New Books in Art

In her excellent new book The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East (UNC Press, 2015), Kishwar Rizvi, Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, interrogates the interaction of history, memory, and architecture by exploring arguably the most important sacred space in Islam: the mosque. By combining the study of religion, history, and architecture in the most compelling of ways, Rizvi highlights the material and political significance of the mosque as a transnational symbol. While focused on the contexts of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the theoretical insights of this richly textured book extend much beyond the contemporary Middle East. In our conversation, we talked about the concept of the transnational mosque, the historicist desires and assumptions that often undergird projects of mosque construction in Muslim societies, the transnational mosque, religious identity and international politics, and ways in which mobile networks of architects and corporations reorient our understanding of what we mean by the Middle East. This stunningly well-written book is also aesthetically pleasing, populated with wonderful visuals and images. It will also make an excellent reading for both undergraduate and graduate courses on sacred space, the modern Middle East, Islam and architecture, and religion, mobility, and globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What is cultural taste? How is it formed, imagined and patterned? In Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), David Wright, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, explores the theories and practices framing cultural taste in contemporary society in order to account for the social role of cultural taste. The book explains how taste is made knowable, through quantification and measurement, moves through an explanation of differing cultural taste patterns, including the all important figure of the omnivore, and narrates the impact of technology on cultural taste. The book accounts for the governing and globalisation of cultural taste, thinking through the rise of cosmopolitan tastes, as well as engaging with ideas about taste and expertise. The book uses a range of examples, including detailed discussions of contemporary art works such as Greyson Perry’s The lovely consensus. Although grounded in sociology, the book speaks to debates, and thus to readers, from across arts and cultural subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) he has given us cultural criticism through a set of provocative portraits of creative Americans at mid-twentieth century who defied convention, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and forged a new sensibility of personal liberation. From John Cage, who in 1952 explored the musical possibilities of silence in the composition 4′ 33″ to Chris Burden’s 1974 performance piece Trans-fixed nailing him to a Volkswagen; both challenged the standing categories of art and aesthetics. Two-dozen dramatic vignettes demonstrate the excess of violence, sex, and madness that blurred the boundaries between art, artist and audience. Creatives such as Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Andy Warhol, and Anne Sexton populate his pages. The fascination with excess cut across diverse expressions taking art and audiences into uncharted territories of the imagination erasing the distinctions between high and low art. Cotkin argues that the advant-garde pushing the limits with a mania for the new and unfettered subjectivity constitutes American culture today. For all its transgressions the New Sensibility was politically impotent and its excess fed the explosive growth of capitalism, consumerism and the golden age of advertising. The New Sensibility became stale, expected, and commodified. With a weakened power to shock it has become our culture, our sensibility, yet still offering the possibility of something passionate and new on the boundary between liberation and limits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today I’m talking with Lynn Gamwell about Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2015). This book is a breathtaking combination of scholarship and beauty, tracing the interplay of mathematics and art throughout mankind’s history, East and West. Gamwell is a lecturer in the history of mathematics and science at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and thus she is uniquely positioned to write a book that brings together the two disparate cultures described by C.P. Snow in his 1959 essay. Snow would have appreciated how the author communicates the depth, passion, and beauty that characterize each culture, while describing how each inspires the other. The in-depth discussion is brought to life by 440 stunning artworks and 102 crystal-clear math diagrams. This is a big, beautifully produced book that you will want to place on your coffee table. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Roberta Wue‘s new book brings readers into the world of late Qing Shanghai, a center of art, culture, and entertainment. As artists fled to the city after the Taiping Rebellion, they helped create new ways of being an artist that emerged from new kinds of relationships between them, their audiences, and their work. Art Worlds: Artists, Images, and Audiences in Late 19th-Century Shanghai (University of Hawaii Press, 2014) focuses on Ren Bonian (1840-1895), a celebrated painter of the Shanghai School, and his circles and audiences. The chapters each use a particular medium or format to explore the changing landscape of the arts in Shanghai, from painted fans and fan shops, to advertisements and mass media (including an interesting account of art world activism around famine relief), to illustrated books and periodicals (including inserts accompanying the Dianshizhai huabao), to portraits of members of the art world (including a truly amazing image of a man about to butcher a dog). It is a fascinating and beautiful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture’s social role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical documents, and the story is a pleasure to read for specialists and non-experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Ink landscape painting was distinctive to the Song dynasty, and the Northern Song period was a special time for the medium. By the tenth century, this kind of painting emerged as a “scholars’ category” whose “values were especially worthy of support” in critical scholarly discourse, according to Ping Foong‘s fascinating new book. Bringing together paintings, poems, colophons, texts about painting, and other sources, Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) looks carefully at the imperial establishment’s efforts “to cultivate the genre of ink landscape painting and its iconography as a dynastic project.” In a story that focuses on Shenzong’s favorite painter: Guo Xi (after 1000-ca. 1090), Part I of The Efficacious Landscape brings readers into the spaces of the Song imperial city and their political connotations, from a careful exploration of the political import of the paintings decorating the walls of the Hanlin Institute, to a reading of unusually-juxtaposed works by Guo Xi and Li Gonglin as political commentaries on contemporary ritual and reform, to an argument about the court’s imbrication in creating a particular lineage of ink landscape painters. Part II looks at the significance and outcome of a century of the court investing in ink landscape as a cultural medium as it gained new social status and dimensions, due in part to the appearance of intimate landscape painting scenes inspired by the work of Guo Xi. This part of the book features a wonderful and surprising reading of the Metropolitan Museum of Art handscroll by Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance that places a careful analysis of the scroll into conversation with the poetry of Su Shi and his colleagues. This part of the book also shows how intimate landscape paintings became socially acceptable outlets of expression, as they were used as private communications between scholars and forms of social currency exchanged on particular social occasions. The book concludes by reconsidering Guo Xi’s legacy under Huizong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

As demographic trends continue to mark the so-called “Latinization” of the U.S., pundits across various media outlets struggle to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of this reality. In popular discourse, Latinoas/os are often referred to as a monolithic group in terms of cultural practices, voting patterns, and consumer preferences. Of course, Latinas/os are one of the most diverse ethnic groups in the U.S., comprising more than 14 nationalities (including indigenous groups) with variances in language, cultural practices, and political attitudes that mirror their geographic distribution. In Thirteen Ways of Looking At Latino Art (Duke University Press, 2014) the accomplished essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans enters into conversation with the distinguished philosopher Jorge J.E. Gracia around 13 pieces of Latina/o art in order to excavate the underpinnings of Latina/o identity and culture. Each work of art provides the impetus for lively exchanges between Stavans and Garcia over the purpose and politics of historical representation, artistic expression, ethno-racial identification, ethics, and religion. Written in an engaging dialogic form, the reader is permitted to listen in as Stavans and Gracia reflect (and at time disagree) over the meanings and significance of each art piece to the broader Latina/o experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art