The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development. - book reviews

The publishers of these books have also failed the reader in many ways. Living through our current situation of cutbacks and downsizing, dare one request that "committed" academic writing respond directly and simply to the harried reader's needs? Can't academic publishers retain a decent spell-check program - not only for that "Vedda," but for other easily avoidable errors such as "Jaspar" Johns (p. 139). It's especially discouraging that this latter mistake occurs in a publication from one of our most important academic houses. Writers try to buttress spurious scholarship with an elaborate structure of extended word processing. The now-familiar MIT format of providing impedimenta as marginalia is welcome in most cases, but not when it exposes lax scholarship. Obviously, for example, Andrew Perchuk has relied heavily on texts by Steven Cohan; he therefore makes general reference to Look magazine's four-part series "The Decline of the American Male" by referring to one of Cohan's books, an all too common type of academic incest.(10) Only a th(o)rough reader (and in a collection of essays, most readers probably do not fit into this category) would discover the reference - as note 15 of Cohan's entry.

Degas is an example of an artist secure in our esteem, even if the meaning of his images is mutable in our regard. In reconsidering and revising our view of such an artist, an editor's consideration guides both author and reader over the terrain. Despite the quality of her work, Anthea Calleo has been ill served by her editor in this area. Not only does she occasionally overwrite or stretch a point into irrelevancy, but usually these examples follow small errors of spelling or grammar: "subtlely" (p. 134 and elsewhere), "Pasadina" (p.151), "innane" (p. 202), and so on. These should serve as warning signs to the editor; such oversights certainly leave the text exposed. I note this more in sorrow for the decline of budgets and changes in publishers' priorities, which have eliminated editing positions, rather than to blame the authors who are only protecting their roles in the academic factory.

To varying degrees, all these books confuse theories of production and consumption, or the making and reading of images. When we read them, are we talking about the image? Its initial viewer? The present-day viewer? The artist? This basic confusion is rooted in Marxism's description of the consumer process, which was forced into a theory of production. In academia, Marxism has produced a self-reflective debate. The most reactionary forces, which claim to address the intellectual disenfranchisement of the populace, have taken over the debate over who we are and our future as a culture.

These books earn their places on our shelves in direct proportion to their ability to disrupt our preconceptions and thus open new possibilities. One of the most pleasant surprises in reading the titles is that each (with the exception of the Ewing book, which is intended differently) locates its argument in intellectual spaces amenable to the traditions of humanistic inquiry, a reasonableness that does not mute the ferocity of the message. Until the Pontormo/Broozino relationship and the identification of the Bronzino portrait in the Joseph is as freely offered (and accepted for its relative unimportance) in standard surveys as that of Whistler's mother or Andrea del Sarto's wife or Fra Lippo Lippi's mistress, we will be unable to encourage openly direct regard and understanding of these figures and their milieu. It is equally sad but true, that such books are still necessary to break open the assumptions of the identification of male subjectivity with quality and female production with consumption in the introductory art curriculum.