Queen Victoria's Life in the Scottish Highlands: Depicted by Her Watercolour Artists Book

Not Here, Not Now, Not That! : Protest Over Art and Culture in America by Steven J. Tepper provides a great insight into the dynamics of conflict over art in the United States. Tepper provides a unique perspective of conflict over culture and art, focusing on the local nature of conflict and how it is influenced by factors such as population size and demographics. The methods he uses to do this is perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of the book. Around 100,000 newspaper articles were scanned to see if they contained stories about conflict over arts. Of these, around 5,000 were deemed relevant, and the conflicts they discussed were then analyzed. From this, the author created a list of 805 instances of conflict over art in 71 different cities in the United States. He separates the cities into three rough categories based on the amount and type of conflict they tend to experience, acknowledging that many cities hold characteristics of multiple different categories. This ability to foresee possible critiques of his work and issue a response defending against the critique is very impressive, and coupled with such a large amount of data provides an incredibly convincing view of cultural conflict. Temmer's overall finding is essentially that rapid social change produces in some citizens feelings of an inability to identify with the community, and that the community is changing or declining. This, he argues, leads to higher rates of conflict surrounding the arts. Using many interesting and occasionally comical examples, he manages to provide vast amounts of evidence supporting this claim, at one point providing an extensive analysis of Atlanta, one of the cities with the highest rates of conflict over art. All in all, a wonderful book that provides an interesting view of cultural conflict.