Suggested Readings: Art and Culture

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present
By Jacques Barzun
ISBN: 0060175869

"This masterful, provocative, and highly readable assessment of the last half-millennium of Western culture is the perfect antidote to the dumbed-down consumerism of our times. It is hard to imagine anyone other than Jacques Barzun as the writer of this engaging history. Reading it is akin to participating in a fast-paced seminar with one of the liveliest and best informed minds of the day."

— Diane Ravitch, New York University

The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art
By Ernst Gombrich
ISBN: 0714841544

"In [Gombrich's] view, the development of art is predicated on technical improvements in the creation of illusions; the newer, more realistic forms are thus superior to the older ones. . . . [Thus,] in Gombrich's view, the artists of the twentieth century, with their deliberate turn away from illusionistic techniques, inexplicably rejected "progress": it is as if they underwent surgical operations to make their thumbs unopposable."

— Susannah Rutherglen, associate editor, Yale Review of Books

The World of Art
By Robert Payne
ISBN: 0385040415

"[Payne] offers consistently penetrating insights into the visual arts—insights not only informed by wide-ranging scholarship but infused with the passionate enthusiasm of his own responses and communicated in a prose that is often breathtaking in its lucidity and grace."

— Michelle Marder Kamhi, editor, Aristos

Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century
Edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball
ISBN: 156663069X

"In some ways, this is a reassuring as well as a clarifying book. It is not short of cries of horror, outrage, even of despair. But the need for a return to ordered reason in the arts and education is put with such assurance that it is hard to doubt that such a return will come about. The tone of voice is often firm but never strident, and always urbane and polite, even when at its most deadly."

— Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times