Julian Bell has written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich's The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making technologies that seemed mature have changed and expanded their reach. In 1950 we lived in an image flood. We are now, as Bell puts it, in an image jam. As you turn the pages of Mirror of the World and skip from illustration to illustration you feel the jostle of hundreds of other images that could equally well have been chosen as landing places, while thousands more that make no claim to be works of art still demand attention. The very persistence of art objects can seem a burden. Of a New Ireland mask Bell writes: 'the mask, like the malanggans, New Ireland's giant funerary complexes of carving, would probably on principle have been consigned to the fire. That is, until European collectors created a market for "primitive" exotica.' The plate of available art is piled higher and higher. Will appetite fail?

LRB 29 November 2007 | PDF Download