News:
Latest book: What Heaven Looks Like.
Next up: a massive textbook with Oxford Press, co-authored with Erna Fiorentini, called Visual Worlds. It should be out (after 7 years of work!) in 2020.
Also in 2020: my summary of the state of art writing around the world, called The Impending Single History of Art: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives. To be published by de Gruyter.
Passed the 300,000 word mark on my novel. Writing every day! It has illustrations; some are posted on Instagram.
Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.
Latest uploads:
The book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?; the book How to Use Your Eyes; and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. (There is also a website with reviews of contemporary piano music.)
Live Writing Projects:
I am experimenting with writing live on the internet. These texts update live, and you can contribute to them & be thanked when the book is published. (1) What is Interesting Writing in Art History?, (2) Writing with Images. Thanks everyone for contributing!
Religion has a "strange" place in art because work that subscribes to a major religion is not often accepted in the international art market.
A book about people who have had strong emotional reactions (including crying) looking at paintings, and about the relatively tearless twentieth century.
A book about the hypnotic attraction of oil and tempera: why painters love paint, even before the painting is half-finished.
A book of commentary on a beautiful and mysterious manuscript in a library in Scotland.
An argument about what's taught in art schools and departments, and what isn't, or can't be.
An answer to the perennially popular book by E.H. Gombrich, Stories of Art.
A book written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This is a pendant, of sorts, to What Painting Is.
A large-format book with color pictures of common objects often overlooked: sand, a twig, the night sky, the inside of your own eye.