Given: 1° Art 2° Crime: Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture

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Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp's fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, Etant Donnés', and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder, Walter Benjamin's description of Eugene Atget's famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting the scene of the crime', and Ralph Roff's 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective's outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe.