Book reviews on visual arts books and books related to Utah’s art community.
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 […]
DADA: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris Ed. Leah Dickerman, with essays by Brigid Doherty, Dorothea Dietrcih, Sabine T. Kreibel, Michael R. Taylor, Janine Mileaf, Mathhew S. Witkovsky. National Gallery of Art, Washington in association with D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2005. ISBN: 0-89468-313-6 (softcover); 1-933045-20-5 (hardcover) […]
Sometime last fall I picked up Art and the Power of Placement, an insightful and scholarly work written by Victoria Newhouse and published by The Monacelli Press. At the time, I thought I would review the book for our recently introduced column “Recently Read,” but days before 15 […]
by Chris Brooks During the Holidays I read Jonathan Harr’s The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece published by Random House last year. Harr, a magazine writer and journalist, is best known for his bestselling non-fiction work A Civil Action, which was made into a movie […]
In his elegantly written and accessible read, “The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa,” Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, explores the creative process as it is revealed in the lives of artists and non-artists alike. Kimmelman brings a critic’s […]
Book Review: First Sight of the Desert Artist Interrupted: The Life and Art of Ella Peacock by Tony Watson [portfolio_slideshow] The University of Utah Press recently published a biography of Spring City artist Ella Peacock by first-time author Kathryn J. Abajian. Abajian’s biography, entitled First Sight of the […]
