Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context

by Stephen Melville

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Philosophy

252 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Professor Melville's areas of expertise are contemporary art, theory and historiography. He has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. Most recently, he served as resident faculty at the Getty Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies (University of Rochester, 1999), and has given invited letures at Cornell University (Ruth Woolsey Findley and William Nichols Findley Lecture), The Johns Hopkins University, and The Tate Modern in London. With Philip Armstrong (Division of Comparative Studies) and Laura Lisbon (Painting), he curated a major exhibition of contemporary painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts in May, 2001. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue from The MIT Press. He has been active on numerous committees for the American Society for Aesthetics and has been on the editorial board for both the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Reviews

[Philip Cherny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the FIRST book I've read (or tried to read) that I found waaaaay too erudite to follow, which says something, given all the difficult scholarly essays I've read in my life. It even has a chapter with the most comically bloated, excessively-erudite essay title in my college experience so far: "Notes on the Re-emergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism.” (!!!)

The essays that I personally found most accessible were the ones that covered topics I was most familiar with, but even these were not entirely clear to me, and I can easily imagine flustered readers who have not read anything on those topics. If Melville intended these essays to reach broader audiences (i.e. fledgling grad students), he could have improved his essays by increasing his footnote-to-bodytext ratio. These essays casually breeze through heavy, high-scholarly tropes and themes like "interpretation" as if to assume the readership has thoroughly read every essay in a bibliography or historiographical account of the issue. I can't even get to the main arguments in the essay without stumbling upon a concept and asking what it means.

Naturally, this is a humbling experience for an aspiring scholar. I checked out this book at the library. After reading 4 essays, I decided to purchase my own copy so I can re-read and annotate the hell out of it until I come to a satisfactory understanding (I find that annotating--marking with your own questions--is a productive way of grappling with a confusing text.) Normally, I would just let this slide and move on to a more understandable text, but the most tantalizing part is that it's covering specialized but important topics in art history and philosophy that any developing scholar would be naturally curious about.

Perhaps this is merely my self-indulgent desire to gain mastery over heady material and become an expert scholar (and oh yes, they do have an essay on Lacan and desire preceding knowledge), but more-so, I want to understand it so that I can avoid what the author is doing, to explain it to other struggling students in relatively comprehensible terms.

I realize I probably sound like I'm complaining my own ignorance, more than offering a valid critique of the text itself. Perhaps the author does not intend this book for beginners such as myself, but I think accessibility is a valid issue that increasingly needs to be addressed in specialized academic fields. There are ways to make these texts more comprehensible without "dumbing it down," and one way is to include more comprehensive footnotes. In the very LEAST, give me some ideas for further reading.