AIR GUITAR
By Dave Hickey
Art Issues Press, $17.95 paper
While art is intended to hold meaning for a variety of viewers, both informed and uninformed, it also exists within the context of current and historical practice. For all those who find that context off-putting, “Air Guitar,” by Dave Hickey, is mandatory reading. Hickey, an associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, draws his ideas as an art critic and scholar from his upbringing by jazz musicians in the ’50s and his decision to open an art gallery after abandoning the final defense of his doctoral dissertation in literature and linguistics in the late ’60s.
In a fluid, vernacular style that drifts from the humorously anecdotal to the revelatory theoretical, the 23 essays that make up “Air Guitar” focus on the way art functions in the context of everyday life, beyond the venues of official culture. Hickey’s meditations on cultural icons, including Liberace, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol and Norman Rockwell, seamlessly reconcile the essential coexistence of the high- and low-brow and its purported effect on the cultural future. Hickey’s relentlessly personal take on the subject of art–a subject met so often in recent years with hostility from politicians and evangelists–would cure the most hesitant reader of his or her reluctance to take a personal stand on art, with the realization that all cultural references in life authorize us to make objects meaningful. Hickey’s enduring belief in the democratic license afforded by a life lived in the serious consideration of art is as infectious as any evangelical decree, making the anti-art pose of so many seem positively unpatriotic.
DISCOVERING ART:
A User’s Guide to the World of Collecting
By Jeanne Frank
Thunder’s Mouth Press, $14.95 paper
While Dave Hickey is content calling a new art patronage to arms while waxing eloquent on the likes of Hank Williams and Siegfried and Roy, others take a
more traditional tack when trying to democratize the connoisseurship of fine art. This is the approach used in Jeanne Frank’s “Discovering Art: A User’s Guide to the World of Collecting.” Beginning with a friendly tone, Frank, a private art dealer, encourages those interested but perhaps uneducated in fine art to explore museums and galleries, discovering personal likes and dislikes. Frank offers simple methods to approaching artwork, such as determining an affinity for figurative or nonfigurative work and gaining a rudimentary knowledge of art history to ascertain a vocabulary in the conventional valuation of art objects. The book outlines how to buy art at galleries and auction, and through private dealers; the custodial responsibility of collectors to works of art; and the authentication and insurance of pieces with impressive provenance. But “Discovering Art” is distinctly a guide to explicate the practical issues of the collection and appraisal of, and the investment in, fine art. While the book boasts a brief overview of historical movements, it is too rudimentary for the novice to begin a self-education.
ART PAST/ART PRESENT, 3rd Edition
By David G. Wilkins, Bernard Schultz and Katheryn M. Linduff
Harry N. Abrams, $90
Evincing a classically academic style, the third edition of “Art Past/Art Present,” by David G. Wilkins, Bernard Schultz and Katheryn M. Linduff appears to be a (literally)
lighter, condensed version of the better-known “History of Art,” by H.W. and Anthony F. Janson. The goal of the authors was to provide a basic introductory text for art neophytes and 100-level college students. After an engaging overview of experiencing, viewing and analyzing fine art, “Art Past/Art Present” outlines every major art period from prehistoric and ancient times to the most contemporary developments of Postmodernism. In recent years, texts such as this have been criticized for overlooking the artistic achievements of non-European cultures. In this third edition, “Art Past/Art Present” attempts to satisfy this multicultural call with a new segment, “Global Timescope,” which graphically represents the significant art achievements and historical events of Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East, all in context of one another. The book is similarly inclusive with occasional nods to female artists who have long been absent from the annals of art history. “Art Past/Art Present” is an impressive reference with which any viewer could look at the collections of major museums or the gallery offerings of emerging artists with an academically informed gaze.
THE WIDENING CIRCLE:
The Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art
By Barry Schwabsky
Cambridge University Press, $54.95
This collection of critical essays closely examines visual art in the context of its creation by both the artist and his or her historical influences as well as by the viewer, who completes a work of art by his or her subjective interpretation. In an impressively straightforward style, Barry Schwabsky brings the reader to the studios of a variety of American and European artists working over the last 35 years to audit their practice as influenced by High Modernism, the mid-century movement cited by Schwabsky as “the triumph of American painting.”
FRANCIS BACON: Anatomy of an Enigma
By Michael Peppiatt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30
In “Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,” Michael Peppiatt removes the world of art from theoretical dialogue and brings it to the personal level. Peppiatt, a longtime friend of the world-renowned Bacon, provides a glimpse into the artist’s world. Bacon’s odd childhood spent with unaffectionate parents amid the hostilities of war-torn Ireland and Europe and his travels through Berlin and Paris of the ’20s and ’30s as a young adult provide the obvious background for the artist’s future practice as a painter of dark, haunted, often deformed figures. Peppiatt’s ability to bring the artist to life through untempered accounts of his rampant generosity, flaring temperament and unrelenting ego satisfies many of the expectations one harbors about the extremes of the artistic lifestyle. While hardly a didactic analysis of Bacon’s oeuvre, this is an excellent biography of a painter that maintains a healthy romance of a life driven by artistic inspiration.
