Volume LIII Number 5
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Books
The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture and Society, by Anthony O'Hear
The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture and Society,
by Anthony O’Hear,
Imprint Academic, 2008, £17.95.
The Landscape of Humanity is a philosopher’s response to the nonsense of the current world. It covers architecture, culture and politics. Anthony O’Hear is less bemused than the rest of us about a world in which, for example, gallery curators ask us to gaze in aesthetic wonder at discarded nappies, Chris Ofili’s Madonna surrounded with elephant dung, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed, Robert Mapplethorpe’s remarkable excursions into the photographic iconography of gay life, and other such exhibits, as if these remarkable objects stood in some line of descent from Botticelli, Vermeer and Monet. Where, when you need him, is the impertinent child who could recognise nakedness when all the fools around him were nodding approvingly at imagined genius?
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