• Art as worldmaking
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Art as worldmaking

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This collection is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading art historians explore Pott’s recasting of realism, providing a new under...
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  • 20 January 2026
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Art as worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts’s recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art’s truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.
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Price: £25.00
Pages: 368
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 20 January 2026
ISBN: 9781526114914
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

ART / History / General, Theory of art, ART / Criticism & Theory
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‘Art as Worldmaking is a game changer. The essays within cast new light on a striking range of subjects, and the collection as whole completely reframes our current understanding of artistic realism.’
Marnin Young, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History, Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University

Preface: essays in honour of Alex Potts
Introduction: realism then and now - Andrew Hemingway
PART I: THEORY
1 The transactions of detail - Briony Fer
2 Realism’s credibility problem - Joshua Shannon
PART II: SCULPTURE
3 Attending to the veristic sculptural portrait in the eighteenth century - Malcolm Baker
4 Elasticity and sculptural form - Caroline Arscott
5 A portrait of the artist as a dead man - Jon Wood
6 Death metal - Anne M. Wagner
PART III: LANDSCAPE DESIGN
7 Recurrent dialogues in the history of Chinese and English garden design - Martin J. Powers
8 Traditional views: conservative anti-naturalism and landscape aesthetics in France around 1900 - Neil McWilliam
PART IV: PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND MAKING STRANGE
9 Willem Kalf on Reflexykonst: the aesthetics of transformation in still life - Celeste Brusati
10 Democratic light: phenomenology and the worldliness of painting - Brendan Prendeville
11 Body and soul in the work of Thomas Eakins and F. Holland Day - Rebecca Zurier
12 From Menzel to Burtynsky: episodes from an imagery of capitalism - T. J. Clark
PART V: PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMA
13 Constance Stuart’s war: women and documentary’s excess - Tamar Garb
14 Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966): photography and film - Lisa Tickner
15 ‘Dirty realism’: documentary photography in 1970s Britain – a maquette - Steve Edwards
PART VI: POST-MEDIA/CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES
16 The roots of Mike Kelley’s Realism: subterranean homesick blues - Thomas Crow
17 The moment of guerrilla art - Alistair Rider
18 Every day, something happens to us: realism at the crossroads - Gail Day
Coda: on Margate Sands… - Adrian Rifkin
Index