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My review
of The Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller,
is at last available on this site. You can
read it here.
The article
on “Authenticity in Art” in Jerry
Levinson’s Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics
is available here.
This article discusses authenticity in music
and in indigenous art, and places autheticity
in the context of audience response.
“Forgery
and Plagiarism,” an entry for The
Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, has
finally made it to this site. You can read
it here.
Charles Rosen’s
new book, Piano Notes, is more than
a wide-ranging account of piano artistry:
is is also a meditation of the fate of modernism
in music. Here’s my
review.
Joseph Williams’s
guide to good
writing is worth study, while Clear
and Simple as the Truth, by Mark Turner
and Francis-Noël Thompson is the best
book on writing style I have ever read.
Richard Rorty views progress
in science as a matter of scientists changing
their vocabularies. He provides a neat summary
of his ideas is Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity.
A shot at a definitive
analysis of intentionalism in art and criticism
was published in 1987. “Why
Intentionalism Won’t Go Away”
uses an example first tried out in “To
Understand It On Its Own Terms.”
“Knowledge
Replacement Therapy”
discusses differing views of indigenous
arts in a wildly uneven anthology.
Of historic interest only
are pieces on Radio
Moscow and Moscow
News which I wrote after a visit
to Moscow in the frigid January of 1990.
The city was boiling over politically at
the time.
The occasion of my trip
was to deliver this
address to the Institute of Aesthetics
of the Russian Federation (now, simply “Russia”).
I continue with the revival of Philosophy and Literature
“Bookmarks”
reviews.
Umberto
Eco’s little volume on
interpretation provoked mostly agreement,
as did Alain Finkielkraut’s The
Defeat of the Mind.
The Book
Reviews page now contains this
critical account of Christopher Steiner’s
African Art in Transit. Steiner is
awfully interested in art commerce. I wish
he would pay some attention to aesthetic
values.
Susan Vogel’s
book
on Baule art is the inverse of Steiner’s
in its refined and sensitive attitude toward
a great African art area.
Arnold Krupat’s
treatise, Ethnocriticism, on the
other hand, is just about the worst
book I have ever read as a systematic
account of how indigenous arts and literatures
should be regarded. Awful.
“Debunking
Deconstruction”
is an analysis
of John M. Ellis’s
book on that subject. It was written back
in 1989, but I don’t
think I’d
alter any of its ideas.
Here is an exasperated
pan of Sally Price’s
Primitive Art in Civilized Places, and
a look at a postmodern
lexicon whose faults are typical of
mid-1990s work in literary theory.
Alfred W. Crosby’s
history of quantification
in culture is in my view a tour de force,
and the late Walter Kaufmann’s account
of Heidegger and
Nazism was spot on.
And Theodor
Adorno. He lived in Los Angeles when I was
a kid. I never would have laid eyes on him, of course, but at least we
read the same astrologer.
If you enjoy
these reviews, Garry Hagberg and I invite
you to subscribe to Philosophy and Literature,
which features coverage of new books and
ideas from a wide variety of authors. You
can take advantage of the special offer
for Arts & Letters Daily readers
here.
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