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April 29, 2008
Margaret Dikovitskaya Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn MIT Press, 2006. 344 pp.; 57 b/w ills. Paper $19.95 (9780262541886)
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CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2008.42

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In its Summer 1996 issue (no. 77), the journal October published the results of a four-part “Questionnaire on Visual Culture” that the editors had sent to a range of scholars, artists, and critics the previous winter. Outwardly hostile to the then-emerging field of visual culture, the survey’s editors made no secret of their disdain for the type of work being done in the name of visual studies, which they suggested “is helping in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (October 77 [1996]: 25). The October questionnaire was a defining moment in the history of visual culture studies. For Margaret Dikovitskaya, it is the defining moment. In her book, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, Dikovitskaya takes as her project to provide “a new perspective on the interdisciplinary nature of visual studies through its interrogation of how art history and cultural studies intersect as they are practiced and taught in academic communities in the United States” (2). Visual Culture is an odd book. Comprised of an introduction, two chapters, and a long appendix consisting of the author’s interviews with seventeen notable scholars in the field, the text...