Reviewing Reviews in The Art Bulletin

For many of us, book reviews in The Art Bulletin represented an early window into the field at large, art history as an active discipline—one with its own traditions, fault lines, and debates. Long before the internet, the reviews section offered the opportunity for long-distance scholarly discussion and critical reflection, a space made suddenly more urgent in 2020 when opportunities for in-person conversation vanished.

I interviewed for the position of Reviews Editor for The Art Bulletin in the Spring of 2020 via Zoom, just as we all shrank into bubbles of social isolation, restricted from travel to collections and archives, as well as from the rich interactions that occur at conferences. My predecessors had described regular trips to CAA’s New York office to peruse submitted titles, but COVID-19 ended these editorial visits. Gone are the days when the Reviews Editor could visit the CAA mailroom and physically flip the pages of books submitted to the journal, an experience evocatively described and analyzed by then Reviews Editor, Joseph Koerner, some thirty years ago.¹

Presses are cutting costs and reluctant to send physical copies of books; after my appointment, it would be three years before I would visit a physical book fair again. The pilgrimage to the CAA mailroom has been replaced with a more proactive and virtual process, which I aim to outline and demystify here.

Reviews can be described as mechanisms of gatekeeping (at their worst), or, in their ideal form, as spaces of community building. The Reviews section of this journal is exclusionary; not all books can or will be reviewed. Yet the Reviews section’s allotted 15,000 words should also not function as free publicity for the most well-resourced authors and presses, those who are able to inundate my physical and virtual inboxes with marketing materials.

My initial selection of books to read primarily results from regularly scheduled perusals of the catalogs of around forty-odd presses who regularly publish books in art history. To help ensure Reviews reflect the full breadth of the discipline, I seek out smaller university presses, those outside the US, some trade books, and those presses whose lists focus on less well represented subfields. I also solicit suggestions from the editorial board, colleagues at conferences, and from students.

At this early stage, I am guided by the publishers’ synopses, as well as the blurbs provided by the author’s colleagues. I follow this rule of thumb: Does the book contribute to those working outside of the author’s specific subdiscipline? Determining if a book meets these criteria, it goes without saying, is a highly subjective process. Do I (a non-specialist in most cases) recognize the book’s critical appeal, or put another way, do I see how it might animate my own work or that of my students? That does not mean that all books considered for review must have a snappy marketing campaign or multiple blurbs from professors at elite institutions. In selecting books for potential review, one must sense that the author has thought about a broader readership and their book’s place in the discipline. What sets the books selected for review in The Art Bulletin apart, for me, are those that illustrate contemporary debates in the field: they employ new sources, methodological frameworks, and attempt to contribute to the wider discipline.

Founded in 1913, The Art Bulletin describes itself as the journal of record for art history in the United States, with an international readership estimated at roughly 30,000 between print and digital formats, comprising of art historians, students, artists, curators, and arts administrators. For a book or an exhibit to be reviewed in The Art Bulletin, for me, means that the title must speak beyond any one single subset of these readers. The book must make a claim that is both legible and of value to those working in different geographies or time periods or considering different forms or media.

A book’s introduction needs to make its stakes clear for the nonspecialist early on. If the stakes are too narrow, it may not warrant review in these pages. For me, the Reviews section of The Art Bulletin is not a gathering of the “best” books of the discipline or an attempt at comprehensive coverage, like that employed by caa.reviews. There are many wonderful books that may be transformative in the teaching of a particular subfield, or which illuminate the contributions of a forgotten artist, site, genre, or object type but do not speak to those outside that subfield.

For the Art Bulletin, I look for books that have a sense of urgency in their material and argument. This is, in part, a question of prose, a sense that the author has a clarity of purpose and a narrative argument in service of a set of claims beyond a perceived gap in the literature. I consider a book’s teachability and utility. I do not select only titles that may be used in a classroom, but the scales tip towards those books that clearly articulate how their argument engages with larger disciplinary issues. In my own teaching, I often assign reviews not only to offer students a synopsis of a particular argument, but to attune students to the different ways one might structure an argument, shining a light on the methodological decisions made by an author. In short, there is no one formula: I select books that employ different styles of writing, cite varied intellectual concerns, and claim diverse political and ethical stakes.

One must also acknowledge the role reviews, and particularly those in The Art Bulletin, play in the structures of the discipline—they are cited in hiring, tenure, and promotion cases—and may boost the visibility and engagement of books both within the citational structures of the academy, and in the marketplace (or at least that’s what publishers hope). As Reviews Editor, I am therefore mindful of ensuring that a range of authors and reviewers, at different career stages and at different kinds of institutions, both inside and outside of traditional research universities, are included. All things being equal, I exercise a slight preference for early to mid-career scholars, for whom a review in The Art Bulletin may act as a useful indicator of the author’s standing in the field. Annually, I aim to represent the full range of subfield and period definitions used by CAA, though the vagaries of publication lead times, and inevitable missed deadlines means that what one intends to have reviewed and what ends up published in these pages may look very different.

The wealth of period, geographic, and medium-specific journals that include art history books means that any book reviewed here would likely also be reviewed in other venues. Reviews in these field-specific journals function to inform their readership of new books in the field, providing a précis for specialists, a guide for those building syllabi and reading lists. As such, these reviews are often short and address a shared audience of specialists.

The Art Bulletin is one of the only academic venues in the field of art history in which it is possible to publish long form reviews. Typically, a single book review in these pages is 2500–3000 words; multititle reviews can rival the length of a full-length article. This extended format gives the reviewer space to reflect not only on the title’s intervention in the field but also to build their own argument about how the book fits into broader trends within art history.

In 2022, my first full year as Reviews Editor, eleven single-book reviews, three double, and two triple book reviews appeared in The Art Bulletin—a total of twenty-three reviews (although more were commissioned, but not delivered). In the same period, approximately four times as many reviews appeared in caa.reviews, which are typically half or one-third the length of those that appear in The Art Bulletin. In terms of current CAA review categories, eleven out of twelve geographical areas were covered, eleven out of twelve chronological periods, and over thirty of the fields listed under subject, genre, media, and artistic practice were represented in the 2022 volume. While caa.reviews relies on a small army of field editors, tasked with selecting titles and commissioning reviews within their domain of expertise, reviews in The Art Bulletin, under the purview of a single editor, offer less comprehensive coverage, but aim to provide a more sustained engagement with the field.

While caa.reviews, for example, is easily browsable by category or field, The Art Bulletin is organized only by issue, a cross section of art history as a discipline at a given moment via a diversity of represented presses, authors, and subfields. Past Reviews Editors have organized reviews under broad-ranging rubrics, mapping connections across titles for the reader (e.g., Phenomenological Art Histories or Craft, Industry, Design). Given the exigencies of the pandemic, and the residual burnout felt by many academics, organizing reviews into cohesive themes has felt unmanageable the past two years. Instead, my focus as an editor has been on ensuring that each review contained within these pages gestures outward and beyond its subfield, indicating the ways in which each title reviewed may be useful for the broad readership of The Art Bulletin.

Very few of us were instructed in how to write book reviews. While the literature review of a thesis or dissertation is intended to situate one’s own work within a field, it is ultimately a rhetorical performance intended to demonstrate mastery of the field to fellow specialists. The default mode of review writing can be to summarize the text extensively, chapter-by-chapter, with a final “compliment sandwich” containing a single point of critique (often an indication of how the reviewer themselves may have done X or Y differently), before a final emphasis of the book’s merits. This is not the formula for a successful review in The Art Bulletin.

My first act as Reviews Editor was to draft a short series of prompts for reviewers. I ask reviewers to identify where the center of gravity in a particular subfield is located, how the book attempts to shift or refocus that center, and how the book may be applicable to readers outside that field. I encourage reviewers to pay particular attention to methodological issues and approach for those working on related questions or materials.

The role of the Reviews Editor, in my view, is not only to act as matchmaker—finding the right reviewer for each book, someone who has subject expertise and/or whose critical concerns overlap or intersect with the reviewed author (but not in conflict of interest with said author)—but also to push each reviewer to position the considered title within this larger disciplinary frame. That is, I ask reviewers to connect the title under review to a wider discursive network, to questions and modes of argument taking place outside of the author’s subfield.

To review, from the Latin revidere, means literally to see again. A good Art Bulletin review expands a book in a way the author may not have imagined, offering a reader, or potential reader, with another perspective on the author’s work. The best reviews do not simply summarize the contents of a volume, but draw out the conceptual underpinnings, the gleaming red threads drawn throughout the work, and establish their argument around these claims, rather than the reviewed author’s own organizational principles. This act of reorganization is critical, but also has the potential to be lyrical, provoking new questions and links to areas outside of the original author’s scope, or prompting historiographic reflections on how a subfield has shifted over time.

For readers, reviews can provide a prompt to those looking for methodological inspiration, or exposure to new ways of working. In an ideal world, reviews produce and sustain intellectual community—one brought together not by geography or time period or object type, but by shared problems and lines of collective inquiry.

It is easy to become siloed in one’s own subfield. Reviews are a space for gaining insight into the tools and strategies art historians have developed to address evolving and emerging problems in the field as a whole. This is imperative not only for our own intellectual engagement, to push us in our own work, but is essential for art historians who teach students or engage broader audiences via exhibitions and public programming—that is, the readership of this journal. How can we advise students interested in topics and fields outside our own narrow expertise if we have no sense of the broader field’s critical momentum? How do we understand how our own work may resonate (or not) with different communities of readers? Reviews provide access to, and awareness of, how art history is being practiced across the field.

The Reviews section of The Art Bulletin, in my mind, is not a period survey of scholarly publishing in the discipline at the current moment, rather it is a map of the contested territories of the discipline within the larger contours of contemporary humanistic thinking—the so-called material turn, the global turn, of affect theory, the Anthropocene and decolonial politics, to name a few of the analytical methods currently animating art historical writing. Reviews elucidate how the work of art history is performed and enacted within these larger frames of reference and as such, are themselves important historical artifacts.

Only a few months into my time as Reviews Editor, CAA leadership, citing budgetary concerns, considered removing Reviews from this venerable publication. The rationale, in part, was to reduce perceived redundancies in review activities across CAA’s publications portfolio: caa.reviews, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, and The Art Bulletin. In advocating for the continued presence of Reviews in this journal, it became imperative to articulate and defend what makes the Reviews in The Art Bulletin distinct, and critically necessary. While the proposed changes did not come to pass, I hope this small window into the work of Reviews at The Art Bulletin at the current moment, offers an argument for their sustained presence here. Art Bulletin reviews are intended to both create and document art history’s intellectual community in motion, providing insight into specific disciplinary debates, acting as pedagogical tools, and offering opportunities for methodological inspiration and theoretical mobilization in one’s own work, as well as acting as an archive for the discipline. In this way, reviews in The Art Bulletin allow art historians to speak to one another, not only about the books of the past and present moment, but also to future students and practitioners.

—Stephanie Porras, Reviews Editor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Joseph Leo Koerner, “Book Review Editor’s Statement,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (1993): 317–18.