Ahead of its September release, Publishers Weekly reviews Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle by Jonathan Crary. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“In this erudite collection of previously published essays, art historian Crary (Scorched Earth) examines 20th-century visual art (including performance, photography, television, and film) and how it negotiates perception and attention…. Students of 20th-century art and media will appreciate Crary’s fine-grained analysis and prescient cultural insights, including how television can ‘produce, rather than represent, a world of experience’ that ‘becomes more real than so-called everyday life.’ This is edifying.”