James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents.

Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, October, 2006 by Hamilton, Emily

James Elkins, Master Narratives and Their Discontents, New York and London: Routledge, 2005, 192 pp., ill. b. & w.

James Elkins's Master Narratives and Their Discontents, the first book in the series "Theories of Modernism and Post-Modernism in the Visual Arts," is a historiographical study which argues that the plethora of writing on twentieth-century painting can be neatly classified within four narrative models: modernism, post-modernism, politics and the importance of skill.

Elkins chooses narratives which, in his view, have built the foundation for the century. Theorists such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Barthes are not included, and Elkins convincingly argues that, despite their influence, they have not changed the structure of the reception...

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