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This is a beautifully designed book, and the credit goes to Janet Wood, who has given us a distinctively shaped volume, eight by six inches, which rests comfortably in the hand. The layout of the book, the typeface and margins, are pleasing to the eye, as are the copious illustrations, mostly in color. One cannot begin to imagine an electronic version of this book nearly so inviting as this lovely tome. The enticing dust jacket,...

On August 27, 2005, a large crowd including residents of a psychiatric facility in Mexicali gathered just to the south of a jagged, oceanside metal fence in Playas di Tijuana, Mexico. The crowd counted down and watched, cheering, as David “The Bullet” Smith shot out of a cannon, flew through the air, and landed, bouncing several times, in a net slung in San Diego’s Border Field State Park. This event, staged to critique U.S. immigration...

In the preface to Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Victoria Alexander reminds her readers that “scholarship . . . necessarily constructs an arena in which combatants from different perspectives battle over each other’s claims” (xiii).The role of scholarship, so defined, has had a rather negligible, and virtually non-existent, place in the traditional development of arts management as a field. It has evolved, instead, through a process of apprenticeship...

In his magisterial survey of British art, commissioned for the gold standard Pelican History of Art and first published in 1953, Ellis Waterhouse paused in his discussion of Thomas Gainsborough and made the following admission: “Unpleasant as it still is for some of us to introduce the shade of Marx into the history of art, it may contribute to the understanding of Gainsborough” (261). This passage attests to the anxiety of the art historian in...

Regarding Romantic Rome, a series of ten essays edited and introduced by Richard Wrigley, casts new light on a subject almost as well trodden as the streets of the famed city itself. The fruit of a conference held in 2003 at the British School in Rome with the cooperation of the Art History Department of Oxford Brookes University, this slim tome brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields including literature, graphic design, women’s...

In the first gallery of the Montclair Art Museum’s excellent and illuminating exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism, two arresting views of Mont Sainte-Victoire from 1927 by the American artist Marsden Hartley flanked a painting by Paul Cézanne of the same subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (ca. 1897), an exemplary work by that artist, acquired by the Baltimore collector Claribel Cone in 1925. The comparison drawn between Cézanne and Hartley (same subject, related...

William E. Jones’s artists’ book Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton is an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture. It is the third of four Jones books published by 2nd Cannons, along with Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), and Heliogabalus (2009). All reflect a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through...

Photography, Roland Barthes argued, is most potent when considered through the lens of death. Or as Geoffrey Batchen’s new edited collection suggests, photography is most potent when considered through the lens of Roland Barthes’s death. As this elegant volume makes evident, contemporary photography studies is simultaneously enervated by Barthes’s continuing, towering presence and yet not ready to let him go. Such is the interminable work of mourning. As the title implies, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections...

Philip B. Betancourt’s Introduction to Aegean Art, as its title suggests, presents a concise, up-to-date introduction to the art and culture of the Greek Bronze Age, ca. 3000–1000 BCE. Prehistoric Aegean art encompasses three distinct cultural realms: Minoan, Cycladic, and Helladic/Mycenaean. Narrative explanations of the origin of Western art often depict the art of these cultures as a vital link between the early artistic works of Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations and the later...

Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals poses an immediate challenge: what is the audience for a coffee table book about a miserable subject? It is as oxymoronic as a junker limousine or a hairless cat, but contradiction is the essence of this nonetheless earnest book. Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in depicting industrial architecture. His previous book illustrated the substations that power the New York City subway. In Asylum, he...