Sixteen philosophical essays (most previously published in academic journals) that, in the vein of Encounters and Reflections (1990), wrestle with questions of art by the critic who contends that Andy Warhol brought Western art history to an end. What Danto (Philosophy/Columbia) does so brilliantly is to take Warhol's Brillo Box, or a painting by Mark Tansey, or the growing presence of museum stores and then, by invoking Hegel, Kant, Rembrandt, etc., set these art-world phenomena ablaze with meaning. A solid-black canvas in a 1990 exhibition becomes a symbol of the final moment of the Modernist narrative—what Danto calls ``the end of art''—just as an open window seen soon after at the Museum of Modern Art's ``High & Low'' exhibition signifies the opening-up of the museum to real life. Not without humor does Danto, in ``Censorship and Subsidy in the Arts,'' compare crowd- pressed viewers at the Boston Museum's Monet exhibition with pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela, both being ``in the presence of things of great moment, worth a sacrifice.'' In another of the most engaging pieces here, ``The Museum of Museums,'' he explains the country's ``resurgent puritanism'' as stemming in part from ``the sense of the Temple profaned.'' Confronting Robert Mapplethorpe's ``terrifyingly obscene'' photographs, Danto claims to hate the experts who read them purely as ``formal exercises.'' And he persuasively argues that ``art cannot be integral to meaningful lives without the shadow of dissent, difference, offense.'' Danto's arguments on the nature of art, metaphor, beauty, values, and narrative tradition are long, detailed, and complex: ``Explanation through reasons as against explanation through causes connects with our distinction, in the way they tend to cancel one another out.'' An intellectual update from a profound thinker whose voice enhances the art and culture he contemplates. (Thirteen illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-11242-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
Categories: ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
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A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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American Lawyer deputy editor Anderson chronicles the legal contests over the administration of America’s largest private art collection.
The author begins with a fair portrait of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, amasser of the famous Barnes Collection and creator of the eponymous foundation charged with its preservation. Barnes received his medical degree at 20 and went on to wrest control of a pharmaceutical company that owned exclusive rights to manufacture an internationally prescribed gonorrhea medicine. (His signature style throughout his life was to hire first-rate legal counsel and pursue his litigious course until he got what he wanted.) Barnes’s fortune, preserved through the Depression, permitted the assembly of a fabulous collection that included 180 Renoirs; it’s currently valued at six billion dollars. Just before his death in 1951, the doctor changed the terms of the foundation’s indenture, granting control to the trustees of Lincoln College, the oldest black college in America, setting the stage for a long round of disputes. While the collection gained tremendously in value over the next four decades, the size of the endowment that paid for the upkeep of the French Renaissance palace that housed it dwindled through mismanagement. In the 1990s, foundation president Richard H. Glanton, a high-profile African-American lawyer, oversaw the galleries’ renovation and undertook the expensive litigation responsible for bringing the foundation to the edge of ruin. Anderson describes these conflicts in a work that by his own admission is “a legal tale” rather than a scholarly biography or a work of art history. The absence of footnotes, he explains, springs from the desire of his best sources to remain anonymous. That’s not surprising, considering the rancor all this legal wrangling has generated, including a lawsuit over a parking lot instituted in federal court that invoked the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Clear journalistic prose makes sense of the befuddling legal entanglements in an ongoing battle that has become notorious in the art world and beyond. (16 illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04889-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Categories: ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
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