Bøker av Helen Molesworth

An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth - the first book of her collected writings

Drawing on twenty years' unparalled experience handling precious stones and following their journey from mine to workshop, from trader to jeweller, auction room to owner, Helen Molesworth reveals the remarkable lives of the world's most legendary stones. From the Emerald Cheapside Hoard watch, fashioned from an exceptional stone mined in Columbia, brought to Europe by 17th century Spanish traders, and then lost for centuries until a London workman uncovered a buried treasure trove, to the Wittlesbach diamond, famously auctioned for a record-breaking $23.4 million, she tells stories of survival that have seen some treasures preserved for centuries, and shows how beliefs around their meaning and magic have persisted for millennia - retaining the same power today.Gemstones are stitched into the fabric of human history, their own stories revealing much about commerce, nation-building, conflict and culture through time. A sweeping exploration of nature's most dazzling jewels, from their first recorded history in ancient Egypt through to the auction houses of the modern day, Precious illuminates their enduring value, hidden meaning and timeless attraction.

Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographers

I remain fascinated by the tricky nature of Duchamp's readymades--objects transformed into art, but not quite. They always retain their original identity of function. This is why many people refer to Fountain in a casual way as "the urinal." For me this is an acknowledgement that the work is part art, part not-part object, part sculpture. In insist that we see the readymades produced in the 1960s as quite different from the readymades that were purchased by Duchamp in the teens. They are different objects, with different sets of rules. Hence they behave differently in the gallery and ultimately mean different things. I have also tried to keep Duchamp's readymades in dialogue with his lifelong interest in eros. These two strains of his thought have been kept separate--wrongly, I think--in the American reception of Duchamp. I am trying to map a genealogy of postwar sculpture that challenges the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist sequence maintained in most accounts of the period. The exhibition begins in the 1950s and comes up to the present. Also, it has become increasingly difficult to narrate postwar art as predominantly or exclusively American. Artists have been engaging in an enormous transatlantic dialogue. No, not at all. It is precisely the constellation of figures like Burri, Duchamp, and Bourgeois, and then Duchamp and Hesse and Johns, and then Duchamp and Kusama and Gober, and then Duchamp and McElheney and Orozco, that makes the exhibition so potentially interesting. I asked writers who were working on the artists in the show and have won my admiration for the sensitivity of their writing and the unconventional nature of their thought. I then allowed them to write what they pleased.The outcome is a book to be considered as another site where the counter-genealogy is being built and argued for.

During the 1960s, artists such as Alan Kaprow, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol stopped making "art", they staged performances that mixed everyday life with theatre and challenged the system of marketing, display and aesthetic discourses. This work brings together a cross- section of such endeavours.