The Quality Instinct
Seeing Art Through a Museum Director's Eye
Distributed for American Alliance of Museums Press
236 pages
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60 color plates
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7 x 10
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© 2012
How do we judge what is good in art? And more to the point, can we even judge art? These questions have long spawned heated conversations about objectivity, subjectivity, and qualitative judgment that span both the academic and art worlds. Acclaimed museum director Maxwell Anderson, newly named Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, enters the fray with The Quality Instinct. Part memoir, part primer on museum culture, The Quality Instinct brims with wit and humor, utilizing anecdotes and insights from the author’s thirty years in the highly competitive, often contentious art world. Anderson takes us on a grand tour of ancient and contemporary art, sharing five simple metrics of quality that help us to increase our visual literacy as we learn to see and, yes, even to judge art.
Daniel Silva, New York Times best-selling author
“Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person’s guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: How I See It
Introduction: How I See It
1. An Apprenticeship in Seeing
2. Defining Quality in Art
3. How to See: The Detective’s Reflex
4. On Originality
5. Crafted with Skill
6. Confident in Subject or Theme
7. Compositional Coherence
8. Memorable for the Viewer
9. Finding Quality in the Art of Our Time
10. Art and Muscle
Index
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Art: Art Criticism
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