Description:
In an exquisitely idiosyncratic book of enormous intellectual ambition crammed into a tiny space...Tamen wants to redefine aesthetics, by way of intently focused chapters on, inter alia, Byzantine theology and image-smashing, human rights, and bodies (of corporations and of babies). In his scheme, the interpretable object (which might be what we recognize as an artwork, but does not need to be) exists by virtue of its 'friends'--those people who gather round it and, so to speak, talk to it, as we might do with a statue or painting. How do objects 'talk back' from within a museum or a church? Suavely Wittgensteinian and insatiably curious, Tamen's arguments are hardly devalued by the lack of any earth-shattering conclusion.
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