by Jon Lackman | 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 one option, but does their special enthusiasm for Gombrich’s Story of Art betray them? “If the aim of the survey text is to open students’ minds to the excitement of studying art and art history, then telling a compelling story, even if in some respects an incomplete or otherwise faulty one, would seem a necessity.”
