a very quick note on Thomas McEvilley

Thomas McEvilley, who began life as a classicist, branched out to write about global contemporary art before global contemporary art was cool. In more recent years he has been collecting his essays on such topics as conceptual and performance art.

And now he has published a new book on Sappho, a reminder that he never quite quit writing about the ancient Greeks as well as about the global reach of contemporary forms of art.

The book is from Spring Publications, and amazon.com lists it as though it were incredibly rare, only one copy available from one of their sellers. But in fact it has just been published, and apparently is simply not in their warehouse yet.

I mention all this not because many readers of counterforces care about scholarly studies of Sappho, but because not many practicing art critics still publish books in their original specialties. Arthur Danto, whom I first encountered through his Nietzsche as Philosoper, hasn't published a book devoted solely to philosophy in a decade, and a flood of titles devoted to his essays on contemporary art.