The Book

Book Review

By Marta Braun, Director, Graduate Program of Photographic Preservation and Collections Management, Ryerson University.

This important and timely book by Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord helps us understand exactly what it is that we call 'culture' and how culture changes. I am impressed by the way the authors lay out basic definitions of words and even concepts that we have always take for granted without condescending to their readers. For that reason, among others, I think that this book will find a wide audience among specialists in areas such as museology and art history and also among the general public.

The authors first explain different kinds of material, physical and aesthetic culture, and then, focusing on the aesthetic, show how works of art convey meaning to those who behold them. They include the fine arts, architecture and what we would call craft, helping the reader to differentiate among them. They claim that works of art can be interpreted but that all interpretation is based on the apprehension of a sensual form. They show the function of imagination in such apprehension as well as carefully defining the components of the art – its form, technique, medium and style – to explain how they contribute

With the establishment of clear terms in the first two chapters, the authors construct an argument that situates aesthetic culture in society. They begin with a definition of patronage and provide its history. Their approach is novel and important; they trace the relation of patronage to surplus in a society, define different forms of patronage and analyze how they have functioned throughout history. Differentiating between patronage and the artist's public, they provide a context in patronage for art as a social activity.

The two chapters on patronage and its history are very strong; they form the ground for the authors' explanation of why artists create what drives them. The Lords believe that changes in art, what we often unthinkingly call artistic movements, are not changes in style ab nihilo, but stem from a particular artist's response to change in his or her own culture. The examples used throughout the book are always pertinent because they stem from the authors' experience teaching about and working with artists and their patrons. With this chapter we understand that if we want to grasp cultural change, we must take into account the artist because it is he or she who initiates new content in response to his or her world situation.

The chapter that sets out the seven principles of cultural change reiterates and at the same time shifts the focus of the analysis in order to establish a theoretical stance that functions in practice. In this chapter we find many of the recent ideas that are core to cultural studies in a form that is both sensible and logical.

Globalization and mass culture are also analyzed with striking clarity. The material in the penultimate chapter on the interaction of cultural change and the environment was completely new to me, as the Lords show how access to energy throughout history has (and still does) affect social values and aesthetic culture.

The effects on social values are made clear; their understanding of the differences between the age of oil and gas and that of coal are particularly compelling as is their explanation of why we have recently become so environmentally conscious. The personal experience of the authors makes readers feel that they are in very capable hands. Each argument is superbly laid out with each chapter's focus deepening our understanding of the others. In the last chapters they examine the way creative artists respond to globalization and intra-culturalism. Here, more than anywhere else in the book, the Lords bring to bear their own experience in a sector in which they are pre-eminent to advance the reader's understanding of how culture changes in a globalized, borderless world. From the burgeoning art fair to the role of institutions, cities and cultural tourism, culture, they demonstrate, is central to the knowledge economy and therefore to the economic success of nations.

This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the world in which we live and work. With the situating of aesthetic culture, its history and its contemporary transformation in material terms, the authors provide the reader with a new awareness of his or her place in local and global culture and his or her relation to its products and its institutions.

Marta Braun is the author of Picturing Time. Her book on photographer Eadweard Muybridge will be published in September 2010 by Reaction Press in London and Chicago.