Book reviews on visual arts books and books related to Utah’s art community.
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 […]
In the opening line to his new book Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, National Book Award-winning author Peter Gay writes, “Modernism is far easier to exemplify than to define.” In the following five hundred plus pages (as well as a weighty section of notes and bibliographical essays) Gay […]
When I heard that a new book about Bonnie Posselli was available, I jumped at the chance to write a review. I remember taking a weeklong painting class from Posselli several years ago where we were challenged to paint en plein-air every day. This was my first experience painting out […]
Recently Read: Vision, Reflection, & Desire in Western Painting reviewed by Shawn Rossiter If the crass commercialism of the holiday season has you down, if the increasingly sophisticated and invasive methods of appealing to your innate narcissism as a means to convince you to purchase more gadgets and […]
As a friend and I entered Michael Berry’s gallery for the November Gallery Stroll, my friend turned to me and said, “I’d love to know where these artists get their inspiration and ideas.” And then, there was an answer, right in front of us, Pilar Pobil’s new book, My Kitchen […]
Putting this edition of 15 Bytes together, I was struck by something that Hadley Rampton said in her On the Spot feature. Remarking on a Giacometti exhibit she came across in the Czech town of Cesky Krumlov, Hadley said: “Along with being a wonderfully thought-provoking exhibit, the unexpectedness of it […]
When I picked up the February edition of 15 Bytes and read Jay Heuman’s missive on the miscomprehended Clement Greenberg, a response to an earlier article on criticism by Geoff Wichert, I thought to myself, “Oh no, there goes the neighborhood.” 15 Bytes had always been such a nice […]
Over the holidays I visited family in the Bay area and while there had the chance to visit the retrospective of Modernist sculptor Ruth Asawa. I was unfamiliar with Asawa before visiting the de Young, but was so impressed with her marvelous sculptures encountered there that I quickly developed […]
In the March 2003 edition of Art in America, Raphael Rubinstein, a senior editor of the magazine as well as poet and art critic, lamented the state of contemporary art criticism in an article entitled “A Quiet Crisis.” In the 15 Bytes edition of that month, Rubinstein’s article […]
As a national experiment able and eager to invent itself from a relatively clean slate, and as a democracy open to multiple voices, America has been and continues to be a country where the nature and purpose of art is hotly debated. In his recently published book, Visual […]
October is the time for spooks and ghosts and this book, produced in conjunction with a 2005 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the prefect Halloween treat. The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult is a collection of images of ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly […]
by Ed Bateman Writing about art in a book without pictures might strike you as odd – something like singing about dancing. But since works of art also have meaning, who better to unpack that meaning than someone whose passion is ideas – a trained philosopher. Arthur C. Danto […]
As artists it is often easy to forget how magical the things that we do really are. We are so deeply involved with the phenomenon of seeing that, to us, its complexity can become invisible and be taken for granted. Human visual perception is the topic of Harvard […]
