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What constitutes live/performance art today? The terms and definition(s) have always been slippery. In the past, live art was a large, interdisciplinary umbrella that included body art, interactive installation, postmodern dance, post-dramatic theater, time-based work, and performance video. Live art has also included the work and products of artistic collectives, interventionist work, relational aesthetics, eco art, social practice, institutional critique, and, recently, reenactment. Live art is further related to a burgeoning category in academic writing that is known as performance studies and which includes contributions from scholars who locate their disciplinary home in theater, fine arts, art history, dance, anthropology… Full Review

Many periods in the history of art are subject to anachronistic or pejorative names that have somehow stuck, yet few have been so controversial as the term “baroque.” Is baroque a style? If so, what are its characteristics and how to account for the countless exceptions? Is it a period? When does it begin or end? What are its geographical boundaries? Is it a concept? Due to its historical anachronism, pejorative connotations, and, not least, the sheer difficulty in defining it as a style or a period, art historians have in recent years shied away from the term. Cultural critics… Full Review

Richard Wrigley’s Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700–1870 is a thought-provoking look at Rome—and, it should be noted, also at its wider environs—from an unlikely point of view: the filthy public sanitation and insalubrious atmospheric conditions of the city and outlying areas, and how these factors, together with the evidence surrounding the Roman phenomenon of mal’aria (bad air or climate), affected the “making and viewing of art” by artistic pilgrims sojourning there. Borrowing his title from the 1934 short story “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton dedicated to the sentimental and physical dangers of Rome’s deadly nighttime… Full Review

The star of colonial Latin American art is ascendant. Though some museums, like the Denver Art Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art, have long had important collections in this area, others have recently begun to take more than a passing interest in the period and region. Just last year the Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art held major colonial Latin American exhibitions. This was the second show of such scale at Philadelphia in recent history. Their 2006 exhibition, Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, after traveling to Mexico City, went on to the Los Angeles… Full Review

Renata Ago’s Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome is an English translation of Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento, first published in Rome in 2006 (Donzelli Editore). The translation is by Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen. Findlen also contributes an important foreword that analyzes in detail the Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie et ornamenti di statue e pitture, ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma, a list of collections in the houses, palaces, and gardens of Rome that was published in 1664 and… Full Review

Roman Architecture in Provence, by James C. Anderson, Jr., is a welcome contribution to the literature on architecture in the Roman provinces. Anderson focuses on the ancient cities of modern Provence, Roman Gallia Narbonensis, surveying urban development and offering detailed studies of monumental types and individual structures. The book is divided into a brief introductory chapter and still briefer conclusions framing two longer, substantive chapters. In chapter 1, “Historical Overview: Roman Provence, ‘Provincia Nostra,’” Anderson begins with a brief account of history and geography, highlighting the early and close relationship between Rome and Gallia Narbonensis, or… Full Review

Though it is a far-reaching critique of the kind of historicism that contents itself with studying the past without regard for the present, Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History is not an attempt to liberate us from history. On the contrary, it is a critique of historicism in the name of history, and it never loses sight of the urgent issues that have fueled historicism, especially in the last century. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Moxey argues that art historians adopted historicist distance after the Second World War as a means of guarding against… Full Review

Beginning with the title—Moche Art and Visual Culture in Ancient Peru—Margaret A. Jackson frames her first book as a comprehensive new approach to Moche visual arts. She proposes to address the corpus of Moche visual culture from an innovative theoretical perspective that “challenges conventional opinions” and “tests operative paradigms” about incipient writing systems in the Americas (10–11). Jackson argues that the perceived visual complexity of Moche iconography may be understood as “neither strictly linguistically informed nor purely pictorial” (149), but rather as an intermediate category, which she describes variously as “semasiographic,” “systematized notation,” and “hybrid presentational syntax.” The… Full Review

Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli looks to the past and the future. The product of the author’s decades-long engagement with the artist, the book is unabashedly an artist’s biography that aims “to embrace Signorelli’s humanity” (xiv). When Henry writes, “A man's work is, after all, the most satisfactory and reliable document for those who take the pains to decipher it—the autobiography which every man of genius bequeaths to posterity” (17), he echoes the first book in English on Signorelli, written by Maud Cruttwell and published in 1899, Luca Signorelli (London: Bell), a volume in the “Great… Full Review

Alex Potts’s ambitious new book, Experiments in Modern Realism, attempts to decenter and reconfigure dominant notions concerning the nature of art production in one of the liveliest periods in the history of art, roughly 1945–1968. At nearly five hundred pages and with numerous chapters and subheads, the book has the broad scope and episodic feel of a textbook, but it also has some of the rich texture and nuance of a volume with more specialist concerns. If Potts’s last book, the brilliant The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) (click here for review… Full Review