Yes, television had a history before Lucy, Jackie and Uncle Miltie, or what author and film director (Bad News Bears, Fletch) Ritchie calls a prehistory. Please Stand By covers the period from television’s invention in 1920 until regularly scheduled programming began in 1948. It is largely a chronicle of “firsts”: the first commercial, the first soap opera, the first newscast. It is also full of anecdotes such as the first professional football broadcast consisting of a single shot of a toy football game board, or the station manager in Washington, D.C., who had a metropolitan map on his office wall marking each of the 48 TV sets in town. On another level, Ritchie outlines the battles between inventors (Philo Farnsworth, Charles Francis Jenkins, Allen DuMont), who were trying to perfect the new medium, and businessmen (Robert Sarnoff, William Paley) and corporations (RCA, Westinghouse), who were trying to wring out a profit from their investments, for control of the airwaves. AP

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 247 pages

In 1974, at the age of 53, Joseph Beuys first set foot in the United States and his “Energy Plan for the Western Man,” a performance piece which consisted of a series of talks in New York, Chicago and Minneapolis, was his introduction to this country. Beuys presented his inclusive ideas, including the notion that “Every man is an artist,” to audiences with decidedly mixed results,. Reactions ranged from frequent attacks on his past as a Stuka pilot for the Luftwaffe during World War II to tremendous interest in his peculiar brand of conceptualism and the “Free University” he had helped found in Germany. The talks provided the impetus for Beuys most famous “action” in America, “I Like America and America Likes Me,” in which the artist lived in a gallery wrapped in felt and carrying only a cane while sharing the space with a wild coyote. This book presents a number of previously unpublished writings and several interviews in which Beuys discusses his best-known projects in both America and Europe. AP

Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Paperback: 274 pages
Illustrated

This work on Klimt is part of the German publisher Taschen’s series on famous artists. Like other works in the series, it economically (in 96 pages) traces the artist’s career while sumptuously illustrating in color his major works. Neret presents extended sections on Klimt’s best-known decorative-art projects: the Beethoven Frieze created for an exhibition in 1902, and the mosaics for Josef Hoffmann’s Palais Stoclet, in Brussels. The remainder of the book focuses on what Klimt is popularly known for, his erotic presentation of the female body, in sections such as “Secessionist Symbolism and Femmes Fatales” and “All Art Is Erotic.” This work also features a useful chronology of Klimt’s life and work
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Publisher: Taschen
Paperback: 96 pages
Illustrated

Not a Dadaist biography like Man Ray’s own Self Portrait (1963), but a chronicle of the life of a man who claimed, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” While most accounts on Ray look almost exclusively at his Dada and Surrealist years and focus on his photography, Baldwin presents an evenhanded approach to his entire career, stressing little-known facts, such as Ray’s determination to be taken seriously as a painter. The subtitle of this work is particularly notable, since it returns the artist to a context he had tried so hard to erase, his prior existence as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the Philadelphia son of a garment worker. With the assistance of Juliet Man Ray, the artist’s widow, the author also explores the details of Ray’s complex private life, including his numerous affairs during the expatriate heyday of the ‘20s and ‘30s. AP

Publisher: Da Capo
Paperback: 449 pages
Illustrated

The Accursed Share is Bataille’s warped three-volume study of political economy. As Bataille described his project, “I had to add that the book I was writing did not consider the facts the way qualified economists do, that I had a point of view from which a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat.” The first volume, titled “Consumption,” looks at these questions from an economic standpoint, concluding that utility can only end in uselessness. AP

Publisher: Zone
Paperback: 197 pages

The Accursed Share is Bataille’s warped three-volume study of political economy. As Bataille described his project, “I had to add that the book I was writing did not consider the facts the way qualified economists do, that I had a point of view from which a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat.” The second volume, “The History of Eroticism,” in sections such as “The Problem of Incest” and “Unlimited Fusion, the Orgy,” takes an in-depth look at the uselessness of erotic life: “Sexuality, at least, is good for something, but eroticism… We are clearly concerned with a sovereign form that cannot serve any purpose.” The third volume, then, takes up the question of sovereignty, and after an examination of feudal society and the negative sovereignty of communism, Bataille concludes that sovereignty lies in a life beyond utility. AP

Publisher: Zone
Paperback: 460 pages