art 20: the thames and hudson multimedia dictionary of modern art
TRANSCRIPT
ART 20: THE THAMES AND HUDSON MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY OF MODERN ARTReview by: Linda Tompkins-BaldwinArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 18, No. 2(Fall 1999), pp. 48-49Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949031 .
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The Review Section Edited by Joan Stahl, National Museum of American Art
Reference Points
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AESTHETICS / Edited by Michael
Kelly-New York, NY: Oxford University Press, August 1998.-4
vol., 2208 p. ill.-ISBN 0-19-511307-1 (cl., alk. paper): $495.00.
Editor Michael Kelly proclaims that the Encyclopedia of Aes thetics is the "first English-language reference work on this scale de
voted to aesthetics." In fact, other recently published reference
sources, such as The Dictionary of Art (New York, NY: Grove's Dic
tionaries, 1996) and Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London,
England: Routledge, 1998), treat selected aesthetic topics ("Fou cault," "Hegel," "Japanese Aesthetics," "Renaissance Aesthetics") but
from within their respective disciplinary frameworks. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York, NY:
Scribner, 1973-74), broader in scope but over a quarter century old,
provides an interdisciplinary overview of key topics, including aes
thetics, and thus comes closest in methodology and intent to what
Kelly and his contributors have accomplished here. Kelly, who is
Managing Editor of Journal of Philosophy and Adjunct Associate Pro fessor at Columbia University, proves his assertion that "aesthetics
is uniquely situated to serve as a meeting place for numerous aca
demic disciplines and cultural traditions," and has produced a valu
able resource in the process. For purposes of the encyclopedia, aesthetics is defined as "crit
ical reflection on art, culture and nature," a broad definition that ac
commodates about 600 alphabetically arranged essays on topics
ranging from the expected, such as "Baroque Aesthetics," "Style," and "Winckelmann," to welcome surprises such as "Camp," "Jokes,"
and "Play." The encyclopedia's scope provides opportunities to
analyze culture outside the realms of art and philosophy, so
articles on literary and musical theory as well as legal issues and
technology are included. Coverage is from ancient times to the
present, although Western aesthetics, from its inception in the eigh teenth century through its evolution to the present, forms the cen
tral historical focus of the work. Non-Western aesthetic traditions
are treated in overview essays ("African Aesthetics," "Chinese Aes
thetics"), and incorporated in comparative discussions of aesthet
ic concepts and issues.
The types of topics treated include individuals, concepts, pe riods, theories, issues, and movements, with more than 500 schol
ars from academic backgrounds in philosophy, art history, literary theory, psychology, feminist theory, sociology, and anthropology forming the core of the contributors' pool. Most contributors are uni
versity faculty, including eminent scholars such as Rudolf Arn heim of Harvard University, Arthur C. Danto of Columbia Uni
versity, and Oleg Grabar of Princeton University. Contributors'
credentials and essays are detailed in a Directory of Contributors.
An excellent, clearly legible, seventy-page index facilitates navi
gation of the four volumes.
Essays vary in length from a single page, such as one on Jo
hann Caspar Lavater, an eighteenth-century Swiss theologian best
remembered for reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, to
thirty-five pages for Immanuel Kant. More complex topics are pre ceded by editorial headnotes and clarified by multiple essays-Kant, for example, warrants nine. Essays are preceded by cross-refer
ences, and entries for alternate spellings and synonyms direct the
reader to appropriate essays. They are followed by bibliographies that range from minimal to extensive, and sometimes do not in
clude the most appropriate citations. It is difficult to understand, for example, why "Roman Aesthetics" warrants seven entries, only one of which is in English, while "Truth" is allotted more than sixty. The work is sparsely illustrated, a limitation made more apparent
by the choice to use standard illustrations for well-known art move
ments, such as the Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock
painting that accompanies "Abstract Expressionism" or George
Braque's Le Portugais that illustrates "Cubism," at the expense of
unillustrated topics such as "Computer Art" or "Outsider Art."
Well-written and scholarly, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is nonetheless accessible to the lay reader trying to decode the intri
cacies of Structuralism, as well as to the browser drawn to enter
taining but intelligent and thoughtful essays on food or kitsch. A
particular strength of the work is the inclusion of articles of current
topical interest, such as "Cyberspace" or "Digital Media, Hypertext and Virtual Reality," and the scholarly treatment of topics such as
"Appropriation," "Camp," "Gaze," and "Genius," which did not
warrant essays in The Dictionary of Art. The quality and unique focus of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics make it a valuable comple
ment to other reference sources in the humanities. It is highly rec
ommended for all art libraries.
Tom Riedel
Regis University
ART 20: THE THAMES AND HUDSON MULTIMEDIA DIC TIONARY OF MODERN ART.?New York, NY: Thames and Hud son, dist. by W.W. Norton, 1998.-1 CD-ROM.- ISBN 0- 500-100015-2:
$125.00.
System Requirements: Windows (3.1 or higher) or Macintosh (7.1 or
higher), 8Mb RAM, 4Mb free hard disc space, 256 color VGA
monitor, sound card and speakers, CD-ROM drive.
Art 20 is an encyclopedic reference that provides introductory
48 Art Documentation ? Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999
This content downloaded from 193.105.154.120 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 18:29:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
information on the major artists, movements, critics, galleries, and
collectors of the twentieth century. Compiled by a team of unnamed
contributors, largely from England and France, the product pri
marily showcases art of North America and Europe. The CD-ROM
opens with a brief slide show that stops on one image. From this
screen you can use a timeline slider to continue running images; by
clicking and dragging the slider, any year between 1900 and 1995 can be selected and a picture from that year will appear.
The lynchpin of the program is a slide show that includes more than 3,500 images with hypertext links to over 2,500 entries; a list of the entries can be viewed at the publisher's Web site
[http://www.thameshudson.co.uk/art20/listent.htm]. Entries can
be accessed and marked from an alphabet. The user clicks on a let
ter that prompts a scrolling list of entries beginning with the chosen
letter; alternately, the scrolling list appears along with a box, in which the user can type a term. Multiple entries may be marked at
one time, an attractive feature of the program. The index screen fea
tures an array of images associated with entries in the displayed let
ter of the alphabet; clicking on any image or word takes the user to the associated entry. The search function performs both text and
caption searching. Besides the entry marking, Art20 boasts several other useful,
graphical features. Images may be enlarged and some have zoom,
video or sound associated with them. These features are indicated
in the caption and can be activated by clicking on the image or head
ing. Clicking again deactivates the function. The software includes
capabilities for cutting and pasting text into a notebook, arranging images side-by-side for comparison, and saving thumbnail images into a picture album. The user can mark entries and pages for quick retrieval at a future session. All of these elements work well and
are easy to use.
One of the unique and potentially unnerving features of this pro gram is its use of hidden menus. When the opening slide show
stops, for example, there are no visible instructions; move the cur
sor, however, and the menu offerings pop up. Without first reading the user manual, one might think there was an installation prob lem. One of the selections from the hidden menu is a user's guide, and this feature is the most frustrating component of Art 20. Al
though the guide describes and explains commands, none of them works from inside the user's guide and I was never able to exit it and
go back to the main program. There is also no evident way to exit
Art20 from inside the guide and the print manual provides no clues.
Fortunately, most of the instructions in the print manual are ade
quate, and it is short enough to read in a few minutes. Spending a
little time with the manual will also enable the user to fully appre ciate the features of the program. Libraries using CD-ROM towers
or servers will probably want to make instructions available for
users of this resource.
Without a doubt, the strength of this product lies in its images. Although thousands of colors are recommended, the images are
still impressive on a monitor running 256. The slide show can be left running on the screen and the variable speed can be set to suit
your taste. This is a stimulating feature since you can click on any
image with which you are unfamiliar. Text entries are not exhaus
tive, but contain a commendable amount of material and the type is clear and easy to read. Most of the entries, including text and
thumbnails, are covered in two or three screens, but famous artists
such as Matisse or Picasso have as many as sixteen. Most of the en
tries are brief and do not rely on unexplained jargon; the hypertext
links enhance and extend the information in any one entry. This title will be most useful for advanced high school stu
dents, undergraduates, and art devotees, and is a recommended
purchase for those audiences.
Linda Tompkins-Baldwin Baltimore Museum of Art
ART THEORISTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE?Alexan
dria, VA: Chadwyck- Healey Ltd., 1998.?2 vol. on 1 CD-ROM.?
ISBN 0-85964-342-5: $6,300.00
System Requirements: Windows (3.1 or higher), 8Mb Ram, 10 Mb free hard disc space, SVGA card and monitor, quad-speed CD-ROM drive.
Is a single CD-ROM and its supporting material contained in a case the thickness of a single volume of The Dictionary of Art worth
$6,300.00? Art librarians and bibliographers may ask themselves this question when they consider reaching into the deepest pocket of their budgets. The question is not an easy one to answer.
Consider the publisher's statement that no single institution,
university or museum, holds all forty-three texts recorded in digi tal form on the CD-ROM. The collection of treatises define key de
velopments in European history between 1470 and 1770; while these texts are not solely specific to the study of art history, art scholars
will find much relevant here, including the canon of classical ar
chitecture as represented in the writings of Vitruvius, Alberti, Pal
ladio, and Vignola, guides to painting and sculpture by Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and others, and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. The list of institutions cited as owners of these rare editions reads like a who's who of venerable humanities
collections, including the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian
Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Cicognara Collection of
the Vatican Library. On this side of the Atlantic, the Fine Arts Li
brary of Harvard University is credited with one title. The unnamed editors or team of information specialists (cer
tainly there had to be more than one, and there were probably sev
eral) went to great lengths to provide the greatest number of the best editions of works by Italian Renaissance art theorists. They pre ferred first or earliest known edition, including notes, but exclud
ing editorial matter outside the period, in an attempt to keep the
copy as intellectually uncluttered as possible. If a nearly contem
porary English translation of the work exists, it too has been
included. In a few cases, such as the more generally sought-after works of Vasari, early twentieth-century English language versions
are included as well.
The software program developed to provide access to the rich
materials contained in Art Theorists of the Italian Renaissance (ATIR) is sophisticated, but happily it is quick and easy to install. Many of the software options, such as tiling or cascading and resizing of
windows will be familiar to moderately facile computer users. A standard search screen offers access by keyword, title, author,
genre, language, and /or date of edition. The command mode of
fers still greater flexibility and the experienced searcher may take full advantage of the complete array of Boolean operators. Re
sponse time in either mode is fast. All searches for a session are
saved and can be reviewed and reselected in different combinations.
All options and many helpful searching techniques are fully de scribed in the user manual.
Within the scope of the licensing agreement the user may save to hard or floppy disk and/or print any of the material from the CD-ROM. The software which controls the printing of text and im
Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999 ? Art Documentation 49
This content downloaded from 193.105.154.120 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 18:29:37 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions