Aleksei Kurbanovskii's book, The Predatory Eye: New Essays on the Archeology of Visuality, is an ambitious attempt to write a multicultural art history. It traces the development of two centuries of visual culture that falls largely within the discourse of western art history, and it incorporates Russia into this discourse. The premise of the book is that, we, as humans, are endowed with “predatory”—desiring, selective—vision, that we see “what we want to see” (6). The form of the book is ambiguous. It is both a theoretical treatise and a historical summary, but most of all it resembles a collection of lectures on the history and theory of art, drawn from numerous art historical sources, mostly by western authors. It is abundant in references to and quotations from these authors, beginning with Immanuel Kant and continuing through Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said, among others. Western art historians and critics—such as Svetlana Alpers, Hans Belting, Rosalind Krauss, and Clement Greenberg—are also cited prolifically. Russian sources, such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Victor Shklovskii, Mikhail Bakunin, and Boris Arvatov are well-integrated into the narrative. The form of the book determines its content. It is a collection of articles that are united by a common methodology of applying contemporary theories of visuality to Russian material. Like some scholarly literature from Russia, it does not have a well-articulated argument, but rather a goal, which is to convince the reader of the differences of visual regimes in various cultures. To this end, the author weaves a chronologically-arranged narrative out of leading art historical and critical trends that have become commonplace in the field in the past thirty years. It begins by covering the themes of “orientalism” and “art and politics” in Russia in the nineteenth century; “the material and the spiritual in art” at the turn of the next century; “the machine aesthetics” in the early 1900s; and “the screen and (de)formations of vision” in contemporary art. Each trend is assigned a certain chronological timeframe and its own chapter.

The logic of the narrative follows the principle of dualistic opposites, formulated as “textual” versus “visual” art, following Alpers, or as the discerning gaze of the Italian Renaissance model, which “illustrates the Albertian metaphor of painting as a ‘window into the world,’” (32) versus the “descriptive” model, which does not pronounce a judgment coming from a definite point of view but rather illustrates Norman Bryson's observation in which “the spectator is an unexpected presence, not a theatrical audience … the bond with the viewer's physique is broken and the viewing subject is now proposed and assumed as a notional point, a non-empirical gaze” (32). The author then projects these two tendencies onto the history of confrontation between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles,” elaborating them anew by expertly using abundant material from Russian literary and artistic heritage.

One problem of the book is that the teleological narrative of the struggle of opposites cannot help but bring the author to the inevitable pessimistic conclusion of “the end of art,” presenting him as an adherent of the descriptive, “disembodied,” “apolitical” model. While the book deserves praise for an original and insightful summary of major theoretical trends in art history, it short-circuits on account of what the Russian revolutionary thinker Nikolai Chernyshevskii formulated as the eternal question plaguing the Russian psyche: “What is to be done”? After reading about multiple transformations of visuality that unfolded in various historical periods, we have a rather clear picture of the development of artistic practice and art history thought up to the present time, but have no idea of what to do next to avoid what the author describes as the inevitable artlessness of our existence. Remarkably, while the first four chapters covering the material of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are dedicated to Russian art, the last, most pessimistic, “end of art” chapter is devoid of concrete examples of contemporary Russian art, as if it does not exist or is not worth talking about.

According to the publisher's note, the book is the continuation of the author's archeological study of visuality launched in his previously published volume, Nezapnyi Mrak (which can be translated roughly as Nexpected Darkness, the first word being a neologism), published in 2007.