“Martin has captured the longing I feel when I think of the blues of distances I cannot close, and in putting it somewhere where I can see it, has closed the distance. Somewhere in there, too: a little joy, tempering all that wanting. It soothes my anxieties about replication, about what I fear is the ultimate failure of communication. For that’s something I’ve always worried about in art—that I keep making things that don’t mean what I want them to mean.”

“Sociologists of art and culture, and like-minded persons of various stripes, should read this book to see that there is not a great deal to be frightened of in Rancière’s criticisms, actual or potential, in what they do. His now famous account of the three historical stages of art can be seen to be a relabelling in his own terminology of what are really some very obvious points about the development of art over the last few centuries, points that anyone who knows about art history would know anyway.”