Art & ventriloquism : essays / by David Goldblatt ; with a critical commentary by Garry L. Hagberg.

Preface / Saul Ostrow -- Critical commentary / Garry L. Hagberg -- Bergen and McCarthy : the logic of an act -- Nietzsche and ventriloquism -- Self-spacing : Foucault's ventriloqual tendencies -- Socratic ventriloquism : theatricality and the voice of logos -- The dislocation of the architectural self -- Self-plagiarism : the ecstatic recycling of the artists's voice -- Cavellian conversation and the life of art -- Epilogue : two ventriloqual paintings.

"In his new book, David Goldblatt examines what he calls "the complex logic of ventriloquism" and its relationship with art, philosophy, and the artistic process. In the conversational exchange between ventriloquist and dummy, Goldblatt recognizes a speaking in other voices, illusion without deception, talking to oneself, effacing oneself as speaker, being beside oneself - the ancient Greek notion of ecstasis - and the animation of inanimate objects as an unabashed anthropomorphism." "Like ventriloquial dummies, artworks take on personalities, characters of their own, often saying what the artist herself would or could not say in voices distinct from her (our) daily modes of expression. Goldblatt uses ventriloquism as an apt metaphor to help understand a variety of art-world phenomena - how the vocal vacillation between ventriloquist and dummy is mimicked in the relationship of artist, artwork and audience, including the ways in which artworks are interpreted. Moreover, Goldblatt employs the concept of ventriloquism to generate insights into many of our important philosophers' writings on the arts, discussing the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Cavell, and Wittgenstein, among others."--BOOK JACKET.