Edited by Stephen Melville

With essays by Emily Apter, George Baker, Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Martha Buskirk, Margaret Iversen, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Karen Lang, Mark A. Meadow, Helen Molesworth, Marcia Pointon, Christian Scheidemann, Edward J. Sullivan, and Martha Ward

$24.95 Softcover

A lure is something that tempts or attracts with the offer of pleasure or reward, a promise sometimes false, sometimes kept, and sometimes broken. Based on the 2004 Clark Conference, The Lure of the Object examines the ways in which art history finds, loses, or gives itself away in the face of its objects. In a series of thought-provoking essays, fourteen distinguished curators, conservators, and scholars from different disciplines in the humanities consider how artists, the public, and art historians encounter objects. How are art and art history shaped by the confrontation with the object—painted, drawn, and sculpted; lost, found, and ready-made; exhibited and conserved; made and unmade?

232 pages, 7 x 9 1/2 inches
89 black-and-white illustrations
2005
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press

ISBN 0-300-10337-9 (softcover)