| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. By Michael Leja. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xxxviii, 300 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-520-23807-9.)
The muse of Michael Leja's Looking Askance is P. T. Barnum. The subject, however, is not that redoubtable purveyor of hoaxes, but a culture of humbug that Leja traces from the 1869 trial of William Mumler, a mid-nineteenth-century "spirit photographer" (p. 14) charged with fraud and larceny, to Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase painting (1911) created a public scandal at the Armory Show of 1913. Leja argues that skepticism, as a public attitude, has remained central to American life over the past century and a half.	1
Mumler is not the usual name we associate with Duchamp. Nor is this the usual art-historical book. Looking Askance is about visual culture, broadly conceived. It is also about the skeptical states of mind that Leja links to the advent of modernity. "Modern life was coming to be distinguished by a gaping separation between appearance and truth" (p. 11). The culprit, Leja explains, was a new culture of images. As commodity production roared into high gear throughout the nineteenth century, images came to play an increasingly central role in politics, advertising, and consumption. Everyday life was saturated with conflicting visual messages, each staking a claim to the viewer's attention, and each claiming to represent the truth.	. . .

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