8Visual Culture

Abstract

This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2018 and is divided into three sections: 1. Art and the Internet; 2. Art and Society, and 3. Artists and Their Environment. The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section explores how art critics and those in the field are continuing to deal with visual culture’s relationship with the Internet and digital media (Daniel Birnbaum, Michelle Kuo, eds. More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age; Eva Respini, ed., Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today). The second section looks at books about art in the social sphere (Kim Snepvangers and Donna Mathewson Mitchell, eds., Beyond Community Engagement: Transforming Dialogues in Art, Education, and the Cultural Sphere; Ole Marius Hylland and Erling Bjurström, eds., Aesthetics and Politics: A Nordic Perspective on How Cultural Policy Negotiates the Agency of Music and Arts; Gary Alan Fine, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education). The third and final section looks at how artists negotiate their environment, responding to and altering their surroundings (Sarah Lowndes, Contemporary Artists Working Outside the City: Creative Retreat; Gabriel N. Gee and Alison Vogelaar, eds., Changing Representations of Nature and the City: The 1960s–1970s and Their Legacies).