Jabari Asim’s previous book, The N Word (2007), employed the notorious racial epithet to illuminate the history of American white supremacy. Now Asim, the editor of the NAACP’s bimonthly magazine, The Crisis, employs a similar technique in What Obama Means to study a new chapter in our country’s racial history—the election of our first black president. Acknowledging that Obama, like race itself, conveys a series of shifting meanings, Asim traces African Americans’ evolving image through a narrative of cultural history, highlighting several fulcrums in that history to help explain the unlikely formative saga of President Barack Hussein Obama.

Television has been omnipresent for so long that it’s hard to conceive of a time before it existed, much less one when art and design weren’t inextricably linked to the all-inclusive mess we know as TV culture. But such a time did exist, and the realms of television and art weren’t necessarily fated to be so closely allied.

The Russian critic Akim Volynsky came late to the art of classical dance but brought to his seat on the aisle a formidable background in philosophy, aesthetics, and polemics—the perfect background, really. He also brought the kind of inflamed idealism, a love of beauty with a capital b, that one associates with nineteenth-century aesthetes: the German Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Davidsbund. Born Chaim Leib Flekser in 1861, to a family of booksellers, Volynsky resembles a character in a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose surreal stories provided the basis for two classic ballets, Coppélia and The Nutcracker. He possessed

A rather touching aspect of music after 1945 concerns the close relationship between composers and the musicians who premiere their works. This intimacy is heightened in avant-garde and experimental music, which forces performers to adopt new reading skills and special techniques for playing their instruments (and sometimes to invent new instruments). In an indeterminate composition, the performer acts as a kind of co-composer, supplying compositional elements (including any and all aspects of melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and instrumentation) that the composer leaves free. The communication in these relationships often resembles that in a marriage, due to the nonverbal understanding between

Early in their fascinating, sometimes maddening cornucopia of erudition, The New Music Theater, Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi define their subject: “Music theater can be considered the confluence or adding up of language-like expressions: verbal or spoken language (the story; the libretto), physical movement or body language (gesture, dance), images or visual language (décor or design), and sound or musical language (pitch and rhythm; vocal and instrumental).” The book’s subtitle, Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body, aptly conveys the nature of this porous and flexible art form, in which disciplines mate in diverse and often obstreperous ways. The subject is

Like a chapbook or a treatise, the collected writings of Agnes Denes are sheathed between plain and precisely designed manila covers. Yet The Human Argument is no arch Conceptualist tract. If Denes is recognized as one of the earliest concept-based artists, since the late ’60s her practice has nevertheless reveled in voluminously detailed drawings that are as lush as they are rigorous and in carefully tended yet plush, shimmering fields of wheat captured in deep-focus photographs, many of which are reproduced here. Similarly, her interest in linguistic codes began bare-bones but quickly veered into the mystical, as her writings recount:

In a drawing of Texas in which the state is superimposed on a cross, Austin is designated by a pentagram sunk into a vortex. A dog’s head severed from a monstrous humanoid form inaccurately observes, “CROSS ON TEXAS,” and a trepanned human head with sunken eyes interjects, “DEATH TO SUICIDE.” Such is the landscape of Daniel Johnston’s drawings—cartoonish collisions of perspective whose Magic Marker palette extends from bright to brighter. But the more than eighty works that make up this monograph, the most comprehensive of his artwork to date, retain too much emotional presence to be mistaken for the doodles

Every time I flip through an L. L. Bean or The Company Store catalog and start to surrender to a world demanding no more of me than to juggle price, size, and color, a scene from Seinfeld comes to mind. Elaine is lying on her bed, thumbing through a Hammacher Schlemmer–y catalog, and considers purchasing “The World’s Best Pizza Cutter.” “Seventy-six bucks, how often do I make . . .” she says—and then, with revulsion, “Oh, I’ve gotta buy a book!” She doesn’t actually run off to buy one, but her reading life’s shrinkage to ad copy and product shots

On April 27, 1951, a few days before he died of cancer, Ludwig Wittgenstein completed one of his most important books, On Certainty. The previous day had been his sixty-second birthday. As Ray Monk tells it in his definitive biography,