Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art, Edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell, University Press of Mississippi, 308 pages, 2007. ISBN 1-57806-916-5 (hardcover) This book is definitely not bound for the coffee table, with its undersized images and serious, occasionally turgid, prose. But that’s not the point of this art book, whose admirable goal instead is to achieve a sober art-historical understanding of the self-taught art of the South “in the context of the makers’ experience.” If it displays more rigor than most books on the subject, however, its authors are not immune to the wishful
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Getting Religion on Its Own Terms
Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, edited by Carol Crown, with essays by Paul Harvey, Erika Doss, Hal Fulmer, Babatunde Lawal, Charles Reagan Wilson and N.J. Girardot, Art Museum of the University of Memphis with the University of Mississippi Press, 215 pages, 122 color plates, other color and b&w illustrations, 2004. ISBN 1-57806-659-X
Stereotypes have two inherent flaws: They often state the obvious and, when too generally applied, they become false. But they also are inescapable because, in the proper context, they are true.
Carol Crown’s exhibition and catalog, Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, can’t help but draw on Bible Belt stereotypes because they reflect a big slice of Southern reality. There is a lot more substance here than in many folk art theme shows, since the Bible really is the force behind a great deal of self-taught art.
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Authentic Heaven: The Vernacular Art of Urban Spirituality
How the Other Half Worships, by Camilo Jose Vergara, Rutgers University Press, 286 pages, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8135-3682-8 How The Other Half Worships celebrates one of the great engines of true vernacular expression – religion. The subject is inner-city churches, with an emphasis on the storefront variety. Camilo Jose Vergara has spent years visiting and photographing urban churches and their people, fascinated by their architecture and decoration, by what people do in them and by what they do for people. The book is built around his photographs, but it also gives the church folk a direct voice. The generous quotations from
Continue readingA Theory of Corporate Incompetence
Even the most brilliant, historically proven governing strategies can come to grief. The Russian czars relied on a track record of dimness, bureaucratic idiocy and stubbornness to create mass fatalism. But that cocoon was breached by the disasters of the Great War. Russians who had put up with their rulers’ incompetence for decades had finally had enough. Now we see our own triumphant incompetent, George W. Bush, continuing to reel from Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes even the most cynical public actually expects performance from its highest leaders. It may be premature to expect actual heads to roll, but it does seem
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