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Thanks for access to the rest of the article.

At first, I did not mind the dropping of some of what I see to be minor artists.

But this paragraph had me stunned:

And it uses art much more as a way to discuss race, class and gender. In the introduction, on pages that once used Dürer and Mantegna to examine the concept of originality, Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" — a painting that rested on clumps of elephant dung and created a furor when it was shown in Brooklyn in 1999 — is used to talk about differences between Western and African ways of seeing. "Art is never an empty container," the introduction states. "Rather, it is a vessel loaded with meaning."

What a boatload of postmodern revisionist *#&$. Janson himself must be rolling over in his grave.

Stephen F. Eisenman, a professor of art history at Northwestern University who described himself as a longtime critic of Janson, welcomed many of the changes. "It's clearly a liberal version of a cold-war classic that will pass muster in most of the U.S.," he said.

But he added that it would probably never regain the dominance it once had, simply because the whole idea of a book like it... had become outdated.

"The main problem, I think, is that there's no longer a general belief that there exists a single canon for art that should be taught to all students," he said.

The liberal ideology doesn't get any clearer than that. Keep me away from this revised book and all who had to do with it.

I have used Eisenman's 19th century art book in the past and some of its claims are amazing. In one of the essays (which I don't know is by him or just edited by Eisenman) claims that the man in red giving Socrates the poisoned hemlock in David's famous painting is really Socrates' lover. He reads a great deal of homosexuality into this painting. Hello?! I'd never heard of those interpretations in previous art history texts. Where do they get these ideas from?

I hadn't jumped through the registration hoop either - but I'm horrified at what you found there. I'm glad my copy of Janson is an older one.

For all the pretensions of the art world (and especially the Leftist inhabitants of it) of breaking away from rigidity, and tossing down barriers, etc, the truth is that their intention is to impose rigidity and to erect barriers the likes of which we have never seen in the (free) West.

RP, what was the name of that text which exposes the PC nonsense being taught in Art History classes today? And which has apparently infected even Janson?

You wrote, "He reads a great deal of homosexuality into this painting. Hello?! I'd never heard of those interpretations in previous art history texts. Where do they get these ideas from?"

From Plato's writings, no doubt. There is no evidence I know of that points to Socrates as homo- or bisexual--Socrates had a wife, for one thing, which tends to put him in the heterosexual camp by default. Plato, however, waxed rhapsodic on the 'purity' of love between men, and so on ad nauseum. The critic's logic seems to be that if Plato, Socrates' premier student, was gay, and the culture of Athens was accepting of homosexuality, then the young man in the painting must be Socrates' lover. Wishful thinking by queer theorists, if you ask me. We know that Socrates detested effeminacy in men from his admonishment to the weeping disciples gathered around him to stop 'acting like women' as he drank the hemlock. We also know from Xenophon's writings that while Athenian homosexuals were not punished for their, er, predilection, they weren't held in much esteem, either. The critic must be confusing Athens with Sparta.

Wow! After a certain amount of exposure to these ideas I guess that I should not be surprised.

What bothers me about the David/Socrates issue is that, at least when I was a grad student, you were expected to do the appropriate research to find out what David had in mind, what influences may have shaped his thought, what his goals were, and so forth.

I am guessing that the bare shoulder means homosexuality? Hmmm--there are lot of bare shoulders out there. They all mean the same thing?

Yet post-modernism means that the meaning is infinitely flexible according to culture. Which of course is not open to cultural interpretation.

McVey