Art as Worldmaking - by Malcolm Baker & Andrew Hemingway (Paperback)

About the Book

This collection is a response to Alex Potts's provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading art historians explore Pott's recasting of realism, providing a new understanding of artworks dating from the eighth to twenty-first centuries and challenging established thinking on art's relation to the everyday.

Book Synopsis

Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts's provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts's recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism's historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art's truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

From the Back Cover

Art as worldmaking is both a tribute to the distinguished art historian Alex Potts and a searching response to his important work on realism as a critical aesthetic, most notably the 2013 book Experiments in modern realism.

The collection comprises twenty original essays by leading scholars in the field, written from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives. They test Potts's recasting of realism, developed primarily through interpretations of European and American postwar art, against art produced in different media, places and periods, from eighth-century Chinese gardens to twenty-first-century video work by the Russian collective Radek Community. Individual chapters offer novel readings of classic instances of pictorial realism by Menzel and Eakins, and reconsider the question of nineteenth-century realism's historical antecedents. Overall, though, the volume has a contemporary orientation, in that it is concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm.

Featuring contributions from T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Lisa Tickner and Anne M. Wagner, along with other established and emerging scholars, Art as worldmaking is a bold contribution to a central question in art theory and history. It is compelling reading for anyone concerned with art's truth value, or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

Review Quotes

'Art as Worldmaking is a game changer. The essays within cast new light on a striking range of subjects, and the collection as whole completely reframes our current understanding of artistic realism.'
Marnin Young, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History, Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University

About the Author

Malcolm Baker is Distinguished Professor in the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside
Andrew Hemingway is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at University College London