Summer reading enters its final stretch as 6 exciting new books hit the shelves in August (if you don’t count my own!).
This month’s offerings span the centuries, moving from Renaissance theories of vision to contemporary debates over morality, inequality, and the future of art.
A new biography explores the secret lives of John Singer Sargent, the queer Gilded Age society painter whose dazzling surfaces concealed a more guarded inner world. A manifesto by the artist collective Metahaven asks about the changing role of art as AI wreaks havoc on our attention span and climate change dampens our capacity to imagine a future. Journalist Hettie Judah guides readers through the opaque creature that is the art world, offering practical advice while puncturing a few of its more stubborn myths.
Meanwhile, Daisy Dixon’s Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art blends history and philosophy to explore a subject as timely as it is timeless, tracing anxieties around obscenity, taste, and public offense back to prehistoric art.
Whether you’re working in your last beach reads, looking for smart company on a long plane ride, or studying up for a September syllabus, we’ve got the latest and greatest listed for you below.
Happy reading!
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Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art
By Daisy Dixon
Philosopher Daisy Dixon asks what moral and aesthetic sentiments we are expressing when we—or they—refer to an artwork as “depraved.” Taking us across time and genre—from prehistoric Venus figurines to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP—she weaves, too, between historical examples and philosophical musings. This range-y lookback has a pointed resonance with the here and now—that is, MAGA’s ongoing assault on culture.
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The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography
By Andrew Moisey
Depending on who you ask—and what counts as a photograph—2026 marks 200 years since the technology’s invention. But of course, in the runup to the world’s first photo came a lot of exploring. Cornell art historian Andrew Moisey looks all the way back to the Renaissance, arguing that proto-photographic ideas of instantaneity first appeared in painting before showing how photography indelibly altered the canvases of modernists.
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The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures
By Metahaven
Challenging times prompt existential questions, and here, Metahaven takes a stab at answering them. Looking to how climate change, AI, and rampant inequality have assaulted our attention spans and reoriented our ability to imagine a future, the artist collective asks what all this means for art—reliant as it is on both attention and imagination.
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Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent
By Devon Cox
The indelible chronicler of Gilded Age glamor, who made so many portraits of society’s finest, here gets a portrait of his own. Biographer Devon Cox tackles the queer artist’s “guarded inner life,” promising readers a character who is “restless, deceptively daring, and shrouded in secrecy.” He argues, too, that Sargent left clues to the inner lives of the socialites he painted.
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How to Enter the Art World
By Hettie Judah
Targeted toward artists, this book, by journalist Hettie Judah, offers pointers toward navigating the art world, demystifying its unspoken rules and debunking its myths. Based on years of conversations with artists and arts professionals, it dispels the notion that an artist’s career is ever linear.
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Still Dangerous!: The Harmony Hammond Reader
By Harmony Hammond
Lately, Harmony Hammond figured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and mounted a survey at SITE Santa Fe. But long before that, she co-founded the storied feminist collective A.I.R. Gallery and wrote tirelessly (for this magazine and others) on the work of women and lesbian artists, fighting their structural exclusion from the art world. A new collection of her writings, edited by Tirza True Latimer with a foreword by Julia Bryan-Wilson, is a portrait of her perseverance.
