Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon

Cultural upheavals have brought enormous change to the world of art. This sweeping history, covering more than 200 years, puts recent changes in a revealing new context. Here's the how and the why of changing perspectives that make and break reputations, often reversing who is considered a master one day and who is unknown the next.

Each generation of experts believes their own taste is the last word, confident in their opinions about the art that was the best of their time.

As the author writes, "People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again; they are incredulous that Botticelli was forgotten and Vermeer overlooked until the late 19th century. They cannot imagine how foolish people were to reject the paintings of Van Gogh or of Picasso and the Cubists, or how angry the Armory Show made many art lovers. How unthinking, how stupid, they think, not realizing that the pattern has been repeated again and again in the past and will be in the future. We now recognize that the process is a continual one. Each past canon was established for good reason; there are no mistakes, there is only history. Many of the favored artists of any period including our own will drop from favor, something that art dealers never tell their clients, or museum curators their boards."

Today, museums, critical judgments, and collectors have gone through a dramatic shift. There has been an emergence of new aesthetic standards based on identity, race, justice, and an embrace of diversity. Words such as "masterpiece" have been all but banished in the artworld. One of America's most respected museum curators and art scholars, Theodore E. Stebbins, is uniquely able to put recent shifts in the canon within the context of a regular, generational shift in taste that tells us much about the value that is placed on art--including who decides what matters and what does not--and art's unpredictable future.

Profusely illustrated throughout, fascinating, controversial, deeply informed, Rethinking American Art is for any art lover who wants a greater understanding of the constant process of change.