What do you think?
Rate this book
How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change
What terms do we use to describe and evaluate art, and how do we judge if art is good, and if it is for the social good? In How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza investigates such questions and the popular terminology through which art is discussed, valued, and taught. Adapting art viewing to contemporary demands within a rapidly changing world, deSouza outlines how art functions as politicized culture within a global industry. In addition to offering new pedagogical strategies for MFA programs and the training of artists, he provides an extensive analytical glossary of some of the most common terms used to discuss art while focusing on their current and changing usage. He also shows how these terms may be crafted to new artistic and social practices, particularly in what it means to decolonize the places of display and learning. DeSouza's work will be invaluable to the casual gallery visitor and the arts professional alike, to all those who regularly look at, think about, and make art—especially art students and faculty, artists, art critics, and curators.
- GenresArtNonfiction
336 pages, Hardcover
Published November 9, 2018
24 people are currently reading
279 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2019
This is like a post-colonial mash-up between ‘Keywords’ and ‘Minima Moralia’. In some ways… in other ways it’s more eloquent and relevant to artists than either!
There are four short chapters which end with a dismantling of the process of the ‘critique’ of an artwork. It is the key art school ritual for sure but it is something that every artists needs in some form throughout their life. There is then a long chapter ‘How art can be spoken: a glossary of contested terms’ which is an alphabetical lexicon of over 100 key terms in art discourses today. Each term is examined and unpacked. Sometimes referring back to art practice and teaching sometimes of relevance to everyone. Finally, there is a chapter on the abstract painter Mark Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz) which is quite brilliant and challenges the ideological mysticism that can occlude the authoritarian in Art, amongst other things. I won’t discuss this here but everyone must read at least this chapter!
This book is useful for artists and art teachers. There are many paragraphs of questions. So the books inquiry is kept quite open. Museums are ‘civilisational destinations’ for those aspiring to join the art cognoscenti of the art world. deSouza embraces his place in the (art) world and acknowledges he cannot step outside of the system and be an effective cultural operator. He describes how he got to be an insider in the biographical introduction - it wasn’t plain sailing.
The glossary is more penetrating in its analysis of the slippery terms of art-speak than anything I have read. Solid foundations are laid early in the book for a rational analytical approach - e.g. “art is produced through socialised individuals. Art is activated by similarly socialised viewers and participants.” p28. He identifies a system in which some are allowed ‘unconstrained mobility’ whilst others are ‘tightly regimented and constrained’. p32. Our understanding of art is embedded in vast inarticulated agglomerations of normative ideas and practices with roots in the days of empire. deSouza's mission is to bring some clarity to this dark gluttinous murk. The current art world ‘routinely practice(s) exclusivity and exceptionalism’. p41. The ambition of this book is not to reject this world but to systematically question each of the conceptual bricks that make the wall of ‘exclusivity and exceptionalism’ maintained by mundane routines of art practice. Behind the ‘seemingly neutral and dispassionate mask of quality’ questions as to what art is ‘passionately seethe.’ p43. This sense of passionate seething describe the tenor of the book well.
Critique as Radical Prototype
Critique is the way artists can support each other or the way art audiences can be more actively involved in thinking about art. deSouza sees critique as “a practice of thinking together.” p.68. My local community gallery TURF in Croydon, has a monthly ‘lunchtime feedback session’. These are convivial, turn taking and open to anyone who can bring work to share. deSouza thinks more deeply about different approaches to critique, especially in the art school setting. To my mind all artists need an ongoing process of feedback or critique throughout their lives and one that is in their control. deSouza’s eloquence and incisive thinking could better allow this crucial process to happen with a renewed consciousness. He talks of critique as a ‘trial space’ for the final act of making art public.
‘How art can be spoken: a glossary of contested terms’
Although the glossary is alphabetically ordered it reads well in the usual linear fashion. He made me think about my own positioning of feeling outside of the system and railing against the literary logonomic order, whilst being caught by within it and largely ignored. I often rationalise this rather than see it as spurred by the disabling pain of my own exclusion.
This entry on aesthetics helps me think more clearly about why I produced my ‘Sense- Think- Act’ bookwork. The point here is that I guarantee that the glossary will give something similar for any artist reading it.
One of the ways that this book asks more questions than it answers is by having a mind to the way that meaning is always dependent on context. So that art is a fluid form of communication that can be potent in one situation and mild mannered (if not invisible) in another. deSouza manages to have a mercurial intelligence on this matter that can allow for this fluidity without allowing oppression the elbow room to wade in with its leaden pencil in order to cross out all that challenges its own survival. At the same time he is careful not to try to impose a ‘new orthodoxy’ of political correctness. p.223
We used to talk about consciousness raising… This book is it. Wow!
But can I, for a moment. be constructively critical? He has a great quote from Fanon’s rejection of the idea of ‘collective unconscious’ and his suggestion instead of a ‘collective catharsis’. (from Black Skin, White Masks). But then addressing the term ‘emotion’ the possible meaning of this and its relation to cultural production is elided. To me the academy and the museum, and ruling class culture, is all about sublimation of emotion and its separation from formal ‘knowledge’. A rationality devoid of feeling and empathy. This could be the place in which Allan deSouza can stay in the academy and I run out into the street gasping for breath!
And although earlier there is a call for speaking of ‘art worlds’ in the plural, there is no term ‘subaltern cultures’, none for ‘working class culture’. Relating to this, another point of critique from one who is an outsider looking in is his entry on taste. This term occupied a special place in my intellectual life in an exploration of how urban working class culture was undermined from the C19 onwards (1993). Something that deeply effected my own family, so perhaps I’m hypersensitive. The idea of taste was a key part of the earlier European philosophical justifications that underpinned the rising dominance of bourgeois culture. For me the entry on Taste is cursory at best. Although later under ‘Truth’ things get more interesting!
But having felt my resentful moments I can go back to admiring this work for simple sentences like:
This book is condensed brilliance from someone who is embedded in struggle, art practice and teaching. Essential reading.
There are four short chapters which end with a dismantling of the process of the ‘critique’ of an artwork. It is the key art school ritual for sure but it is something that every artists needs in some form throughout their life. There is then a long chapter ‘How art can be spoken: a glossary of contested terms’ which is an alphabetical lexicon of over 100 key terms in art discourses today. Each term is examined and unpacked. Sometimes referring back to art practice and teaching sometimes of relevance to everyone. Finally, there is a chapter on the abstract painter Mark Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz) which is quite brilliant and challenges the ideological mysticism that can occlude the authoritarian in Art, amongst other things. I won’t discuss this here but everyone must read at least this chapter!
This book is useful for artists and art teachers. There are many paragraphs of questions. So the books inquiry is kept quite open. Museums are ‘civilisational destinations’ for those aspiring to join the art cognoscenti of the art world. deSouza embraces his place in the (art) world and acknowledges he cannot step outside of the system and be an effective cultural operator. He describes how he got to be an insider in the biographical introduction - it wasn’t plain sailing.
“As all other forms of knowledge are eradicated or subsumed within colonial knowledge systems, the colonised (subaltern), in order to gain a voice and to be heard, have to adopt the colonisers means of knowing, reason, language and manners, and institutions.” p.50
The glossary is more penetrating in its analysis of the slippery terms of art-speak than anything I have read. Solid foundations are laid early in the book for a rational analytical approach - e.g. “art is produced through socialised individuals. Art is activated by similarly socialised viewers and participants.” p28. He identifies a system in which some are allowed ‘unconstrained mobility’ whilst others are ‘tightly regimented and constrained’. p32. Our understanding of art is embedded in vast inarticulated agglomerations of normative ideas and practices with roots in the days of empire. deSouza's mission is to bring some clarity to this dark gluttinous murk. The current art world ‘routinely practice(s) exclusivity and exceptionalism’. p41. The ambition of this book is not to reject this world but to systematically question each of the conceptual bricks that make the wall of ‘exclusivity and exceptionalism’ maintained by mundane routines of art practice. Behind the ‘seemingly neutral and dispassionate mask of quality’ questions as to what art is ‘passionately seethe.’ p43. This sense of passionate seething describe the tenor of the book well.
Critique as Radical Prototype
Critique is the way artists can support each other or the way art audiences can be more actively involved in thinking about art. deSouza sees critique as “a practice of thinking together.” p.68. My local community gallery TURF in Croydon, has a monthly ‘lunchtime feedback session’. These are convivial, turn taking and open to anyone who can bring work to share. deSouza thinks more deeply about different approaches to critique, especially in the art school setting. To my mind all artists need an ongoing process of feedback or critique throughout their lives and one that is in their control. deSouza’s eloquence and incisive thinking could better allow this crucial process to happen with a renewed consciousness. He talks of critique as a ‘trial space’ for the final act of making art public.
“Good and Bad are final judgements, and one method of critique is to defer judgement since the work’s meaning is always context-specific, or circumstantial, I'm one therefore can't arrive at any kind of final judgement.” p.112
‘How art can be spoken: a glossary of contested terms’
Although the glossary is alphabetically ordered it reads well in the usual linear fashion. He made me think about my own positioning of feeling outside of the system and railing against the literary logonomic order, whilst being caught by within it and largely ignored. I often rationalise this rather than see it as spurred by the disabling pain of my own exclusion.
“One might say that aesthetics, as the philosophy of beauty, has anaesthetised us to articulating a full spectrum of sensation.” p.92 (my emphasis)
This entry on aesthetics helps me think more clearly about why I produced my ‘Sense- Think- Act’ bookwork. The point here is that I guarantee that the glossary will give something similar for any artist reading it.
One of the ways that this book asks more questions than it answers is by having a mind to the way that meaning is always dependent on context. So that art is a fluid form of communication that can be potent in one situation and mild mannered (if not invisible) in another. deSouza manages to have a mercurial intelligence on this matter that can allow for this fluidity without allowing oppression the elbow room to wade in with its leaden pencil in order to cross out all that challenges its own survival. At the same time he is careful not to try to impose a ‘new orthodoxy’ of political correctness. p.223
We used to talk about consciousness raising… This book is it. Wow!
But can I, for a moment. be constructively critical? He has a great quote from Fanon’s rejection of the idea of ‘collective unconscious’ and his suggestion instead of a ‘collective catharsis’. (from Black Skin, White Masks). But then addressing the term ‘emotion’ the possible meaning of this and its relation to cultural production is elided. To me the academy and the museum, and ruling class culture, is all about sublimation of emotion and its separation from formal ‘knowledge’. A rationality devoid of feeling and empathy. This could be the place in which Allan deSouza can stay in the academy and I run out into the street gasping for breath!
And although earlier there is a call for speaking of ‘art worlds’ in the plural, there is no term ‘subaltern cultures’, none for ‘working class culture’. Relating to this, another point of critique from one who is an outsider looking in is his entry on taste. This term occupied a special place in my intellectual life in an exploration of how urban working class culture was undermined from the C19 onwards (1993). Something that deeply effected my own family, so perhaps I’m hypersensitive. The idea of taste was a key part of the earlier European philosophical justifications that underpinned the rising dominance of bourgeois culture. For me the entry on Taste is cursory at best. Although later under ‘Truth’ things get more interesting!
But having felt my resentful moments I can go back to admiring this work for simple sentences like:
“Art is not politics, but is always political” p.219
And brilliantly concise formulations like:
“Humanism’s aspirations of universal reason and liberty as an abstracted human nature, while worthy, simultaneously allowed for hierarchies of the self, with categories of the subhuman to which those universalisms were not applied.” p.230
Or this:
“Universalism needs to be reconceptualised to produce inclusivity across difference.” p.257 (his emphasis)
This book is condensed brilliance from someone who is embedded in struggle, art practice and teaching. Essential reading.
December 9, 2025
Very interesting and refreshing to see this. Especially when deSouza referenced linguistic and colonial terms that I wasn’t even aware of. The text lost me at times with how complex some of the theory was but overall would recommend especially if you’re an artist or art student.
April 5, 2023
1 star because I could not finish the book. The language used was very academic, so it was very difficult to digest and read not in an academic setting.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews