New Books in Art

In Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini provide a full introduction to the visual world across all the fields that theorize it. In contrast with typical visual culture texts, their book looks beyond the arts, taking a comparative approach that considers a number of fields, including art history and theory but also epistemology, ontology, vision science, neurology, cognitive psychology, law, advertising, medicine, warfare, and more. Intended for first-year university students from diverse backgrounds, Visual Worlds presents a broad array of examples and covers a wide range of topics in short, thematic chapters which offer instructors great flexibility. By focusing on different modes of looking, the book shows students how seeing can change depending on the object that is seen and on its interpretation by an individual.Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet.Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage.Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot inHumanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture (Monacelli Press, 2020), architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Françoise Bollack presents eighteen projects that use traditional materials to build contemporary forms or use modern materials to build traditional forms, blurring the boundary between tradition and modernity in architecture.Bollack rejects the modernist taboo against imitation and precedent, tracing the history of adaptive and imitative design from the Renaissance to the Greek and Gothic revivals and to the nineteenth-century modular cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered "the basis for modern design."The book examines projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, encompassing a broad range of building types: residential, hospitality, commercial and retail, and cultural spaces. All share an intriguing, even radical, approach to reinterpreting traditional forms and materials. Humble thatch moves beyond the farmhouse roof to clad the walls of a Danish environmental center; a photographic image of a Parisian facade becomes a scrim on the facade of a new building; the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh.Among the featured architects are Kengo Kuma, architect of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic stadium; MVRDV, a highly regarded Dutch firm; Lacaton & Vassal and Chartier/Corbasson in France; Skene Catling de la Peña in the UK; Morris Adjmi in the USA; Max Dudler in Germany; Dortre Mandrup in Denmark; and Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How do we think about situations and things do not exist but might, engage in pretense and fiction, and create new works of art? These are central cases in which we’re using our imaginations, but what is imagination, and how should it be explained? In Explaining Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2020), Peter Langland-Hassan distinguishes using mental imagery to think about things and thinking about imaginary things, and proceeds to give a reductive account of both. On his view, imagining isn’t a sui generis mental state, as the received view holds. Instead, it can be reduced to more basic states, in particular belief, desire, and intention. Langland-Hassan, who is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, uses his account to explain the central cases of imagination, defends his view against objections, and considers how recent advances in Deep Learning might help explain the creative process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian. The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Morton Schoolman, Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has published a new book that explores the idea of democratic enlightenment in the United States, and the way that we may want to consider both how to achieve this enlightenment and how we can be guided by our literary and philosophical traditions. Schoolman explains that we need to come to democratic enlightenment through a process of reconciliation, and that this concept of reconciliation is at the heart of the work by Walt Whitman and Theodore Adorno. The centerpieces of A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics (Duke UP, 2020) are explications of how Whitman and Adorno each, separately, approach this need and capacity for reconciliation, and how they delineate it in their work, and finally, how it is vitally important to democracy. Schoolman’s reading of Whitman notes that this is what Whitman set out to do with his poetry, to teach or guide the capacity to reconcile identity, especially with all those who are different. Whitman’s work and his reflection on this need for reconciliation was written during the period of Reconstruction, and he saw the need and the means to provide a path towards healing America’s differences through the democratic media of his time, poetry. Theodore Adorno is pursuing a parallel concept in his work, examining modern artwork as the fulcrum for reconciliation, explaining that these images, while they may be static in some form, are, in fact, images in motion—all visual works of art are in motion. Thus, both Adorno and Whitman provide Schoolman with an aesthetic space and definition for the place where democratic reconciliation can and does occur. But Schoolman builds on the foundation provided by these two theorists, himself constructing the place where he thinks it is most likely that citizens will experience and engage with this idea of reconciliation, especially around those who have been othered or prevented from inclusion by American politics and culture. Schoolman centers this space in film, in part because films are accessible by so much of the populace, and because they provide the aesthetic images, not only the narrative framework, to confront and engage democratic reconciliation. A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics is a fascinating and complex exploration of how aesthetic education has an important role in democratic politics, especially in regard to the function of the reconciliation image as a dynamic component of that education.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Everyone will lose someone they love at some point in their life; a spouse, a parent, or a child. Having to deal with the clothes or personal effects that remain can be a heartbreaking experience. It is a challenge: what is one to do with all the small and large items that made up the material life of the one who’s gone - store them in the attic? Discard them? Donate them to charity or call the junkman?In his recently released book, Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects, artist and writer Jay Garfinkel found another way. His unique book contains photographs of the personal effects of victims of terror attacks in Israel. He gave the families a way to preserve a piece of their legacy through a fine art photograph of their cherished object.The subtitle of the book, Memory and Cherished Objects, was selected, says Garfinkel, because "the person we have lost will not make any new memories, so we need to create a space for them in our life. Heirlooms create a space where memory happens.”The American-Israeli artist Jay Garfinkel tragically lost his son in middle age. His response was to create a dozen fine art photographs of his son's most treasured possessions that stirred memories. His exhibit-sized prints freed him to throw away everything else. It gave him some comfort. But real comfort came after he agreed to work with OneFamily, an Israeli NGO that assists families affected by terror and war. Over a period of 14 months, he met with 33 Israel families whose loved ones were murdered in terror attacks—and with their cooperation, he selected an object of the deceased, which he then documented as a still life photograph.Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects describes his journey meeting families of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in different parts of the country. Garfinkel recorded intimate conversations about love, loss, and finding one's equilibrium by helping others find their way.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021).Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art