"A rich, opinionated melange . . . full of notes, asides, and second thoughts." --Roger Kimball, Managing Editor, The New Criterion -- The Public Interest
"At last I have found enough uninterrupted time to read What Art Is from end to end, and I report my enthusiastic appreciation and enjoyment. You have done a splendid piece of work--research, reflection, and writing are worthy of all praise. . . . Your scholarly treatment of modern art, your Appendices, your Notes are full of facts, comparisons and judgments that come to grips suggestively with the elusive double topic, Art and the arts. . . . My hearty congratulations on an admirable book." -- Jacques Barzun, Cultural Historian, author of From Dawn to Decadence
"I am not sure that I have ever reviewed a book from which I have learned so much." --Lester Hunt, Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison -- Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
"Well-documented, a major addition to Rand scholarship, and a humorous debunking of twentieth-century art . . . and art theory." --Richard E. Palmer, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, MacMurray College -- Choice (Current Reviews for Academic Libraries)
As independent scholars and critics, we bring to our work a deep love of the arts, cultivated over more than four decades. During that time we have witnessed increasingly disturbing trends in contemporary culture. With a never-ending stream of bogus inventions concocted in the name of art, real art--especially traditionally based painting and sculpture--has been relegated to a marginal status by the cultural establishment. In the process, the very concept of art has been debased, even among philosophers.It is our hope that What Art Is will help to reverse these lamentable trends. We wrote the book over a period of more than five years, based on a series of articles we had published on the subject in the early 1990s. From the start, we had two audiences in mind: general readers who are puzzled by or skeptical about modernist and postmodernist work, and who seek to deepen their understanding of what is and is not art; and scholars and critics willing to consider a well-reasoned alternative to the artworld's assumption that anything can be art.
