Referenced Books
This page gathers the books that come up in our Artist Roundtable discussions. Many titles surface as sources of inspiration, historical context, technical insight, or theoretical grounding. We keep a record here so you can easily revisit what was referenced and explore any titles that spark your interest.
Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color
Author: Valerie Steele
Publication Date: September 4, 2018
Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color presents a cultural history of pink, showing that its meanings have shifted dramatically across time and place. In eighteenth-century Europe, especially France, pink signified refinement and luxury for both men and women. It was not linked to childhood or gender norms. As industrial production made pigments cheaper and dress codes evolved, pink gradually narrowed in its associations and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became tied to femininity, softness, eroticism, and later innocence within a Western framework. Rather than presenting pink as a stable psychological category, the book treats it as a social construct shaped by fashion systems, technology, trade, and cultural expectations.
Because the book accompanied an exhibition at the Museum at FIT, it includes essays by multiple writers and a wide range of visual material, from garments and paintings to fashion photography. The volume traces how pink has served as a symbol of aristocracy, mass culture, rebellion, and identity politics, with examples from Europe, the Americas, and Asia. By demonstrating that meaning attaches itself to color through history rather than essence, the book invites artists and designers to treat hue as a communicative tool loaded with social implications. Its central insight is that color participates in cultural negotiation, and pink, far from being a simple “feminine” tone, has carried prestige, provocation, sentimentality, pleasure, and resistance depending on who used it and when.
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution
Author: Denis Dutton
Publication Date: December 23, 2008
The Art Instinct argues that art is not merely a cultural ornament or a historically contingent luxury, but is rooted in evolved human predispositions. Denis Dutton proposes that aesthetic preferences emerge from universal features of human nature shaped by natural and sexual selection, helping to explain recurring cross-cultural patterns in landscape preference, storytelling, performance, decoration, and technical virtuosity. Rather than treating beauty as entirely relative or art as wholly socially constructed, the book contends that many artistic behaviors reflect deep-seated perceptual and cognitive tendencies shared across humanity.
Drawing from evolutionary theory, anthropology, philosophy, and art history, Dutton examines why humans are drawn to representation, skill display, imaginative worlds, and costly acts of making. The book is especially useful for artists and educators because it pushes against the assumption that aesthetic judgment is arbitrary or infinitely malleable. Its central contribution is the suggestion that artmaking and art response are built upon species-wide dispositions, even though culture powerfully shapes how those dispositions are expressed. In that sense, the book offers a framework for thinking about art as both biologically grounded and culturally elaborated.
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like
Author: Paul Bloom
Publication Date: June 14, 2010
In How Pleasure Works, Paul Bloom explores the idea that pleasure is not determined only by sensory qualities, but by what we believe things are, where they come from, and what they mean. A central theme of the book is psychological essentialism: the tendency to assume that people, objects, and experiences possess an underlying reality that affects how we value them. Bloom argues that much of human enjoyment, whether of food, art, sex, music, possessions, or ideas, depends on invisible beliefs about authenticity, origin, authorship, and significance rather than on raw sensation alone.
The book draws on research in psychology and cognitive science to show that pleasure is interpretive through and through. We do not simply respond to surfaces; we respond to stories, identities, associations, and perceived essences. That makes the book especially valuable for artists, designers, and educators interested in why context alters experience so profoundly. Its central insight is that delight is shaped not only by what something looks, sounds, or feels like, but by the conceptual framework through which it is encountered. In this way, Bloom offers a compelling account of why meaning and perception are inseparable in many of our richest aesthetic and emotional experiences.