A comprehensive treatise for collectors who regularly struggle between rationality and passion.
Rubel and Rosman (The Tapestry of Culture, 2009) explain the history, psychology and economics of “the unruly passion” of collecting tribal art.
Collecting can be an obsession, an investment, or an emotional pull. But mostly, the authors assert, it’s “a game.” It has winners, losers and rules, and its main goals are hunting and acquiring. More specifically, fine-art collecting is like politics, where wealth begets power and reputation. The authors, both research associates from the American Museum of Natural History’s department of anthropology, write that collecting tribal art “goes back more than 6 centuries.” During the Age of Exploration, Portuguese and Dutch sailors returned from overseas with goods made by so-called “savages.” These “artificial curiosities” so thrilled the Europeans that African and Oceanic societies began to make objects to appeal directly to European sensibilities. The authors provide tales of collectors, from the Medicis to the modern-day de Menils, and case studies that examine the unique ecosystem of collectors, dealers, auctions and museums. They also investigate those who collect for commercial purposes and those “guided by rules of taste, connoisseurship and aesthetics.” Using extensive research, the authors highlight seminal moments in tribal art history—such as how “primitive art” collecting by Pablo Picasso and others led to the creation of modernism and how photographer Alfred Stieglitz used ethnographic objects. They also show how the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to a greater appreciation for the cultural significance of the “exotic.” Although Rubel and Rosman concentrate on tribal-art collecting, their book also examines collecting in general and what separates it from “mere acquisitiveness.” Although sometimes a bit pedantic, this book holds great treasures, such as the tale of a 19th-century “souvenir”: an Apache necklace made of human fingers.
A comprehensive treatise for collectors who regularly struggle between rationality and passion.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0741480590
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
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 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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