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The definitive and most up-to-date volume on the celebrated Biloxi artist, who was the most revolutionary art potter of his time. Called the Mad Potter of Biloxi, the Apostle of Individuality, and the self-proclaimed Greatest Art Potter on Earth, George Edgar Ohr (1857-1918) transformed wheel-thrown pots into ceramic works that were far ahead of their time. Though the unprecedented shapes and idiosyncratic glazes of Ohr's creations were ridiculed by some during his lifetime, he was recognized as a genius by cognoscenti, who championed his work. Today, his ceramics are seen as forerunners of the American modernist movement and are prized by collectors and museums. This handsome volume, showcasing some 135 of Ohr's masterpieces, accompanies a major exhibition at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art that will take place in the John S. and James L. Knight Gallery, four new Frank Gehry-designed, supersized, twisted steel "pod" buildings. All-new photographs of the objects--...

In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco's On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Eco's encyclopedic knowledge and captivating storytelling skills combine in this ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we're most attracted to subliminally. Topics range from Milton's Satan to Goethe's Mephistopheles; from witchcraft and medieval torture tactics to martyrs, hermits, and penitents; from lunar births and disemboweled corpses to mythic monsters and sideshow freaks; and from Decadentism and picturesque ugliness to the tacky, kitsch, and camp, and the aesthetics of excess and vice. With abun...