Endorsements

Art as worldmaking is both a tribute to the distinguished art historian Alex Potts and a searching response to his important refurbishing of realism as a critical aesthetic - most notably in the 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. The collection comprises twenty original essays by leading scholars in the field written from a diversity of theoretical and critical perspectives. They test Potts's original recasting of realism - which was developed primarily in interpretations of European and American postwar art - in relation to art produced in different media and periods ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. At the same time as offering novel readings of classic instances of pictorial realism by Menzel and Eakins and reconsidering the question of nineteenth-century realism's historical antecedents, the volume is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. The book is essential reading for students of art history concerned with art's truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics. Contributors include Caroline Arscott, Malcolm Baker, Celeste Brusati, T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Andrew Hemingway, Neil McWilliam, Martin Powers, Brendan Prendeville, Alistair Rider, Adrian Rifkin, Joshua Shannon, Lisa Tickner, Anne M. Wagner, Jon Wood and Rebecca Zurier.