Some might think that the influence of politics and economics in a censored art world might harm Chinese artist Cao Fei's efforts to provide real critique.
Zürich's Institute of Landscape Architecture explores the fragile connection between mankind and nature in a multimedia project that merges science with art, turning sounds and images of a changing alpine glacier into a moving call to action.
There's a wealth of work on display in Shape of Light, from the Tate Modern's exhibit, perhaps one of the finest general collections of abstract photographs currently available in print form.
In rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy in The Made-Up Man, Joseph Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy.
From its inception as a blogging project to its culmination into a beautiful art book, Dave Addey's Typeset in the Future is a wonderful but expensive look at typography and design in popular science-fiction films.
Ian Birch's engaging Iconic Magazine Covers shows how magazines and their covers not only reflect social change -- they can also help bring about social change.
Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela's Garage challenges the beguiling, energizing, and yet limiting power of the garage in America as a symbol of escape and reinvention.
For fans of poster art and other ephemeral graphic representations of rock music, Rock Graphic Originals is a wonderful resource.
While it's unlikely that you will ever come across an acknowledged gay, lesbian, or transgender person featured on an official holy card, it's quite possible that some individuals thus pictured snuck in under the radar, so to speak. Ria Brodell's Butch Heroes brings that tragic oversight to light.
Being humble and peaceable are not virtues, according to Oscar Wilde, as seen in his collection of essays, In Praise of Disobedience, disobedience and rebelliousness against inequality and tyranny are much more valuable to humankind.
Kara Thompson's Blanket provides an excellent, warm, and informed history in the Bloomsbury Academic Object Lessons series.
