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 had become outdated.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?
