ART 20: THE THAMES AND HUDSON MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY OF MODERN ARTReview by: Linda Tompkins-BaldwinArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 18, No. 2(Fall 1999), pp. 48-49Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949031 .

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The Review Section Edited by Joan Stahl, National Museum of American Art

Reference Points

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AESTHETICS / Edited by Michael

Kelly-New York, NY: Oxford University Press, August 1998.-4

vol., 2208 p. ill.-ISBN 0-19-511307-1 (cl., alk. paper): $495.00.

Editor Michael Kelly proclaims that the Encyclopedia of Aes thetics is the "first English-language reference work on this scale de

voted to aesthetics." In fact, other recently published reference

sources, such as The Dictionary of Art (New York, NY: Grove's Dic

tionaries, 1996) and Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London,

England: Routledge, 1998), treat selected aesthetic topics ("Fou cault," "Hegel," "Japanese Aesthetics," "Renaissance Aesthetics") but

from within their respective disciplinary frameworks. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York, NY:

Scribner, 1973-74), broader in scope but over a quarter century old,

provides an interdisciplinary overview of key topics, including aes

thetics, and thus comes closest in methodology and intent to what

Kelly and his contributors have accomplished here. Kelly, who is

Managing Editor of Journal of Philosophy and Adjunct Associate Pro fessor at Columbia University, proves his assertion that "aesthetics

is uniquely situated to serve as a meeting place for numerous aca

demic disciplines and cultural traditions," and has produced a valu

able resource in the process. For purposes of the encyclopedia, aesthetics is defined as "crit

ical reflection on art, culture and nature," a broad definition that ac

commodates about 600 alphabetically arranged essays on topics

ranging from the expected, such as "Baroque Aesthetics," "Style," and "Winckelmann," to welcome surprises such as "Camp," "Jokes,"

and "Play." The encyclopedia's scope provides opportunities to

analyze culture outside the realms of art and philosophy, so

articles on literary and musical theory as well as legal issues and

technology are included. Coverage is from ancient times to the

present, although Western aesthetics, from its inception in the eigh teenth century through its evolution to the present, forms the cen

tral historical focus of the work. Non-Western aesthetic traditions

are treated in overview essays ("African Aesthetics," "Chinese Aes

thetics"), and incorporated in comparative discussions of aesthet

ic concepts and issues.

The types of topics treated include individuals, concepts, pe riods, theories, issues, and movements, with more than 500 schol

ars from academic backgrounds in philosophy, art history, literary theory, psychology, feminist theory, sociology, and anthropology forming the core of the contributors' pool. Most contributors are uni

versity faculty, including eminent scholars such as Rudolf Arn heim of Harvard University, Arthur C. Danto of Columbia Uni

versity, and Oleg Grabar of Princeton University. Contributors'

credentials and essays are detailed in a Directory of Contributors.

An excellent, clearly legible, seventy-page index facilitates navi

gation of the four volumes.

Essays vary in length from a single page, such as one on Jo

hann Caspar Lavater, an eighteenth-century Swiss theologian best

remembered for reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, to

thirty-five pages for Immanuel Kant. More complex topics are pre ceded by editorial headnotes and clarified by multiple essays-Kant, for example, warrants nine. Essays are preceded by cross-refer

ences, and entries for alternate spellings and synonyms direct the

reader to appropriate essays. They are followed by bibliographies that range from minimal to extensive, and sometimes do not in

clude the most appropriate citations. It is difficult to understand, for example, why "Roman Aesthetics" warrants seven entries, only one of which is in English, while "Truth" is allotted more than sixty. The work is sparsely illustrated, a limitation made more apparent

by the choice to use standard illustrations for well-known art move

ments, such as the Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock

painting that accompanies "Abstract Expressionism" or George

Braque's Le Portugais that illustrates "Cubism," at the expense of

unillustrated topics such as "Computer Art" or "Outsider Art."

Well-written and scholarly, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics is nonetheless accessible to the lay reader trying to decode the intri

cacies of Structuralism, as well as to the browser drawn to enter

taining but intelligent and thoughtful essays on food or kitsch. A

particular strength of the work is the inclusion of articles of current

topical interest, such as "Cyberspace" or "Digital Media, Hypertext and Virtual Reality," and the scholarly treatment of topics such as

"Appropriation," "Camp," "Gaze," and "Genius," which did not

warrant essays in The Dictionary of Art. The quality and unique focus of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics make it a valuable comple

ment to other reference sources in the humanities. It is highly rec

ommended for all art libraries.

Tom Riedel

Regis University

ART 20: THE THAMES AND HUDSON MULTIMEDIA DIC TIONARY OF MODERN ART.?New York, NY: Thames and Hud son, dist. by W.W. Norton, 1998.-1 CD-ROM.- ISBN 0- 500-100015-2:

$125.00.

System Requirements: Windows (3.1 or higher) or Macintosh (7.1 or

higher), 8Mb RAM, 4Mb free hard disc space, 256 color VGA

monitor, sound card and speakers, CD-ROM drive.

Art 20 is an encyclopedic reference that provides introductory

48 Art Documentation ? Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999

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information on the major artists, movements, critics, galleries, and

collectors of the twentieth century. Compiled by a team of unnamed

contributors, largely from England and France, the product pri

marily showcases art of North America and Europe. The CD-ROM

opens with a brief slide show that stops on one image. From this

screen you can use a timeline slider to continue running images; by

clicking and dragging the slider, any year between 1900 and 1995 can be selected and a picture from that year will appear.

The lynchpin of the program is a slide show that includes more than 3,500 images with hypertext links to over 2,500 entries; a list of the entries can be viewed at the publisher's Web site

[http://www.thameshudson.co.uk/art20/listent.htm]. Entries can

be accessed and marked from an alphabet. The user clicks on a let

ter that prompts a scrolling list of entries beginning with the chosen

letter; alternately, the scrolling list appears along with a box, in which the user can type a term. Multiple entries may be marked at

one time, an attractive feature of the program. The index screen fea

tures an array of images associated with entries in the displayed let

ter of the alphabet; clicking on any image or word takes the user to the associated entry. The search function performs both text and

caption searching. Besides the entry marking, Art20 boasts several other useful,

graphical features. Images may be enlarged and some have zoom,

video or sound associated with them. These features are indicated

in the caption and can be activated by clicking on the image or head

ing. Clicking again deactivates the function. The software includes

capabilities for cutting and pasting text into a notebook, arranging images side-by-side for comparison, and saving thumbnail images into a picture album. The user can mark entries and pages for quick retrieval at a future session. All of these elements work well and

are easy to use.

One of the unique and potentially unnerving features of this pro gram is its use of hidden menus. When the opening slide show

stops, for example, there are no visible instructions; move the cur

sor, however, and the menu offerings pop up. Without first reading the user manual, one might think there was an installation prob lem. One of the selections from the hidden menu is a user's guide, and this feature is the most frustrating component of Art 20. Al

though the guide describes and explains commands, none of them works from inside the user's guide and I was never able to exit it and

go back to the main program. There is also no evident way to exit

Art20 from inside the guide and the print manual provides no clues.

Fortunately, most of the instructions in the print manual are ade

quate, and it is short enough to read in a few minutes. Spending a

little time with the manual will also enable the user to fully appre ciate the features of the program. Libraries using CD-ROM towers

or servers will probably want to make instructions available for

users of this resource.

Without a doubt, the strength of this product lies in its images. Although thousands of colors are recommended, the images are

still impressive on a monitor running 256. The slide show can be left running on the screen and the variable speed can be set to suit

your taste. This is a stimulating feature since you can click on any

image with which you are unfamiliar. Text entries are not exhaus

tive, but contain a commendable amount of material and the type is clear and easy to read. Most of the entries, including text and

thumbnails, are covered in two or three screens, but famous artists

such as Matisse or Picasso have as many as sixteen. Most of the en

tries are brief and do not rely on unexplained jargon; the hypertext

links enhance and extend the information in any one entry. This title will be most useful for advanced high school stu

dents, undergraduates, and art devotees, and is a recommended

purchase for those audiences.

Linda Tompkins-Baldwin Baltimore Museum of Art

ART THEORISTS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE?Alexan

dria, VA: Chadwyck- Healey Ltd., 1998.?2 vol. on 1 CD-ROM.?

ISBN 0-85964-342-5: $6,300.00

System Requirements: Windows (3.1 or higher), 8Mb Ram, 10 Mb free hard disc space, SVGA card and monitor, quad-speed CD-ROM drive.

Is a single CD-ROM and its supporting material contained in a case the thickness of a single volume of The Dictionary of Art worth

$6,300.00? Art librarians and bibliographers may ask themselves this question when they consider reaching into the deepest pocket of their budgets. The question is not an easy one to answer.

Consider the publisher's statement that no single institution,

university or museum, holds all forty-three texts recorded in digi tal form on the CD-ROM. The collection of treatises define key de

velopments in European history between 1470 and 1770; while these texts are not solely specific to the study of art history, art scholars

will find much relevant here, including the canon of classical ar

chitecture as represented in the writings of Vitruvius, Alberti, Pal

ladio, and Vignola, guides to painting and sculpture by Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and others, and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. The list of institutions cited as owners of these rare editions reads like a who's who of venerable humanities

collections, including the Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian

Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Cicognara Collection of

the Vatican Library. On this side of the Atlantic, the Fine Arts Li

brary of Harvard University is credited with one title. The unnamed editors or team of information specialists (cer

tainly there had to be more than one, and there were probably sev

eral) went to great lengths to provide the greatest number of the best editions of works by Italian Renaissance art theorists. They pre ferred first or earliest known edition, including notes, but exclud

ing editorial matter outside the period, in an attempt to keep the

copy as intellectually uncluttered as possible. If a nearly contem

porary English translation of the work exists, it too has been

included. In a few cases, such as the more generally sought-after works of Vasari, early twentieth-century English language versions

are included as well.

The software program developed to provide access to the rich

materials contained in Art Theorists of the Italian Renaissance (ATIR) is sophisticated, but happily it is quick and easy to install. Many of the software options, such as tiling or cascading and resizing of

windows will be familiar to moderately facile computer users. A standard search screen offers access by keyword, title, author,

genre, language, and /or date of edition. The command mode of

fers still greater flexibility and the experienced searcher may take full advantage of the complete array of Boolean operators. Re

sponse time in either mode is fast. All searches for a session are

saved and can be reviewed and reselected in different combinations.

All options and many helpful searching techniques are fully de scribed in the user manual.

Within the scope of the licensing agreement the user may save to hard or floppy disk and/or print any of the material from the CD-ROM. The software which controls the printing of text and im

Volume 18, Number 2 ? 1999 ? Art Documentation 49

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