News:
Finally out, after 6 years of work: a textbook with Oxford Press, co-authored with Erna Fiorentini, called Visual Worlds.
The opening pages of my novel are now online with Place (lierary magazine in Brussels). More on the novel here.
Also in 2020: my summary of the state of art writing around the world, called The Impending Single History of Art: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives. To be published by de Gruyter.
Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.
Latest uploads:
The book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?; the book How to Use Your Eyes; and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. (There is also a website with reviews of contemporary piano music.)
Live Writing Projects:
I am experimenting with writing live on the internet. These texts update live, and you can contribute to them & be thanked when the book is published. (1) What is Interesting Writing in Art History?, (2) Writing with Images. Thanks everyone for contributing!
The idea of close reading is fundamental in art history and literary criticism. This essay is about the coherence of the idea in art history and in some archaeology.
A series of seven books, intended as barometers of the current state of art theory on seven different subjects. This site includes the Series Preface and Series Afterword.
Art Criticism (an encyclopedia entry, written for the Grove Dictionary of Art, and interestingly censored by them). It's a survey of major theories of art criticism.
Three anthologies are planned, in Russian, Spanish, and German. Links will be added here as the books appear.
Is "art history" the name of a discipline, or an area of interest, that is practiced throughout the world? Or is it a Western interest, currently spreading along with capitalism?
A book about the hypnotic attraction of oil and tempera: why painters love paint, even before the painting is half-finished.
A book on the principal theories of modernism and postmodernism, considered in terms of how they divide up the past two centuries.
A book about the kinds of images that are made and studied throughout the university, not just in the arts and humanities.