New York, New York : fifty years of art, architecture, cinema, performance, photography and video /

This hefty volume is the catalog for a July-September 2006 exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco organized by the indefatigable Germano Celant and Lisa Dennison (both, Guggenheim Museum). It offers not a synoptic history but a series of quirky essays, in some of which the authors discuss small corners of the general history, challenging the usual presentation of the period as a sequenced trajectory of events marching in an orderly fashion through history. However, the catalog is sectioned by unnamed artistic categories--abstract expressionism, pre-Pop, Pop, minimal, conceptual, everything else--that still maintain old hegemonic structures. Cinema, photography, performance, and video are included, not so much to be integrated into the history of painting and sculpture as to exist alongside them, almost to let the viewer/reader decide on what connections, if any, exist. Yet only the painters and sculptors (84 of them) are accorded individual, splendid, full-page color. Fourteen authors present generally provocative essays, although Celant's four essays are written in such overripe prose that his ideas are buried in the verbiage. There are a few refreshing moments in the various essays when a critique of American art peeks quietly through the comments. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates; professionals; two-year technical program students. J. T. Paoletti Wesleyan University

New York recently invaded the Grimaldi Forum of Monte Carlo with an exclusive exhibition of a lifetime featuring the works of the best-known artists in a variety of visual and performing arts media, from 1950 through 2000. This colorful and spectacular exhibition catalog by Dennison (director, Guggenheim) and curator Celant (Manzoni Catalogo delle Opere) is beautifully illustrated with some of the most notable iconic and symbolic imagery associated with New York artists, yet it is very much representative of American culture as a whole. Following two introductory essays, the catalog is presented in two parts. Part 1 features seven focused and related essays before moving on to artists and images from 1950 to 1975 (e.g., William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko). After eight essays, Part 2 concentrates on artists and images from 1975-2000 (e.g., Vito Acconci, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons). Illustrations of painting and sculpture dominate the other arts represented, with several interruptions where illustrations of notable New York artists of photography, cinema, performance and video, and architecture have been inserted within the appropriate time period. This catalog would make a valuable addition for collections needing an overview of New York art and artists as well as for those libraries focusing on contemporary visual arts and communication.-Stephen Allan Patrick, East Tennessee State Univ. Libs., Johnson City (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.