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THE CRISIS OF CRITICISM

Name: THE CRISIS OF CRITICISM
Author: Maurice Berger
ISBN: 1-56584-417-3

CULTURAL CRITICISM TODAY

edited by Maurice Berger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1998

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A collection of provocative, often insightful essays on the endangered state of contemporary arts criticism. Alarmed by critics’ failure to act as —aesthetic mentors— to difficult new work, editor Berger, a senior fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, has selected a diverse range of essays that speak to the challenges critics now face. Berger’s contributors, Homi Bhabha, Arlene Croce, bell hooks, Joyce Carol Oates, and Wayne Koestenbaum, among others, all harbor profoundly different opinions on critics’ responsibilities, and Berger highlights those contrasts by launching his collection with a now-infamous article by Croce. The dance critic for the New Yorker refused to see Bill T. Jones’s —Still/Here,— about AIDS, and yet savaged it anyway, calling the piece a prime example of —victim art.— Jones, who is black, gay, and HIV-positive, had committed the apparently unpardonable act of including gravely ill performers; as a result, Croce considered his work to be —undiscussable.— And yet her dismissal provides the grounds for lively debate: Joyce Carol Oates and Homi Bhabha rebut Croce’s points with verve and clarity. The collection benefits from such momentum; unfortunately, it isn’t uniformly sustained—as when the subject changes to fashion, for example. On the whole, however, Berger has chosen contributors fearless enough to question the role of the critic in a society that has become increasingly hostile toward artists and their work and brave enough to implicate themselves in the failing of much art criticism. As he surely intended, their honesty supports his own argument for criticism that —breaks through the constraints of adjectives to inspire, move, and incite the reader.— Although Berger’s outlook is grim, his collection offers the undeniable pleasure of reading intellectually stimulating arguments about the role of contemporary criticism.

Pub Date: June 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-56584-417-3

Page Count: 192

Publisher: The New Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

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THE BODY

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE HUMAN FORM

by William A. Ewing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1994

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Through thoughtful essays, Ewing (Breaking Bounds, not reviewed) transforms a fantastic collection of photographs into a history of photography itself. With careful arrangement and stylish writing free of art- critic blather, Ewing has rendered accessible an almost intimidatingly wide range of works. The introduction covers attitudes toward photographed nudity (and therefore toward sexuality), beginning with a photograph of two topless Zulu women published in a British magazine circa 1879. Setting a pattern for the remainder of the book, Ewing discusses how these photographs reproduced their subjects and simultaneously served as a mirror for contemporary British culture. Chapters carry vague titles like ``Probes'' and ``Metamorphosis,'' which are pithily defined (in these cases as ``the realm of scientific exploration'' and ``the body transformed,'' respectively). Each section starts with a mini- essay expounding a basic principle and tying together the photos. For example, ``Flesh'' links Regina DeLuise's nude woman gripping the heavy, knotted rope of a tire swing and Robert Davies's close- up of a navel. ``Eros'' ponders the personal nature of sexuality, and an 1865 photograph of one woman inserting an umbrella in a second, tuba-playing model's behind is grouped with some squeaky- clean, pin-up-style shots from the 1950s. The shocking chapter entitled ``Estrangement'' contains a range of striking, often disturbing images, including a servant crucified for killing his boss's son and a grotesquely obese sideshow man with a relatively tiny towel placed over his behind, as well as a series showing ``the Hilton Siamese Twins of Texas'' cheerfully swimming, playing tennis, dancing, and flirting in tandem. Some ground is covered twice, and there is an occasional oversight (the essay on ``Estrangement'' brings up the 19th-century popularity of photographs of corpses of loved ones, but no examples are offered). Overall, however, the result is engrossing and the balance of text and photos just right. Stunning, clever, and very provoking.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8118-0762-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

- BOOK REVIEW
HUMAN.KIND.
by William A. Ewing & Elisa Rusca

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DEGAS IN NEW ORLEANS

ENCOUNTERS IN THE CREOLE WORLD OF KATE CHOPIN AND GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE

by Christopher Benfey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 1997

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This lifeless account of Edgar Degas's 1872 visit to New Orleans unsuccessfully tries to link his artistic breakthrough with the city's Reconstruction-era social turmoil. Benfey (American Literature/Mt. Holyoke Coll.; The Double Life of Stephen Crane, 1992) claims the French painter's five-month sojourn with his mother's family ``is something of a legend in New Orleans.'' There's nothing legendary in Benfey's workaday account. A private man bent on being ``famous but unknown,'' Degas stayed indoors because his eyesight (which he fancied was failing) couldn't stand the intense southern light; he pined for black models but painted family members instead. Admitting the challenge posed by his ``notoriously secret'' subject, Benfey expands his critical field of vision to encompass New Orleans writers George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin—even though there's no evidence they crossed paths with Degas. Their work, obsessed with the enormous changes transforming New Orleans society in the Civil War's aftermath, is supposed to help us ``decipher the underlying meanings in Degas paintings and letters.'' Chopin gets top billing, but the largely forgotten Cable gets more ink, including a provocative but unsubstantiated suggestion that this creator of the archetypal ``tragic mulatto'' is the granddaddy of southern literature. Benfey, the first biographer to focus on Degas's American roots, adds valuable insight to the artist's work with his analysis of the effects American technology, architecture, and commerce had on his paintings. But Benfey's glosses of Chopin and Cable don't bring Degas into sharper focus; they push the enigmatic Frenchman further to the edges of an already sprawling, speculative biography. Conjecture about the psychological root of Degas's racial ambivalence—namely the possibility of black blood in the American side of the family—is overstated and underdocumented. Ambitious, perhaps, but Benfey's wide net nevertheless allows his primary subject to slip away, lost in a fog of lit-crit theory and psychobabble. (illustrations, not seen)