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Title: Caravaggio's Secrets by Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit ISBN: 0-262-52313-2 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 19 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Critics are the Custodians of Culture
Comment: Well, at least this book, which really has fallen out of circulation and is not often-read even among students of seventeenth-century Italian painting, is still being discussed in this forum. I add my voice to the list of the unenthused. The book insists on psychoanalytic readings and imports a decidely dated 1990's post-modern vocabularly that lowers a seductive, gauzy veil around Caravaggio's paintings, but absolutely does not serve to illuminate them in any way. The last reviewer, a painter, expresses a muted disregard for the work of critics; I would remind this reviewer that writers and critics are the custodians of culture, and that the job of the writer on art is to illuminate, perhaps through description, which is a form of interpretation, how a work of art lives in the world; and the job of the critic is to make distinctions. (All art is not popular culture, subject to equalizing democratic standards.) For this clear, crafted prose -- prose that is accessible both to the scholar and an intelligent audience interested in art -- is always best. Perhaps one of the reasons this book is laregly overlooked is that written for neither of the above it has failed to find an audience.
Rating: 5
Summary: Creative meditation on sociality
Comment: It is sad to see how this book has been misunderstood. This book is not about "art history" or even "criticism." But it is a creative attempt to affirm one's experience through Caravaggio's paintings as inventing different "forms" to relate to others (both human and non-human).
Bersani and Dutoit, in such a poetic way, challenge how we look at art in general--. We interpret it instead of experiencing it. As a practioner of painting, I feel that they wrote this book NOT from the position of a critic, who often tries to be a custodian of culture.
Rating: 1
Summary: It's moment has already passed
Comment: I looked forward to this book with much anticipation, and readit carefully twice and I am not convinced by their argument, but feelthat in its trendiness it will not be a long-lasting addition to Caravaggio scholarship. In many ways, after only a few years on the market, it remains fairly unnoticed by the academy, and remains relatively untaught in graduate seminars. I can't image it is a book that will interest the general reader with its physcoanalytic interpretations and academic lingo. I feel compelled to give it one star in order to balance out the scales and alert prospective readers that there are those of us who did not find it worthwhile. END
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Title: Caravaggio: A Life by Helen Langdon ISBN: 0813337941 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity by Leo Bersani, Ulysse Dutoit ISBN: 1844570169 Publisher: British Film Institute Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Masters of Art: Caravaggio (Masters of Art) by Alfred Moir ISBN: 0810931508 Publisher: Harry N Abrams Pub. Date: 01 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Caravaggio by Gilles Lambert, Gilles Neret ISBN: 382286305X Publisher: Taschen Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Caravaggio by John T. Spike, Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio, Michele K. Spike ISBN: 0789206390 Publisher: Abbeville Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $95.00 |
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