Synopses & Reviews
The past decade has seen American culture deeply divided by debates over social identity, public morality, communal values and freedom of expression. A key focus of these polarizing discussions has been the role of visual arts in public life.
In Art Matters, five leading cultural critics and two prominent contemporary artists show the ways that this debate has profoundly reshaped our view of American culture. Lucy Lippard investigates the extraordinary recent transformations in visual art; Michele Wallace takes on high art, popular culture, and African American identity; David Deitcher discusses queer culture and AIDS; Carole S. Vance ponders censorship and sexually explicit imagery; and Lewis Hyde considers democracy and culture. Projects by artists Julie Ault and Andrea Fraser provide a context for these debates.
Art Matters also offers a close examination of attempts to develop alternative funding sources for artists, focusing specifically on the influential private foundation Art Matters-a foundation which became an important proponent for new forms of art and for protecting freedom of expression through its funding and advocacy efforts.
Review
“A set of thoughtful essays that examine the origins and absurd persistence of this influential forgery, informative assessments of the anti-Semitic conspiratorial imagination in Europe, Japan, the United States and in the Middle East, and lively debates about the way Western and Jewish intellectuals have responded to the recent forms in which the old hatred has found expression.” -Jeffrey Herf,author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propagandad During World War II and the Holocaust
Review
“A timely and important volume that ought to be essential reading for students and scholars alike. The Shoah did not begin with concentration camps and trains. It began with words and ideas. The lies of the Protocols played a key role in marginalizing and dehumanizing European Jewry, paving the way for their brutal extermination. Remarkably, in the contemporary context, the Protocols are once again becoming widely used as effective propaganda, especially throughout much of the Middle East. . . . This text provides an interdisciplinary, high calibre, scholarly analysis of a subject matter that is under-studied and of profound importance." -Charles Asher Small,Former Executive Director of the Yale Intiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
About the Author
Richard A. Landes teaches at Boston University and is Director and Co-Founder of their Center for Millennial Studies. His publications include
The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Studies in the Mutation of European Culture.
Steven T. Katz is Slater Professor of Jewish and Holocaust Studies and Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. His many publications include the multivolume Holocaust in Historical Context.