"Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism" by David Summers, published by Phaedon Press, London, UK, 2003, First Edition, 1st Printing; illustrated.

Original dust jacket [a little edge wear]; hard boards have the same design as the jacket; large format: 8.3/4" x 10"; 2.1/4" shelf space; 687 pages including Endnotes and Glossary + Index, very good/ fine condition.

"A galloping aesthetic anthropology, a globe-trotting exercise in vast erudition and dizzying equivalences...The book...offers a repositioning of the very idea of art." (Mark Kingwell, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto)

"David Summers sets forth that current formalist, contextual and post-structural approaches fail to provide an adequate account of all art, particularly art produced outside the Western tradition. He argues that there are profound problems right at the heart of Western thinking about art, and his new framework is an attempt to resolve these problems.

At the core of the argument is a proposal to replace the notion of the 'visual arts' with that of the 'spatial arts', comprising two fundamental categories: 'real space' and 'virtual space'. Real space is the space we share with other people and things: the fundamental arts of real space are sculpture (the art of personal space) and architecture (the art of social space). Virtual space - which always entails a format in real space (thus making real space the primary category) - is space represented in two dimensions, as in paintings, drawings and prints.

Adopting a wide definition of art that in principle embraces anything that is made, and underpinning his arguments with detailed examination of artifacts and architecture from all over the world, Summers develops his thesis in a series of chapters that broadly trace the progress of human skill in many different traditions: from the simple facture of the first tools to the sophisticated universal three-dimensional grid of modern technology, which he describes as 'metaoptical' space. In a sequence of far-reaching and revealing discussions of facture, places, centers, three-dimensional and planar images, virtuality and perspective, and the centreless metaoptical world of Western modernism, Summers creates a conceptual framework that always relates art to human use, and enables us to treat all traditions on an equal footing within universal categories." [a review]

David Summers is the William R Kenan Jr Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. Internationally recognized as one of the most distinguished historians of art and ideas of his generation, he is the author of two major, groundbreaking studies, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987). Judgement of Sense won the Forkasch Prizefor the best book in intellectual history published in 1987. In 1996 Professor Summers was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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