Tl;dr Another critical theory jargon book that oversimplifies, craps all over the place and just stinks. It’s also makes a fascinating subject incredibly boring. Avoid at all costs if you are truly interested in art, history or art history.

Specifically, she portrays critical theory as a dumbed down collection of isms (all but feminism created by European white men she constantly reminds us have warped humanity). Aside: Read the VSI on Critical Theory which is excellent if you want a more sophisticated view, although I still remain baffled why so many humanities academics are so enthralled by it.

She then claims this basket of isms, gives us deep and new insights into understanding art history that undermines the ideas of old white men whose paradigms of art fall into one of these baskets:
- classical art as a pinnacle from which everything declined
- history is progress from the primitive to now
- art is a work of genius European white men; women, minorities and non-European can’t create great art
- art isn’t about politics and culture but old white man values like beauty

Besides the terrible over-simplifications, straw man arguments (no straw people here), and misrepresentations of several thinkers ideas, there are also inaccuracies which always drive me nuts (e.g. ancient Babylonians collected artifacts long before the Greeks, iconoclasm only lasted 150 years so of course tons of icons existed 600 years after this controversy was settled). Come on Oxford, why aren’t your editors doing their job and fact checking?

Worst of all, you don’t come away with any coherent view of what art or art history is or should be. Plus it’s all terribly boring to read (yes I know I’ve said that already but…)

Perhaps this book grated on me so much because I recently finished the VSI on architecture, which discusses similar themes and issues in a closely related field. That book was highly interesting, enlightening, well presented, thought provoking and jargon free. ( )

Caveat emptor: this is about the discipline of art history, not about the history of art. That said, it's a very nice piece about that discipline. It briefly tells you what art historians have done and what Arnold thinks they ought to do. Since it's a book written by an academic humanist who made her name in the 90s, it's massively and turgidly ideological--it's not enough to say that art history should pay attention to, you know, women and people who aren't pasty, you also have to self-flagellate and (more offensive) flagellate others for failing to do so, as if you would have known better before feminism. It's really a disgrace that Vasari didn't include more women artists in his work, right? At times Arnold comes close to suggesting that what art historians should do is limited entirely to this flagellation.

Thankfully, she has more interesting things to say than that, and had she said them at greater length and skipped the 'KILL ALL THE WHITE MEN'* stuff, the book could have been truly excellent. Well, except for one thing: her readings of philosophical aesthetics bear roughly the same relation to the actual thoughts of those aestheticians as Braque's cubist violins bear to, well, violins, except that Braque meant to do that. Her own theory is a good one, though, and looks more or less like what lit types like me call reader response theory mixed with an appreciation for that fact that artworks really do exist.

The writing's occasionally horrific, but that's the be expected.


*sample strangeness: "instead of calling for a fundamental shift in art practice and appreciation, [Clement] Greenberg now worked to exclude from the privileged domain of high art... the work of women artists, minority groups, and elements of popular culture." I have no doubt that Greenberg's actual pronouncements may have had the *effect* of 'excluding' women and minority artists, simply because they weren't working in his preferred style. But to say that he "worked to exclude" them is something else all together, implying a kind of VAST CONSERVATIVE CONSPIRACY of the type better left to the conservatives who actually believe in vast conspiracies, because then they don't have to face up to their/our own complicity or the horrific consequences of the things they/we love. ( )