Category: Graphic Arts

Art of Atari by Tim Lapetino

Post author By Art Ride
Post date February 27, 2018

Anybody grew up with Atari? Many of us did and feel nostalgic about the early days of video game arcades and fondly remember Atari, an icon in its class and a cultural phenomenon. For our readers, this month we bring a fabulous collection of Atari art. Read on….

Atari is one of the most recognized names in the world. Since its formation in 1972, the company pioneered hundreds of iconic titles including Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command. In addition to hundreds of games created for arcades, home video systems, and computers, original artwork was specially commissioned to enhance the Atari experience, further enticing children and adults to embrace and enjoy the new era of electronic entertainment. The Art of Atari is the first official collection of such artwork. Sourced from private collections worldwide, this book spans over 40 years of the company’s unique illustrations used in packaging, advertisements, catalogs, and more. Written by Tim Lapetino, The Art of Atari includes behind-the-scenes details on how dozens of games featured within were conceived of, illustrated, approved (or rejected), and brought to life! Includes a special Foreword by New York Times bestseller Ernest Cline, author of Armada and Ready Player One. Whether you’re a fan, collector, enthusiast, or new to the world of Atari, this book offers the most complete collection of Atari artwork ever produced!
From the book description

Nostalgia was never this good! Video game buffs and cultural historians alike will totally enjoy this cool collection. This book is not widely available, so please make sure you plan ahead if you want to buy it.

Art Record Covers by Francesco Spampinato

Post author By Art Ride
Post date April 26, 2017

For music lovers, we bring you yet another treat! A magnificent collection of record covers put together by the legendary artist Francesco Spampinato. Francesco Spampinato is a contemporary art and visual culture historian, writer, and artist. He teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and has taught at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, and NABA, Milan. His writing has appeared in Apartamento, DAMn°, Flash Art, Kaleidoscope, L’Uomo Vogue, and Waxpoetics among others. He lives and works in New York.

Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance.
In Francesco Spampinato’s unique anthology of artists’ record covers, we discover the rhythm of this particular cultural history. The book presents 500 covers and records by visual artists from the 1950s through to today, exploring how modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, postmodernism, and various forms of contemporary art practice have all informed this collateral field of visual production and supported the mass distribution of music with defining imagery that swiftly and suggestively evokes an aural encounter.
Along the way, we find Jean-Michel Basquiat’s urban hieroglyphs for his own Tartown record label, Banksy’s stenciled graffiti for Blur, Damien Hirst’s symbolic skull for the Hours, and a skewered Salvador Dalí butterfly on Jackie Gleason’s Lonesome Echo. There are insightful analyses and fact sheets alongside the covers listing the artist, performer, album name, label, year of release, and information on the original artwork. Interviews with Tauba Auerbach, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Christian Marclay, Albert Oehlen, and Raymond Pettibon add personal accounts on the collaborative relationship between artists and musicians.
From the book description

Hope the readers will not only enjoy this fabulous collection, but may also consider it as a soulful gift for the music lovers in their lives. Available at select stores. Call ahead to check availability at your local bookstore.

Advertising Graphic Arts Modern Posters

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s by Ruth E. Iskin

Post author By Art Ride
Post date November 22, 2014

Here is our first share – An amazing book by Ruth E. Iskin

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.
Book description

Available at leading bookstores. Hope you will enjoy it. Let us know what you think.