The Rape of the Masters

Kimball, a noted art critic himself, shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics -- feminism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, the whole armoury of academic anti-humanism. To make his point, Kimball shows how eight famous works of art (reprinted here as illustrations) have been made over to fit a radical ideological fantasy. Kimball then performs a series of intellectual rescue operations, showing how these great works should be understood through a series of illuminating readings in which art, not politics, guides the discussion.