John Hyman’s newest work, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art, addresses one of the perennial issues in art theory—the fascinatingly complex nature of pictorial representation. Here, Hyman makes a radical departure from recent trends in the philosophy of art to formulate what a review in the January 25 London Review of Books has called a “devastating critique of subjectivism”—all the while using “a complex array of texts and arguments from the full historical sweep of Western cultural reflection on the nature of pictorial art” to build his own “carefully nuanced” objectivist stance.
But though the work of reformulating hundreds of years of theoretical writings in the arts might sound complicated, the London Review continues, “the rigorous clarity and elegant concision of Hyman’s writing—literary virtues to which the best analytical philosophy has always aspired—carry his reader through even the most difficult sections. No one will come away from this book without having learned a great deal about one of the most familiar mysteries of human culture.”
And indeed, readers will find this an engaging critique of contemporary art theory a fascinating challenge to some of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of pictorial representation.