Browse Recent Book Reviews

Given this book's title, it bears asking what comprises the new media? Lev Manovich enumerates them early on: "Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces" (8-9). What, then, is the new media's "language"? By language, Manovich intends both the diverse conventions used by new-media practitioners to organize data and structure the user's experience, and the various discourses that surround the new media. Grounded in an analysis of the ways in which new media have appropriated the forms and conventions of older art and communications media, Manovich's central… Full Review

Good things come in small packages. Diebold's book should join the ranks of other petit books that have made a large contribution not only to their field of specialization but also to a wider audience. Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art has found a place on my personal bookshelf alongside Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909) and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Diebold offers a fine, lively text—free of inhibiting scholarly apparatuses—that students and novice readers can enjoy. Based on his classroom lectures, Word and Image explores many of the key issues… Full Review

Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany offers a rich, ambitious, and theoretically acute analysis of this subject and its legacy in our own time. In this book, Weimar visual culture emerges in its various guises—architectural, cinematic, and consumerist—to reveal the transition from the modern to the postmodern and the merging of high and low culture. These developments in turn prefigure our own current state of saturation with regard to the visual codes of consumerism. In its promotion of a pervasive urban spirit—and cult of surface that extended into the visual arenas of fashion, architecture, advertising, film… Full Review

The series of erotic pictures known as I modi, or The Positions, from which this book takes its allusive title, acts as a catalyst for a study of the erotic in Renaissance culture that makes an unprecedented attempt to determine—in terms untainted by modern day squeamishness or purulent curiosity—the origins, proliferation, and circulation of erotic and obscene material in early sixteenth-century Italy. Bette Talvacchias painstaking reconstruction of the fluctuating borders between that which was considered an acceptable representation of the erotic (and therefore appropriate for wide circulation) as opposed to that which was decreed obscene and… Full Review

As Francis Haskell reminds us in this meticulously researched book, the idea of a permanent collection of paintings is slowly becoming a thing of the past. The collecting, arranging, and display of art works in museums reflects an increasingly ephemeral experience determined by the needs of museums and galleries to prove their worth in a world of accountability. In a witty introduction, the author reminds us that as jets are ferrying their precious cargo to blockbuster exhibitions throughout the world, curators work like harassed nibelungen to ready paintings for fast-approaching deadlines. In The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master… Full Review

In cities and towns across the United States, museums and galleries stage countless art exhibitions in the course of a season. Direct mailings and advertisements may lure us in, but it is often a critic who persuades us to go or stay home. Revered or reviled, art critics have an effect on our actions and opinions. And to whatever extent we agree or dispute with these critics, we read their reviews. Or do we? That question haunts Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826-1925, for difficult as it might be to determine who read reviews and how much… Full Review

With the collection of nineteen essays in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, Paul Corbey Finney promises to provide a revisionist account of the relationship between Calvinism and the visual arts by challenging the presumed, prevalent view that Calvinism had either no impact or a purely negative effect on the development of the visual arts. Rather than focus on acts of Reformed iconoclasm, Finney calls his readers to examine the positive contribution that Calvinism made to the visual arts. Discovering the gift offered, however, remains a daunting task, for according to the editor, the nature… Full Review

This is a valuable book for both historians and art historians concerned with Renaissance Florence. It boasts the intriguing topic, "Art, Memory, and Family," and contains scholarly essays from leading historians and art historians in their respective fields. As discussed by the art historian Patricia Lee Rubin in the book's preface, the essays originated in a symposium held at the National Gallery in London in 1996. Although some of the conference papers have since appeared elsewhere in print, Rubin's thoughtful preface (the historian Ciappelli wrote the introduction) incorporates their ideas to make this volume an almost complete record of the… Full Review

The text that comprises Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 is, to borrow from Roland Barthes (writing around the time Artforum became an established art-world institution), not “a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning,” but rather “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”[1] Consisting of fragments of interviews woven together to produce a narrative that chronicles the first twelve years of Artforum’s publication, this text is literally a “tissue of quotations.” Thus, the structure of the book reflects the discursive nature of this project’s source. As Amy Newman writes in the introduction, “An unruly group… Full Review

In his previous book, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics and Art History, Keith Moxey called on art historians to abandon their quest for objectivity and instead foreground the precepts of critical theory. Its sequel, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power in Art History, considers what such an approach means for the discipline of art history. Moxey rejects what he perceives as the nostalgia for order and tradition in the current reaction against the incursion of critical theory because he believes it ignores the most important development of recent times: the demise of grand narratives. The… Full Review