The Life and Death of Images
"The Life and Death of Images is a well-conceived intervention in one of the principal impasses in contemporary theories of the image: the question, broadly put, of what comes after the opposition of the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. For almost three decades now, that question has been surfacing in various forms-as institutional critique, as relational aesthetics, as a return to beauty-but almost no interesting work has been done on the underlying issues. Costello and Willsdon conceive the problem in terms of aesthetics and ethics, and they enlist a number of the foremost writers in and around images in a series of exchanges. The format is innovative, and generates the kind of real interdisciplinary friction that is so often missing from ordinary edited volumes. The book's insights and hopes are an accurate reflection of the state of conceptualization of the image."—James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago