A brief intellectual history of the idea of the art public.
 
The Art Public explores the history of efforts to imagine a collective, general audience for art in the world. Oskar Bätschmann explores both written and pictorial evidence of the development of the “art public” as an idea and disentangles connections between art production, audiences, and actual reception. Two aspects shape the narrative: the transformation of the audience from passive recipient to active agent as well as satirical jabs at audiences by the likes of Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Daumier. This sweeping account connects the ancient Greeks with Renaissance painters, modern writers, and contemporary movie stars in a deft survey of the ways we imagine art’s immediate impact on audiences and its afterlives in museums, galleries, and the world.
 

From monocles to pince-nez and goggle-eyes, a cultural and technological history of glasses in fact and fiction.
 
This book examines those who wore glasses through history, art, and literature, from the green emerald through which Emperor Nero watched gladiator fights to Benjamin Franklin’s homemade bifocals, and from Marilyn Monroe’s cat-eye glasses to the famed four-eyes of Emma Bovary and Harry Potter. Spectacles are objects that seem commonplace, but In the Blink of an Eye shows that because they fundamentally changed people’s lives, glasses were the wellspring of a quiet social, cultural, and economic revolution. Indeed, one can argue that modernity itself began with the paradigm shift that transformed poor eyesight from a severely limiting disease—treated with pomades and tinctures—into a minor impairment that can be remedied with mechanisms constructed from lenses and wire.