Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico, Caitlin Frances Bruce engages in an extended ethnographic case study of graffiti culture in León, Mexico from the mid–1990s to 2018. Through the framework of attunement, Bruce structures the book around themes of frisson, noise, harmonization, amplification, resonance, and susurration to examine the shifts in attitudes towards graffiti in relation to the sociopolitical circumstances of early twenty-first century León. Terminology is paramount to this framing: the book begins with a glossary that defines terms in writing culture, and Bruce consistently uses “graffiti” rather than “street art” to… Full Review

David Hopkins and Disa Persson, the editors of Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde, open their volume with a contradiction central to cultural modernism: while nineteenth-century scientific medicine revolutionized understandings of germs and disease, holding out the promise of a healthier, more hygienic future, urban industrial life was also by its very nature a breeding ground for disease with its crowded cities, polluted skies, and dirty streets. The possibilities of a sanitized society were held in check, in other words, by the realities of an environment that had never been filthier. The fact that by the late nineteenth century… Full Review

As every art historian and material culture historian knows, the most basic objects— those that we encounter during the course of our lives—are central elements to our being, and the same held true for the French eighteenth-century artist. It is this question of the relationship between the artist and the objects they owned that drives Katie Scott and Hannah Williams’ study into the world of the artist’s things in their book, Artists’ Things: Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France. To the delight of eighteenth-century specialists—and this book does assume knowledge of the primary actors and institutions of the Parisian… Full Review

Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration is a deeply researched book that mobilizes ideas from philosophy, political theory, critical refugee studies, and other areas to assess the rhetorics of recent prominent artworks responding to a global surge of migration into Europe and the US in the last decade and a half. These artworks show migration to be a “dark coexistence” between “citizens-on-the-move” and those of affluent countries, appealing to audiences to transform this relation into a “luminous” one (8, 15). Christine Ross argues that art has responded to contemporary so-called migration crises by producing a series of… Full Review

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective is a collection of essays that came out of a symposium held at Princeton University dedicated to the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, organized in 2018–19 by Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock. The catalog accompanying that exhibition and Braddock’s other editorial venture with Christoph Irmscher, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009), form two major anchor points in the field of ecocritical art history, to which Picture Ecology is a ready addition. While these previous volumes focused on the art of the United… Full Review

From the outset, Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action mobilizes categories tied to 20th-century avant-gardism, populating the siege against the division between art and life with a wide array of radical characters and groups from heterogeneous backgrounds. As Millner-Larsen suggests, what most of them have in common is a “minor” status in the histories of the avant-garde after 1945 (14–15), but whose practices and redefinitions of the social role of art point to crucial contacts and thresholds between aesthetics and politics often not found in the discussions surrounding the “major” avant-gardes of the period… Full Review

In April 2023, with 1.429 billion people, India, the world’s fifth-largest economy, surpassed China as the world’s most populous country. What does this say about the nation’s art ecology? Does it translate to a proliferation of art galleries? A thriving art market? A flourishing of art schools? A diversity of art practices? With her training in both anthropology and art history, and based on decades of fieldwork in Mumbai and Delhi, Karin Zitzewitz has written an excellent and lavishly illustrated book that examines how artists in India, over seventeen prosperous years before a market crash, have put themselves on the… Full Review

In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, materiality is the message. Oliver Wunsch explores the shifting, often competing meanings of physical fragility in eighteenth-century French art. Originally an aspect of courtly social aesthetics, delicacy (délicatesse) became an aspect of objecthood as well as personhood, a commodified material quality that was diversely cultivated, savored, criticized, and resisted. In an expanding, speculative market animated by artists seeking recognition and newly wealthy collectors seeking cultural legitimacy, “delicacy structured debates over morality, status, and power” (12).  Wunsch links the creation and reception of materially unstable artworks with… Full Review

The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) Elegy is an exhibition by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey and curated by the incomparable Valerie Cassel Oliver. Developed by Bey in Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio between 2017 and 2023, Elegy presents three distinct and intertwined collections of large-scale black-and-white photographs alongside two immersive multi-channel color video installations. This cohesive triad highlights held narratives of enslavement and emancipation along a journey that follows rivers and trails up and across the American landscape. Bey’s photographs frame terrestrial marks of US history in black and white, accentuate the sadness and the triumphs pressed into… Full Review

Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Linda IJpelaar’s edited volume, The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction of Plants in the Western World, 600–1600 begins with a caveat: the title may center on the word “green,” but the text does not tackle ecology in the modern sense. Instead, this translation of their 2019 Dutch language volume De Groene Middeleeuwen: Duizend jaar gebruik van planten 600–1000 explores the impact of plants on European book traditions from late antiquity through early modernity. These interactions are manifold and diverse, ranging from the representation of plants in pharmacological texts to the use of plants themselves as art… Full Review