Art as Worldmaking

Art as worldmaking is both a tribute to the distinguished art historian Alex Potts and a searching response to his important work on realism as a critical aesthetic, most notably the 2013 book Experiments in modern realism.

The collection comprises twenty original essays by leading scholars in the field, written from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives. They test Potts's recasting of realism, developed primarily through interpretations of European and American postwar art, against art produced in different media, places and periods, from eighth-century Chinese gardens to twenty-first-century video work by the Russian collective Radek Community. Individual chapters offer novel readings of classic instances of pictorial realism by Menzel and Eakins, and reconsider the question of nineteenth-century realism's historical antecedents. Overall, though, the volume has a contemporary orientation, in that it is concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm.

Featuring contributions from T. J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Lisa Tickner and Anne M. Wagner, along with other established and emerging scholars, Art as worldmaking is a bold contribution to a central question in art theory and history. It is compelling reading for anyone concerned with art's truth value, or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.