Synopses & Reviews
Review
“Recommended for faculty and graduate students, Jean-Michel Rabatés Given, 1º Art 2º Crime is a study that aims to link avant-garde art to the aesthetics of murder in order to bridge the gap between modernism and mass culture, where the latter is often embodied by both popular best-selling novels and tabloid coverage of unsolved murder cases. ...Even when there are no obvious traces to be found in the work of art, the critic can always hallucinate them into being through the use of paranoia-criticism (p. 121).” —IASL online
Review
"...a profoundly insightful, witty book, which, with great panache focuses ‘on a number of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century artists who cross the bridges linking the history of the avant-garde and the esthetics of murder (5).” —Everyday Modernities
Synopsis
This exciting new study investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematized by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout, author Jean-Michel Rabat is concerned with two key questions: What is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? What has modern art to say about murder? Rabat compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp's fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the center of his final work, Etant Donns, and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. Steven Hodel's recent book has thrown new light on what was called the Black Dahlia murder by pointing to one of Duchamp's friends, Man Ray, who, according to Hodel, was the murderer's accomplice and inspirat