A brilliant, intricate interpretation of modern art's progress as it reflects the dictates of the museum, by a Harvard professor of English. Fisher casts the art museum as the major interpreter of industrialized culture, countering the pull of mass production by designating what is unique and ``irreplaceable''—what counts as art. Indeed, the museum has changed the way we look at objects- -crucifix and Greek vase alike—by extricating them from their cultural context, ``effacing'' their intended meaning, and rearranging them in a time-line of art history. In Fisher's provocative view, the ``natural art'' for ``museum culture'' is abstract art, its ``essential subject matter'' the ``linear ordering and the cancellation of content,'' each museum functions. Jasper Johns and Frank Stella aim their art at the museum, their ambition to make it ``the future's past.'' Johns's paintings go so far as to mimic the museum, effacing our own cultural symbols- -numbers, letters, and the American flag—of their meaning and reworking them as shards and as art. The ``knowing and sophisticated'' Stella paints in ``series'' ``ready to be swallowed whole by art history.'' Fisher grounds what is complicated and narrowly focused but exceptionally accessible academic theory in Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Meyer Shapiro, animating it with observations that stick: that all modern painting is about ``the stranger''; that ``it is memory rather than realism that photography drained from painting and sculpture''; that Degas conceals his shocking industrialization of the body by seeming to seize a bather's momentary pose; that our perception of the Parthenon frieze changes forever when fragments are brought down from their original elevated location to eye-level in a gallery. A ringing affirmation, in the company of Arthur Danto's Encounters and Reflections and Robert Hughes's Nothing if Not Critical (both 1990), that today art criticism is often contemporary art's most interesting aspect. (Forty-four illustrations—some seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-19-506046-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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