24 March 2006 | Books
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “art historians and critics appear to be tired of writing for one another and have turned to useful commentary to enlighten the gallery visitor.” They cite recent books by Sidra Stich and Geoffrey Smith as examples of the trend.
23 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary
According to Otto Karl Werckmeister’s new book, Der Medusa-Effekt: Politische Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September 2001, September 11 forced all images to occupy one of two spheres: “a non-public operational sphere in which images circulate around power [or] a public sphere of mere appearance in which only weak images succeed.” He concludes that “in the [...]
21 March 2006 | Books
For a testament to the tremendous energy and range of Stanislaus von Moos’ scholarship, consider the breadth of topics found in the recent star-studded, handsomely bound festschrift devoted to him, which includes contributions from Denise Scott Brown, Jean-Louis Cohen, Thomas Hirschhorn and Jacques Herzog. So writes reviewer Bernadette Fülscher in the NZZ. Topics include globalization, [...]
20 March 2006 | Architecture, Books
Anna Minta’s profound study of architecture, town planning and monument building in Israel doesn’t dwell on familiar high points such as Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus “white city”, writes the Neue Zürcher Zeitung‘s reviewer Roman Hollenstein. Instead, it incorporates a thorough consideration of planning and policy. Minta takes a particularly detailed look at Jerusalem, including the history [...]
17 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Independent curator Harald Szeemann was no mere administrator / catalogue-foreword-writer, but rather an art-world Macher, a creative author of exhibitions, and he practically invented the role. So writes Hans-Joachim Müller in his new book-length overview of Szeemann’s career. In the view of the Frankfurter Rundschau‘s Mirja Rosenau, one could go so far as to say [...]
Donald Kuspit is publishing his “Critical History of 20th-Century Art” entirely online (in installments). Is this because, as Doug Harvey wrote a year ago, it’s become “difficult to imagine a position more alienated from the mainstream canon of contemporary art theory [than Kuspit's]“? Kuspit’s opening lines: “‘The real problem of modernity is the problem of [...]
14 March 2006 | Books, Islamic
Of Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction, Yasser Tabbaa writes: “For a book that claims to be introductory and foundational, [its] oppositional, even antagonistic, stance against nearly all the scholars it discusses is a serious problem. I have encountered nearly two dozen places where Leaman disparages other approaches and conclusions as ‘wrong,’ ‘just wrong,’ ‘entirely [...]
13 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to S.A. Mansbach, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724–1796 “is a monumental book … one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical [analyses], and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century … equally impressive is the author’s literary [...]
In the March Oxford Art Journal Dan Karlholm takes the measure of Donald Preziosi’s 2003 Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity: “The book was intended as a sequel to his department-shattering or, at least, consensus-challenging Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science [1989] but it became a ‘rethinking [...]
In the February Art History, art historian Peter Vergo laments the disappearance of the traditional exhibition catalogue: “Twenty or thirty years ago, large international exhibitions were usually marked by catalogues, in which items on display were not only reproduced but also discussed at length and in detail. That was partly because, in that more leisurely [...]
8 March 2006 | Books, Teaching
Another choice bit from the Times story on the new Janson: “‘I can see the reasons, artistically, for dropping Whistler’s mother,’ said [instructor] Mickey McConnell … ‘But it’s become so well known, such a part of the culture. What if there’s a cartoon in The New Yorker that uses it as a reference? Younger students [...]
7 March 2006 | Books, Teaching
The New York Times gives the new Janson the “who’s in, who’s out?” treatment: “hit men, otherwise known as critics and scholars, are lurking around every corner, waiting to whack even the most sterling reputation … The new edition drops not only Whistler’s portrait of his mother but also evicts several other longtime residents, like [...]
6 March 2006 | Books, Renaissance
Publishers Weekly has nominated Frank Zollner’s recent Botticelli tome for the distinction of “least-scintillating opening sentence ever (‘Art history is the scholarly discipline that addresses the ubiquitous medium of the visual image’).”
3 March 2006 | Books, Teaching
Samuel Y. Edgerton loves Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s new Art of Colonial Latin America: “When I think of all the popular surveys I’ve assigned in my fifty years of teaching art history … only E.H. Gombrich’s Story of Art … is a true literary gem … But now, eureka! The survey by Gauvin Bailey here under [...]
21 February 2006 | Books
ARTnews reports that textbook “[p]ublishers and editors, stung by criticism … are literally rewriting art history—more often and more aggressively than ever before.” Nonetheless, persistent dissatisfaction has led CAA to reevaluate “as many as 40 or more textbooks. In a break with tradition, some will be reviewed by a student as well as by a [...]
21 February 2006 | Books, Modern
To her surprise, Aruna D’Souza found much to like in Wayne Andersen’s “madcap” Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine (one of several books on the artist she reviews). Andersen’s idea “that there is an almost evolutionarily conditioned, instinctual ‘beauty constant’ that drives the representation of idealized femininity” allows him to conclude that “certain key images in [...]
20 February 2006 | Books
As the world’s art historians converge on Boston, now seems a good time to contemplate the art-history survey text, the subject we can all disagree on. Larry Silver and David A. Levine review the primary options, finding them all decent but also over-canonical, inattentive to the teaching of method, and boring. They decline to endorse [...]
17 February 2006 | Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Susan Fillin-Yeh, editor of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (2001), and contributor Robert E. Moore cross swords with Christopher Reed over his 2002 review. (Why so late?) Fillin-Yeh: Reed “so misses the point that he does not even recognize the book’s subject for what it is, an expanded definition [...]
16 February 2006 | Books
“We’re all told that if you’re an art historian, be an art historian.” Lawrence Weschler discusses his new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, “a series of essays on the visual rhymes and eerie resonances of everyday life,” with The American Prospect.
15 February 2006 | Books, Renaissance
In the January-March 2006 Word & Image, Louisa Waldman belatedly reviews Michel Jeanneret’s “groundbreaking, learned, and eminently readable” 1997 Perpetuum mobile, published in English in 2001 as Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, which “sets out to revise the idea … of the sixteenth century as an age dominated [...]
