Enigma Variations [Paperback]

Noted writers on art, culture, and the tropical Americas, Richard and Sally Price have crafted a mystery at the intersections of art and anthropology. Drawing readers into their quest for a solution, they build an unusual partnership between text and pictures, daringly expanding the possibilities of academic discourse.Enigma Variations--in the tradition ofThe Recognitions andThe Crying of Lot 49--is an entertainment as readable for its intellectual power as for its irresistible drama.A fabulous and unique artifact, an art-historical whodunit told with great flair, intelligence, and sensitivity. Like the art it tells us so much about,Enigma Variationsis a hybrid work that keeps tempting you to read it as fact although it is officially labeled fiction...For the reader, puzzling out which is which is part of the enigmatic charm of the Prices' book--a novel based on the authors' anthropological experiences. The Prices certainly have the great novelist's ability to breathe life into the people they invent--and also, it appears, to breathe life into the living.A genre-busting meditation on the nature of genre-busting...One might even say the mask of mystery and steamy tropical adventure this book wears is exactly the right outfit for approaching the question of what is and what is not art today--whether in the humid workshops of the Amazon or in the galleries of SoHo.Strikingly well crafted...A useful account of the social and commercial processes whereby art objects are 'authenticated,' and of the roles scholars play in those processes. The theoretical arguments raised by the novel (concerning the epistemological status of 'real' versus 'fake' objects) are not new, butEnigma Variationswill give readers a three-dimensional sense of the intellectual and social work that goes into establishing the status of particular objects.Enigma Variationsis, in short, atour de force--and lots of fun.Enigma Variations, an allegoricl³*