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My work for the last few years has gone beyond defining modernity in Asian art to looking at the circuits for the recognition and distribution of contemporary art in Asia. In particular these involve two simultaneous phenomena.[1] The first is the arrival of contemporary Asian artists on the international stage, chiefly at major cross-national exhibitions, including the Venice and São Paolo Biennales. This occurrence may be conveniently dated to Japanese participation at Venice in the 1950s,[2] followed by the inclusion of three contemporary Chinese artists in the Magiciens de la terre exhibition in Paris in 1989. The trend continued with… Full Review

These comments were originally prepared to provoke discussion in a session at the annual College Art Association meetings on Thursday, February 23, 2006, about the needs for a comprehensive textbook for introductory courses in the history of art. They should be read in that light and in tandem with a comprehensive review of ten currently available examples of such textbooks presented by Larry Silver and David A. Levine, Quo Vadis, Hagia Sophia? Art History’s Survey Texts,” also online at caa.reviews. My credentials for speaking here this afternoon are very, very slight. They… Full Review

H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art: The Western Tradition, 6th rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004). 1032 pages; 1326 illustrations, 976 in color. Cloth $95.00 Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 12th ed; 2 vols. (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005). 1150 pages; 1306 illustrations, almost all in color, Paper w/CD-ROM $189.90 Marilyn Stokstad et al., Art History, 2nd rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005). 1264 pages; 1409 illustrations, 1004 in color. Cloth w/CD-ROM $120.00 Frederick Hartt, Art: A History of Painting,… Full Review

Billboards and advertisements all over New York declare that “Manhattan is Modern Again,” often showing an image of angled sunlight raking an elegant building interior. The subscript directs you to the locus of this statement: “The new Museum of Modern Art reopens in Midtown on November 20.” These messages formed a long and careful campaign that generated breathless prepublicity in all media, secured a largely reverential art-world response, brought in twenty thousand visitors on opening day, and racked up record attendances ever since. Given the jewels of early and midcentury modernism that are the core of MoMA’s collection, nothing less… Full Review

See Christopher Reed's review of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture edited by Susan Fillin-Yeh. In the following two letters, Susan Fillin-Yeh, editor of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), and Robert E. Moore, a contributor to the volume, respond to Christopher Reed’s review of the book, published in caa.reviews June 18, 2002. Reed then responds to their letters. I have recently read Christopher Reed’s review of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture and wish to respond, for, as the book’s editor… Full Review

Meyer Schapiro’s choice of subjects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art was highly selective, focusing on artists and issues, concerned with the relation of art to politics, art to science, and certain kinds of personal expression. Belief in the subjectivity of vision underlies Schapiro’s engagement with modern art. That he drew, painted, and sculpted all his life, works figurative and abstract, may well have confirmed this belief.[1] While modern art was not his primary scholarly field, Schapiro’s insights were original and profound, and his impact far and wide. A scholar of medieval art and an interpreter of modern… Full Review

In this short essay, Michael Rabe responds to Padma Kaimal’s review of his book, The Great Penance at Mamallapuram: Deciphering a Visual Text (Chennai, Institute of Asian Studies, 2001), published in caa.reviews January 14, 2003. Rabe’s text first appeared in the spring/summer 2003 issue of the American Council for Southern Asian Art Newsletter. With the admitted ulterior interest of an author subject to review, I would like to offer a response to a couple points made by Padma Kaimal, as my contribution to Rebecca Brown’s call for reflections on how we utilize written texts in… Full Review

bq. O, what a world of profit and delight Of power, of honour, of omnipotence Is promised to the studious artisan! bq. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (I: 1, 54–57) Almost a century has passed since Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) was born; more than half a decade since his death. Yet even after a scholarly career that spanned most of the twentieth century, there is a sense of the unfinished about his legacy. For one thing, his publications are still emerging, including several major public lectures. Even his 1966 Norton lectures on medieval art at Harvard… Full Review

By the end of his career, Meyer Schapiro’s work had earned him virtually unanimous acclaim; art historians as different in their fields and approaches as T. J. Clark and John Pope-Hennessy placed him at the summit of the discipline.[1] Now, six years after his death, his stature is unchanged. Thomas Crow has recently upheld Schapiro’s sixty-year old article on the sculptures of Souillac as a role model for theoretically engaged art historians whose concern with images leaves them frustrated by the logocentric origins of much contemporary theory.[2] This call to imitate instead of avoid the past is highly unusual in… Full Review