Recently Published Reviews

A compendium of twelve essays written over the last three decades, Charles Harrison’s Since 1950: Art and Its Criticism offers a punchy yet partial picture of the critic and historian’s take on visual art at the end of the twentieth century. Sadly, this volume must also serve as the coda to the author’s career as curator, researcher, teacher, and longtime collaborator with Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden in the collective art practice of Art & Language. After a long struggle with cancer, Charles Harrison died on 6 August 2009 at the age of 67. Presenting much more than an… Full Review

David Whitehouse is the executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass and has embarked on the ambitious task to publish comprehensive catalogues of ancient and Islamic glass in his institution. The Roman, Sasanian, and Post-Sasanian publications are on the shelves (Roman Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, vols. 1–3, 1997, 2001, 2003; Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Glass in The Corning Museum of Glass, 2005), while the present review deals with the first of three volumes dedicated to the glass holdings from the Islamic world. This book is entirely devoted to cut and engraved objects; the two… Full Review

Two decades ago, a crowd of Afghanistan’s VIPs gathered at the Koti Bagcha in the Presidential Palace for an exclusive one-day showing of a small collection of the country’s rarest antiquities. The collections had been securely stored in the vaults below the Presidential Palace during the later years of the Soviet occupation (1979–89), owing to a group of concerned Afghan officials who organized their protection under the auspices of then-President Mohammad Najibullah. After the exhibition, the pieces were returned to the bank vaults and a year later the country was amid the throes of the Mujahideen civil war (1992–94). It… Full Review

The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore is a revisionist study of the leading artist of the early twentieth-century Bengal Art School. Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) was the vice principal of the Government School of Art in Calcutta from 1905–1915. Tagore’s art and writings helped spawn a nationalist art movement known as New Indian Art (Nabya Bharat Shilpa) tied to the larger cultural nationalism of the Bengali Renaissance, in which he and several family members, including his uncle, the famous poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), played a leading role. The book argues that overemphasis on Tagore’s involvement in the nationalist art movement has… Full Review

There are few things as challenging as creating large-scale cultural events for cities. Numerous stakeholders, funding bodies, and public agencies must be counseled, appeased, and included in the process, if not directly in the artistic program. Local audiences and interests should form an integral part of the event’s offering, while media and tourist markets yearn for the high-end, world-exclusive tier of cultural engagement. Add to these factors the mystical quest to create a “something for everyone” program to please all of the above, and one begins to understand the complications at hand. It is therefore admirable that someone should step… Full Review

The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875, on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, was a concise and handsome exhibition that addressed an ambitious topic: the dynamic interaction between artistic media from the late 1840s until the 1870s. The artistic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism provided the lens that focused this investigation. Photography was still in its first decade as public knowledge when the young artists who styled themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met in London in 1848. Nevertheless, as Diane Waggoner, the associate curator in the Department of Photographs and organizing curator of the exhibition… Full Review

In an effort to counteract the negative reputation Iran has earned in parts of the West during the past few decades, many Iranians and Westerners alike point to the country’s “glorious past”—the Achaemenid Empire, for example, where the so-called first charter of human rights was fabricated. Iranians point with pride to poets and other literary greats their country has produced. The verses of the national epic—Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written by Ferdowsi in the eleventh century—are frequently recited, and Hafez-reading (fal-e Hafez) is part of many Iranians’ everyday life. Sa’di’s medieval prose and poetry—recognized for their quality… Full Review

Art and Globalization, edited by James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim, results from the first of the Stone Seminars at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Focusing on what James Elkins calls “biennale culture”—i.e., the global aspects of contemporary art—the book is an edited transcript of the seminar, or, rather, a transcript of select parts of the seminar. Readers are thus voyeurs, eavesdropping on a conversation but doing so as if entering the middle of a dialogue well in progress because they encounter only parts of it, not the whole, and they can’t interject insights, except… Full Review

Although there have been piecemeal studies of Emperor Maximilian I’s literary and art patronage, the material productions of his court have been difficult to measure. Chief among the reasons for this are its lack of a centralized seat, a vast and shifting stable of artists in his charge, the preponderance of ephemera that marked their efforts, and the unfinished nature of most of these. Larry Silver’s Marketing Maximilian ambitiously ties up these loose threads in Maximilian’s art worlds, reconstructing a program in his distracted and somewhat frenetic patronage, and reinvigorating this context for the field of print studies. … Full Review

It makes perfect sense. Why wouldn’t George Lucas and Steven Spielberg champion and collect the art of Norman Rockwell? They’ve all shared enviable talents at telling engaging stories about the dreams that make ordinary people heroic. Their stories evoke feelings of nostalgia for an earlier time of innocence—a mythic construction at the heart of many popular narratives of the “American” experience. Indeed, Lucas and Spielberg have developed substantial collections of Rockwell’s paintings and large-scale preparatory drawings, which senior curator Virginia Mecklenburg organized in a stunning display of almost sixty works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition’s… Full Review

Along with the journal Mechademia (also published by the University of Minnesota Press) and the 2008 anthology entitled Japanese Visual Culture (Mark MacWilliams, ed., Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), Robots Ghosts and Wired Dreams constitutes a significant English-language contribution to the intellectual analysis of contemporary Japanese science fiction and otaku (obsessive fan) culture centering around manga, anime, and video games. This volume brings together essays by noted scholars working in Japan (e.g., Kotani Mari, Azuma Hiroki, Tatsumi Takayuki), in addition to works by researchers of Japanese science fiction and anime who are based in Northern American academe (Susan Napier… Full Review

From March to mid-April of 2002, two squares of searchlights located at the Ground Zero site in Lower Manhattan were directed into the nighttime sky. Appearing at sunset and fading at dawn, they were two luminous ghosts standing in for the missing World Trade Center towers. Disagreements over memorialization of the site have been vociferous and nasty in recent years, yet The Tribute in Light was greeted with an outpouring of positive press and public reception. There was near unanimity about its fittingness. Perhaps because of the elemental associations of light and the sheer simplicity of the form, Tribute could… Full Review

June Wayne’s exhibition Narrative Tapestries: Tidal Waves, DNA, and the Cosmos symbolized her triumphant return to the city of her youth and marked the re-opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (AIC) permanent textile galleries after a five-year renovation. The show featured eleven out of twelve exquisite tapestries Wayne created in collaboration with three different French ateliers from 1970–74 led by the following artists: Pierre Daquin, Camille Legoueix, and Giselle Glaudin-Brivet. An exhibition catalogue accompanied the show with informative essays by Christa C. Mayer Thurman, curator emerita of the Department of Textiles at AIC, and Wayne, as well as high-quality… Full Review

In The Object Reader, Fiona Candlin, a lecturer in museum studies at Birkbeck College in London, and Raiford Guins, a specialist in cultural and visual studies based at Stony Brook University in New York, combine to bring together an innovative collection of essays concerning objects and how we understand them. Organized into six thematic sections, twenty-eight key readings (all previously published) are complemented by an additional selection of twenty-five commissioned shorter object lessons and a bibliography. Acknowledging that “object” is a “sprawling category,” the authors make a concerted and successful attempt to account for the way that interest… Full Review

The ancient Mexican civilization traditionally known as the Olmec, approximately 1800–400 BC, left a rich material record of its presence. Yet without written documentation, scholars are left to ponder both the origin of the Olmec and the specific cultural, spiritual, and political significance of the many, primarily stone, works excavated since the nineteenth century. Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, a collaboration between the Instituto Nacional de Antropolgía e Historia, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, curated by Kathleen Berrin and Virginia Fields, included a selection of over 140 Olmec… Full Review