we find art so seductive, but ultimately as so frustrating and perhaps disappointing. Leader begins by asking if "the story of the 'Mona Lisa's' disappearance can tell us something about art and why we look at it". He is fascinated by the fact that the painting's absence drew crowds, and asks, "might this give us a clue as to why we look at visual art? Are we looking for something that we have lost?".
This is an elegant and witty book that uses the insights of Freud and primarily Lacan to offer a range of amusing but often striking accounts of why we look at art, the importance of the gaze and the look, the significance of emptiness and incompleteness in art, and why artists create what appear to many to be incomprehensible works of art. Erudite and wide-ranging, Leader moves from a comparison of Leonardo's painted smile to a symbolic penis, to the artist Yinka Shonibare's observation that painting "was a way of staying out of hospital", which leads Leader to conclude that "the only people who don't sublimate are artists". Stealing the Mona Lisa doesn't always convince, but Leader's ability to explain complex theoretical ideas without oversimplification makes this a fascinating psychoanalytical version of John Berger's classic Ways of Seeing. For Leader, the point is to understand what art stops us seeing.--Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Independent, 19 March 2002
He has read widely and looked widely, and packs a lot into a short book. . . (Its) packed with interesting stories and questions.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
First Sentence
On the morning of 21 August 1911, a slight, white-smocked man slipped out of one of the side entrances of the Louvre, and soon vanished into the crowds on the rue de Rivoli. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
On the morning of 21 August 1911, a slight, white-smocked man slipped out of one of the side entrances of the Louvre, and soon vanished into the crowds on the rue de Rivoli. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Leader's writing is supported by a wide breadth of knowledge and his style skips along delightfully. Initially I feared it was a fairly cosmetic treatment of the subject with only superficial recourse to psychoanalysis, but without ever badly losing an only lightly informed reader it came to some complex conclusions. Not the book to read to find out much you didn't about Freud, Lacan et al, but rather if you'd like to believe psycholanalysis might be applicable to everyday life, and that there might be something in the whole art lark beyond over-inflated prices and egos.
3 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In the beginning, I thought it sounded like an interesting book but it turned out to be farfetched. Why do psychoanalysts have to complicate things so much? Although there are some very interesting points concerning art, the book itself was disappointing.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Unique and well written
7 Mar 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Here's a fascinating meditation on art, desire, value, and beauty as seen from the lens of the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The author, who is most obviously incredibly smart, uses a casual yet colorful voice that never reeks of self-importance or self-consciousness. So many great observations, this is a book I'll dip into again and again.
The only complaint I have is that I wish it had been broken up into chapters, rather than one long narrative.
The only complaint I have is that I wish it had been broken up into chapters, rather than one long narrative.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A rare treat
26 Nov 2007
Format:Paperback
this book is great and I would recommend it to anyone. Its really rare to find a book written on art that manages to be fun and well written, this is both. Amazingly I couldnt put this book down, a total breath of fresh air, thank you Darian Leader!
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
