Art criticism

so, i just got an unexpected bonus from my boss for working lots of overtime - opened up my paycheck envelope and a bunch of $20 bills fell out. marched right into my bookstore and grabbed the new foster/krauss/bois/buchloh volume on art in the 20th c.

i was pretty conflicted about picking this one up. i pretty much learned what art history i know from hal foster. he was a visiting prof during my first year of college and all my friends took his class, read his books, and talked his talk. so i have a pretty strong affection and sympathy for his ideas. also, this is a compromise move. another bookstore has a copy of october #2 in a case for $30 and i've been trying to keep from buying it for a long time now.

OTOH i have read a number of scathing reviews on the book, and i distrust comps as a rule.

any opinions on the subject??

vahid, thread posted this week - What are your favorite art books?.

picked up clement greenberg's 'art and culture' a while back - this is what anti-rockism crit looks like, there's some stuff on the novel too, but for the most part its criticism that HAD to be written. 'right place, right time etc'

john berger's 'ways of seeing' has a materialist view

By "anti-rockist" you mean "rockist" right?

hmm well the essay on kitsch maybe but not when he'd concentrate his energies reviewing a new show.

Heavens, Greenberg is barely tolerable, even outside of the utterly absurd kitsch essay. My pref runs to Fairfield Porter, Stokes and Schjeldahl, when he's not being too cutesy (the VV days and before). And then Fry is great to get back to on a regular basis.

so i just spent some time looking at my bookshelves and realized i'm much more of a survey / monograph / collected works sort of reader. not much in the way of multiple-author anthologies on the shelf.

but, i do own and enjoy uncontrollable beauty. theory-wise, it leans more towards aesthetics than sociology, which makes it sort of unusual (at least as far as my bookshelf goes).