Janet Wolff is professor of cultural sociology and director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Social Production of Art, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism, and AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States.
A salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. -- Garry L. Hagberg CAA Reviews