CAA News Today

Peter Gena reads Records Ruins the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording by David Grubbs. In this “excellent and meticulously researched book,” Grubbs examines “several early recordings along with a number of post-Cagian minimalists and free improvisers.” The volume is “highly recommended and a must-read for anyone probing new music and recordings.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Eloise Quiñones Keber reviews Alessandra Russo’s The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600. The author “extends and deepens her excursions into the creative and cultural dynamics of the art forms of early colonial New Spain” while advocating “their necessary place in contemporaneous Renaissance and early modern art history” in this “learned, insightful, and challenging” study. Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Sonja Drimmer examines Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books by Kathryn M. Rudy. Over the course of “three hundred riveting pages,” Rudy establishes “a new category of late medieval object, which she terms ‘parchment painting.’” The book is full of “intrepid flights of scholarship” and “like the manuscripts that it revives,” it “is prodigious with riches.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Gennifer Weisenfeld discusses Christine Guth’s Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon. “A landmark in multidisciplinary scholarly sophistication,” the volume “examines the long and storied history of one Japanese artwork as it has circulated around the world being imagined, reimagined, and reimaged, thereby fusing the local and global across time.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

caa.reviews publishes over 150 reviews each year. Founded in 1998, the site publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate. Read more reviews at caa.reviews.