A seasoned art scholar, editor and author presents an overview of art history with a suggested approach for identifying “true” visual art.
As the co-editor of the renowned art journal Aristos and co-author of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (2000), Kamhi brings to her newest book decades of study and practical experience in the art world. She provides a history of visual arts as viewed by Aristotle, Kant, Rand and others, and offers her list of “basic assumptions” about “true” art’s essential characteristics: “First, all works of art are made with special skill and care—they are not the product of casual whim, chance, or accident,” and, among other assertions, “They are not abstract.” She concludes: “Any work that does not possess all these attributes is either failed art or non-art.” In Chapters 3 and 4, Kamhi reviews 20th-century innovations she believes depart from conventionally accepted visual arts—including abstract art, pop art, installation art and similar visual art forms. Other chapters cover film as art, art education, the role art critics have played in promoting bad art, and the rewards of “real art.” Chapter 7, perhaps the book’s most engaging, reveals that, according to data from cognitive science, emotions are tied to sensory experiences, and perceptions of beauty and meaning aren’t really subjective. Online links to dozens of artists’ works help bring the text to life, and the extensive chapter endnotes offer solid supporting resources for further study. Kamhi’s writing is forceful and persuasive as she defends her conventional concept of art: “Prior to the early twentieth century, artists…employed imagery to embody meaning.” Abstract art is not “an intelligible vehicle of meaning or emotional expression,” she says; rather, it is “essentially a failed enterprise.” Certain appreciators might agree, but the art world no doubt has a compelling rebuttal.
An impressive companion for advanced studies in visual arts, accessible enough for general-interest readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ingram
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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