‘Book Reviews’ Archives
The most important 158 pages you will ever read!
The sensationalism of the title of this post is intended to demonstrate the kind of difficult questions facing the arts and culture sector today: a question like whether sensationalizing in order to attract audiences compromises core cultural values. Simon Brault's book No Culture, No Future (Le Facteur C en français) sets out not so much answer [...]
How Much is a Book Worth?
If the hardcover edition is out of print and the artist is famous, prices become astronomical. Take, for example, this catalog for a small 1999 exhibition of Gerhard Richter's watercolors. Originally listed at US $60, the hard cover is sold out (out of print or OOP in the lingo) so in the Amazon an unblemished copy is worth a whopping $1,736, a [...]
The Art Instinct – book review
Denis Dutton got tired, as most of us do, of trying to find justifications for the arts. So he started looking for an explanation so basic that if enough people knew about it, none of us would ever again question the need for art. All that explaining and educating and begging could just stop. In The Art Instinct Dutton argues that art is a [...]
Visual Arts Research – Three Books
(This post was written last April and has been sitting in the Drafts folder - time to let it go:)Craig Leonard, Clive Robertson and Michael Maranda are all artists. In their practices, they share a love of print, text, publication. And they all have produced research that they did on their own steam as it were, more or less self-directed, yet with [...]
Nomads – No Stone Unturned
The catalogue for Nomads, an exhibition that ended August 30 at the National Gallery of Canada, is so completely designed it seems to want to shame all lesser efforts. Its lux quality reflects the superb exhibition itself, but also the very excess that the various works in the exhibition parody. (more...)
The $29 book about the $12 million stuffed shark
Had author Don Thompson started his book, The $12 million stuffed shark: the curious economics of contemporary art, where it ends, with the chapter on Contemporary Art as an Investment, few readers would have made it past chapter one. So sobering is the economist's view of the dismal financial returns to be had from playing the art market, that [...]
Europe undermines Stephen Harper’s $1 billion bid for Arctic sovereignty
This weekend's Globe and Mail was filled with news about research, some with direct bearing on arts/culture.First, Doug Saunders, on the Globe's front page, trumpeted Canada's claim to arctic territory supported by a new Canadian produced arctic atlas compiled by the Geological Survey of Canada (in collaboration with Russia, the United [...]
Commercial art books make money
Whereas most art books are designed for niche markets and are, as I've said before, generally under priced, there are exceptions. Limited editions of sumptuously produced monographs of the work of artists who have international stature cater to collectors who will pay handsomely for them. But what happens when mass-market art uses the same [...]
Commercial art books make money
Whereas most art books are designed for niche markets and are, as I've said before, generally under priced, there are exceptions. Limited editions of sumptuously produced monographs of the work of artists who have international stature cater to collectors who will pay handsomely for them. But what happens when mass-market art uses the same [...]
Best books never written
At least .007 times a day authors and their publishers wonder what they have to do to sell more books. They are sorely tempted to stray from their niche, into, for example, popular genres like self-help. It's an impulse that can be creatively harnessed without straying from your area of interest and expertise, as Dinosaur Comics shows above.
