Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle

"An erudite collection. . . . Students of 20th-century art and media will appreciate Crary’s fine-grained analysis and prescient cultural insights. . . . Edifying."—Publishers Weekly

"[A] rich collection. . . . Crary distinguishes between vision reduced to a technical function, characterized by passivity and as it were de-natured, and vision, capable of seeing, as a defining human activity and way of interacting with the world."—Stephen Petersen, Leonardo Reviews

"Presents a broad spectrum of the interests of this American theorist and of the interdisciplinary scope of his intellectual work...Crary offers us critiques of subjectivities produced by dispositifs and regimes of visibility, as well as a fine and radical analysis of the relationships between images and power.—Critique d’art"

"“An agile writer…there’s an intellectual dazzle.” —New York Review of Books"

"Crary is the historian-philosopher of our spectacle-lives." – Artforum

“The essays collected in this extraordinary book establish that Jonathan Crary’s unique project as an historian of modernity emerged from a specific set of encounters with contemporary art. Through these, Crary describes anew an epoch of unrelenting, dissolute flows—of data, of finance capital, of electronic images—as if he were both its visionary poet and fiercest critic. The poet imagines the lines of flight from a catastrophic present that are still possible and the critic musters the untimely insight necessary for this task.” —George Baker, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Theory, University of California, Los Angeles