Reviews for The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art

The average rating for The Changing Garden: Four Centuries of European and American Art based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-28 00:00:00 Gunther Mainhardt A useful critical assessment of Victorian fairy art, literature, poetry, and photography, Nicola Bown's short, but robust, engagement with the major themes involving the presence (and absence) of fairies in the Victorian imagination is a must-read for all interested in the subfield. That being said, her reliance on Gillian Beer and now-outmoded "secularization theses" makes some of her claims regarding the presence of fairies in "disenchanting / secular" Victorian England severely misguided. Counter-examples abound of fairy story-tellers whose aim was not nostalgia or combating Darwinism, but for the sake of pedagogy, holdovers of Romanticism's rejection of the Enlightenment, or commentary on social injustice (see, for instance, the writings of George MacDonald, or William Morris). This trouble aside - and it does hamstring much of Bown's core thesis (for a new approach on the "secularization thesis," see Josephson-Storm's The Myth of Disenchantment) - Bown's discussion on the artworks at-hand is superlative, her intense research work resulting in the discussion of many obscure (to us) and/or forgotten works, and her other discussions on modernity and industrialism are all quite insightful and worthy to read.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-13 00:00:00 Doug Martin This isn't only the best philosophical writing about art that I have ever read, it is the only philosophical investigation of the arts that I have found at all interesting. Langer, building on her earlier work, Philosophy in a New Key, analyzes all of the arts, saying on the one hand that each is distinct, but that all share some basic attributes, and that these are universal across culture and time. Each art is a virtual reality, and each art is based non-discursive symbolism, which is in turn a basic human cognitive process. She refuses to see sculpture as 3 dimensional painting for instance. She differentiates film narrative from theatre. The novel is a virtual history, where as dramatic art is virtual fate, or about the future. Music is virtual time and painting virtual space. The ideas are so crisply and beautiful presented it was possible to forget momentarily that I was reading philosophy. So much aesthetic writing gets bogged down in jargon, abstraction, weird values, agendas foreign to the arts. Few writers take the actual experience of artists into account. It is only at the end for instance that she discusses at all how to evaluate what is good or bad art. I marked so many pages of this book it would be absurd to quote. I want to reiterate here: this book is profound, takes into account the complexities of evolution, cognition, reception, sign vs. symbol, communication, form, structure, and history without ever once devolving into the nightmarish gobbledeegook of contemporary academic theory.