Book reviews on visual arts books and books related to Utah’s art community.
The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathen Lopez Art forgers have frustrated and fascinated the art world for years. The critics whose reputations can be ruined by false attributions, and the collectors who find themselves holding a painting worth less than […]
This week’s book review originally appeared in the April 2009 edition of 15 Bytes. We are revisiting the review in conjunction with the UMFA’s current exhibit, The Continuing Allure: Painters of Utah’s Red Rock, which will be covered in this month’s edition of 15 Bytes Painters of Utah’s […]
Spiral Jetta: a road trip through the land art of the American West by Erin Hogan The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2008 In the 1960s and 70s, artists were drawn to slogans. “Art is dead” was followed by “Museums are where art goes to die.” […]
Photojojo!: Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas By Amit Gupta and Kelly Jensenreviewed by Amanda Moore Photojojo! Is a great book for the flickr addict, scrap booker and diy enthusiast. The book is separated into two halves. The first half is all about unique crafts and presentations […]
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art Laney Salisbury Penguin Press 2009 352pp You couldn’t write a better story line if you were dealing with fiction. John Drewe, a working-class chameleon of a racconteur passes himself off as a posh nuclear […]
Maggie Macnab, author of Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication will be speaking at SUU’s Art Insights next week, on September 17 at 7 pm in the Centrum Arena at SUU. Macnab, whose book has been called this year’s hottest graphic design book, has been […]
Local artist Alex Bigney, who teaches at Utah Valley University, has just published a book entitled Talking to Tesla. Over the past four years the painter has undergone experiences that have profoundly impacted his art and changed his life. In a series of uncanny dreams the enigmatic and now […]
Behaviourables and Futuribles A review of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness In 1970, Roy Ascott wrote, “If writing about art has any value at all at a time when art works and processes are themselves polemical, it can only be to discuss alternative futures.” […]
Unmonumental: the object in the 21st century reviewed by Geoff Wichert Unmonumental is simultaneously the name of a book, a pioneering exhibition at the New Museum’s new home in the Bowery for which it functions as catalog, and a school of sculpture that the book argues is the […]
Dismantling Geneva Steel: Photographs by Chris Dunker Essays by Diana Turnbow and Sara J. Northerner Brigham Young University, Museum of Art reviewed by Laurel Hunter Geneva Steel, in Vineyard, Utah, opened in the 1940s to mill steel for use in WW2 war ships. It slowly declined after its […]
The Art of Small Things by John Mack Reviewed by Laurel Hunter It is no small thing to read through this book. Every time I picked up The Art of Small Things, I became totally absorbed in the beautiful color photographs that illustrate the book – the objects shown are […]
Artscience: Creativity in the post-Google Generation by David Edwards I really want to like Artscience. I am totally in agreement with its premise that artists and scientists can benefit by immersing themselves in the other’s discipline. The author David Edwards, a biomedical engineering professor at Harvard, is obviously […]
Artists in China by Philip Tinari and Mario Ciampi reviewed by Aaron Moffett Artists have been an important part of China’s history for thousands of years. Fine artists in porcelain and ceramics have existed all the way back to the Han Dynasty. The Ming and Ching dynasties produced […]
Jean Arnold the Illustrator Comes to Town By Ruth Lubbers Several weeks ago, an invitation from the Utah Arts Council’s Rio Gallery landed on my desk for an intriguing exhibition titled This is Our Land: Discovering America & the World Through Original Illustrations from Children’s Books. And there, on the front […]
One of the most remarkable monographs to have been written in recent years is Marian Wardle’sMinerva Teichert: Pageants in Paint. That Wardle is the granddaughter of the venerable western and Mormon muralist is inconspicuous, and with exacting detail, Wardle has created the most important work to date about […]
