2011 Centennial Project

Lucy Oakley, Editor-in-Chief, caa.reviews (2008–11), Editorial Board (2006–8), and Council of Field Editors (Nineteenth-Century Art: 2004–8)

In celebration of the College Art Association’s 100th birthday, the caa.reviews editorial board presents the top “readers’ picks,” one for each year of publication since the journal’s origin online in September 1998. Each pick is accompanied by a brief description—illuminating the review’s contributions to, influence on, and place in the field—written by current and former members of the editorial board, Council of Field Editors, and editors-in-chief. To identify the most popular reviews, we used statistics from Google Analytics beginning in 2007, when they first became available for the site, through 2010. This enabled us to see the total number of hits on individual reviews over the course of three years. The editorial board chose this quantitative approach to the journal’s history in part to highlight a key difference between caa.reviews and CAA’s other two, print-based journals—we can track closely what our readers read and learn which reviews they are accessing.

Even though this statistical measurement doesn’t allow us to see what readers were choosing before 2007, the Google Analytics list is quite revealing. Earlier reviews have continued to be among the most popular, years after they first appeared online. Despite its early publication date, it did not come as a complete surprise to learn that the review with the most hits by far (almost 7,000) is Quitman Eugene Phillips’s assessment of Timon Screech’s Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 from February 4, 2000. Holding a distant second place, with about 2,000 hits, is Monica McTigue’s review of several books on Installation art, published on February 6, 2006. Next on the list is Swati Chattopadhyay’s review of Kamil Khan Mumtaz’s Modernity and Tradition: Contemporary Architecture in Pakistan, published in 2001. These selections reveal the journal’s continuity while highlighting the diversity of its coverage across geographic and subject boundaries.

In presenting the caa.reviews Centennial Project, I’d like to thank not only my predecessors as editor-in-chief, Larry Silver and Rick Asher, as well as Sheryl Reiss, my designated successor, but also all past and current editorial-board members, field editors, and CAA staff members whose hard work and dedication to the journal over the years have made its publication possible. Last but not least, we are all deeply grateful to the hundreds of reviewers whose careful readings and lucid analyses have made perusing caa.reviews so richly rewarding, and whose inspired contributions have sparked readers to return for more, again and again.

Happy Birthday, CAA, with many thanks to you, our readers!