Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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See Christopher Reed's review of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture edited by Susan Fillin-Yeh. In the following two letters, Susan Fillin-Yeh, editor of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), and Robert E. Moore, a contributor to the volume, respond to Christopher Reed’s review of the book, published in caa.reviews June 18, 2002. Reed then responds to their letters. I have recently read Christopher Reed’s review of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture and wish to respond, for, as the book’s editor… Full Review
February 9, 2004
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Gary Shapiro
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 458 pp.; 34 b/w ills. Paper $30.00 (0226750477)
There is much to recommend about Gary Shapiro’s latest book to readers of these reviews. It is well written, liberally illustrated, and thoroughly researched, and it clarifies insights that have not yet come to the attention of most authors. In short, this book is original and compelling, warranting the attention of those seeking a philosophical basis for their art-critical perspectives. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying is, above all, a philosophy book. It sets out to correct the professional myopia that regards Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault—and the whole field of aesthetics—as only… Full Review
February 6, 2004
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David Carrier
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. 144 pp. Cloth $95.00 (0275975207)
In graduate school, a fellow student once told me, “Rosalind Krauss exists for you to react against.” In his recent book, David Carrier assumes a similar stance, portraying Krauss as a critic who is brilliant, provocative, and constantly refining her ideas in order to challenge accepted beliefs. Carrier works from the premise that Krauss’s rise in the post-Greenberg era parallels the rise of American philosophical art criticism, and that the story of both offers insight into the contemporary art world. He states clearly that it is not his intent to gossip about his subject; instead he relies solely on Krauss’s… Full Review
February 2, 2004
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Vidya Dehejia
Exh. cat. New York: American Federation of Arts in association with University of Washington Press, 2003. 255 pp.; 49 color ills.; 40 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (0295982845)
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., November 10, 2002–March 9, 2003; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Tex., April 4–June 15, 2003; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, July 6–September 14, 2003
This book, published to accompany the touring exhibition of ninth- to thirteenth-century south Indian bronzes that opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., follows the trend of recontextualizing works of Indian sculpture that began with the Asia Society exhibition, Gods, Guardians, and Lovers: Temple Sculptures from Northern India, A.D. 700–1200 (1993). These bronze figures of deities and saints are examined against the backdrop of the religious and literary world in which they were created and used, when the Chola dynasty dominated the Tamil Nadu region of south India. It seems remarkable that these exquisite works… Full Review
January 30, 2004
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Sibel Bozdoğan
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. 380 pp.; 240 ills. Cloth $30.00 (0295981520)
See Bernd Nicolai’s review of this book “All nationalist architecture is bad, but all good architecture is national.” Bruno Taut, 1938. The formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk may be seen as one of the most radical and revolutionary moments in twentieth-century world history. With it came the end of the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman imperium, the abolishment of Islamic law, or shari’a, and the cultural transformation of a region spanning from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Istanbul to Diyarbakir.… Full Review
January 29, 2004
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Gabriele Paleotti
Ed Stefano della Torre; trans Gian Franco Freguglia Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Cad & Wellness, 2002. 328 pp. Paper €25.00 (8820973588)
Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) of Bologna was among the most important ecclesiastical reformers and writers on sacred art in post-Tridentine Italy. After receiving a degree in canon law from the Studio di Bologna in 1546, he was appointed an uditore di Rota in Rome in 1556. He subsequently served as the Rota’s counselor to the papal legates during the final session of the Council of Trent (1561–63). Pope Pius IV appointed Paleotti to the Congregation of the Council to study the approval and implementation of Trent’s decrees, which the Congregation issued in print in 1565. In March 1565, Pius elevated Paleotti… Full Review
January 27, 2004
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Catherine E. Karkov and Fred Orton, eds.
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002. 240 pp.; 4 color ills.; 34 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0937058793)
The concept of difference unites the essays in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Though comprised of six papers from a day-long seminar at the 1998 International Congress at Leeds, this collection arrives in two parts: essays by Jane Hawkes and Catherine E. Karkov look at relatively little-known examples of Anglo-Saxon eighth and ninth-century sculpture, and contributions by Fred Orton, Richard N. Bailey, Ian Wood, and Éamonn Ò Carragáin engage in an often-argumentative conversation about approaches to the two best-known early-Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures, the monuments at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. The benefit of the collection lies in the chance for the contributors… Full Review
January 20, 2004
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Jane Green and Leah Levy, eds.
Intro Marla Prather Berkeley: University of California Press in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003. 226 pp.; 13 color ills.; 78 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (0520233557)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 2, 2003–February 29, 2004
Jay DeFeo and The Rose is the long-awaited monograph dedicated solely to this artist and her best-known painting. Its eleven essays from a prestigious roster of authors work together to situate DeFeo’s achievements within American postwar art, and its thirteen color plates and seventy-eight black-and-white photographs sustain these texts and enhance the reader’s experience. Challenging art-historical essays by her biographer Richard Cándida-Smith and art critic Carter Ratcliff are particularly significant contributions to the body of DeFeo scholarship. The inclusion of Lucy Lippard, whose essay positions the artist within the context of the critic’s previous writing, is impressive. The… Full Review
January 15, 2004
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Barbara A. Barletta
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 232 pp.; 87 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (0521792452)
In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius provides the earliest surviving account of the origins of what we have called, since the Renaissance, the orders of Greek architecture. Vitruvius, however, wrote during the early years of the Roman Empire—some six hundred years after the orders first developed—and his first-hand experience of early Greek architecture must have been limited at best. The numerous Greek treatises on architecture that he had at his disposal and to which he routinely refers in his writings were for the most part relatively late, dating by and large to the Hellenistic period, again, long after… Full Review
January 13, 2004
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Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 256 pp.; 30 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (0300098170)
Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips’s Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective is a curious book: while largely synoptic, written by two nonspecialists who rely heavily on previously published research, it also constitutes an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the reception of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings among contemporary viewers. Issues of audience response have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. The authors take their cue from the likes of Alison Kettering and Elizabeth Honig, among others, who have already investigated questions of audience reception vis-à-vis seventeenth-century Dutch art. But although Muizelaar and Phillips… Full Review
January 12, 2004
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