Mountain View, California: Mayfield (now owned by McGraw-Hill), 2001. Co-authored by Professor Timothy van Laar, University of Illinois.
Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art
is written as a supplementary text for undergraduate art courses. The book fills an important role in these classes: while it is certainly important that students learn to understand and interpret art using the traditional approaches of art appreciation and art history courses, we live in a time that is increasingly critical of the very assumptions which underlie Western art, and this book offers a look at some of the issues central to these critical discussions.
This book is an introduction to art issues which typically are overlooked or under-represented in standard art texts: the role of the museum in creating the canon of high art, the most useful ways to understand art of other cultures and outsider art, and the difficulty students have in understanding much art, especially contemporary art. These are, however, issues which dominate recent art criticism, art theory, art politics, and the structure of our art institutions. And, as our first and last chapters particularly show, they are also central to students’ experience of art.