General Interest

These books offer some useful and occasionally provocative ideas about art and visual culture.  Most are more historical in nature (as opposed to those of critical interest), but they are nonetheless applicable to contemporary studio practices and concerns.

While Elkins's purpose with this book is to invite art historians to cast a wider net in their choice of subjects, Domain of Images has a lot to say to artists too.  This is because the nature of artistic training today is so deeply imbued with the history of art's past, especially the canon of masterpieces, that we tend to overlook other kinds of images that saturate our visual culture such as logos, graphs, diagrams, and so on.  The genius of this book is the way Elkins combines art history's methods of disciplined study with an artist's eye for the visually unusual, novel, or puzzling.  Elkins thus models both a sensitivity to visually intriguing phenomena and a rigorous approach to probing these images.  And it's no accident that Elkins combines these skills with such gracefulness: He trained as an artist before becoming an art historian (both his M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from the University of Chicago).  So if you think you might be interested in subjects like "Pictures as Ruined Notations," "Allographs," "Subgraphemics," or "Ghosts and Natural Images," this is the book for you.

This book is essentially about the origins and evolution of the concept of art as a distinct category of objects in western societies.  It is organized more or less chronologically and ranges from ancient Greece, when the idea of "art" as we use it today did not exist, to the late twentieth century.  Along the way, the author also discusses the transformation of art makers from artisans to artists, the impact of the marketplace and public institutions like museums, the separation of art (painting, sculpture, etc.) from craft (ceramics, metalwork, etc.), and the particular case of photography and its eventual assimilation as an art form.  All in all, the author provides a fresh and useful reminder that the very notion of "art" as a special category of objects is, itself, an arbitrary --and perhaps eventually a temporary-- artifact of western culture.

Criticism and Theory: Introductions and Surveys

I receive more questions about contemporary criticism and theory than any other topic.  This is an enormous subject and not one than lends itself to readily accessible summations.  To make matters even more complicated, most of the ideas that finds their way into contemporary art criticism originated in other disciplines, particularly literary criticism and theory.  So if you want to dig into the origins of certain notions, you will almost certainly have to read the works of literature scholars and interpret their ideas by analogy to art.  The following books, then, span essentially three disciplines: art, literature, and philosophy.  Taken together, they offer a good range of approaches to contemporary strategies for thinking about a variety of cultural expressions, past and present, and in art as well as other forms.

Far and away the best survey of its kind, this is a collection of extracts from the writings of major thinkers from the beginnings of western thought to the present day.  It is organized chronologically by author with the titles of the selections listed under each name.  However, the primary table of contents is followed by an "Alternative Table of Contents" that is arranged thematically under four major parts: "Modern and Contemporary Schools and Movements" (including cultural studies, deconstruction and poststructuralism, feminist theory and criticism, etc.), "Genres" (epic and romance, the novel, popular culture, etc.), "Historical Periods" (from classical theory and criticism to Victorian theory and criticism), and "Issues and Topics" (authorship, the body, canon/tradition, gender and sexuality, representation and realism, etc.).  The book has an excellent index and, best of all, each entry is prefaced with a brief and clearly written introduction to the author and subsequent text(s).  Though hefty (over 2,600 pages!), the anthology is reasonably priced and belongs on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in understanding major trends in western theory and criticism, as well as the interrelations and genealogy of these ideas.

Teaching Art: Histories, Practices, Theories

Whether or not you intend to go into university-level teaching, it's good to know something about why art is taught the way it is here.  The following books provide a good overview of the historical origins of studio art teaching, the particular direction it took in the United States, and some of the problems with it today.

Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

A history of studio art teaching that concentrates primarily on the origins and practices of art academies beginning during the Renaissance in Florence and continuing through early twentieth-century experiments like the Bauhaus.  The book concludes with a chapter on the university art department and the challenges of teaching modernism today.  I especially recommend the chapters on "Doctrine," "The Copy," "Art and Science," and "Originality."  But the entire book is worthwhile.

Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Advanced art teaching in the United States has become primarily a province of universities and colleges, and even the independent institutions (like the several art institutes around the country) have fashioned their curriculum structures after university models.  This has had significant consequences for how art programs are constructed, their content, and their relationship to other fields of study.  Singerman's book explores the nature of university art teaching by looking at the origins of art teaching in America, its transformation into a university discipline, and subsequent consequences.  Art Subjects is a terrific book and a "must read" for anyone entering university teaching.

James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught (Urbana: University of Illlinois Press, 2001).

Elkins, like the eighteenth-century philosophical skeptic David Hume, is at his best when he's questioning familiar bromides --in Elkins's case in contemporary art scholarship and practice-- that are so common most of us have stopped thinking about them.  Here he explores the teachableness of art to sometimes hilarious if also melancholy effects.  He begins with a brief history of art teaching before moving on to other subjects including theories and critiques.  While Elkins does not have much to offer in the way of improvements, his observations are nonetheless thought-provoking and useful for students and teachers alike.