"This book gives real pleasure and offers a genuine learning experience. Right from the beginning, the author engages the reader with the thought that something that seems so incomprehensible to so many (abstract art) can be understood in the same terms as something as concrete, unthreatening, and comprehensible as a pizza."
Raymond Erickson, editor of Schubert's Vienna "Nancy G. Heller is ... Read morea godsend for the average Joe who wants to understand modern art... Heller's funny, accessible book is filled with terrific color pictures for us to look at and get an idea about our individual aesthetic preferences... There's no dour intellectual jargon and gobbleygook here, just plain talk for plain folks who dig art and want to know why."
Gino Vivinetto, St Petersburg Times "Heller organizes a large body of material coherently. She clearly explains concepts that might otherwise seem novel or complex. She allows space for the critics of the avant-garde... Taken as a whole, Heller's analysis is directed more to creating openness to avant-garde art than to an appreciation or understanding of it. She is not a proselytizer."
Gresham Riley, Philadelphia Inquirer "In this evocatively titled book, Heller simplifies the complexities of modern avant-garde art, making it palatable and accessible to an uninformed audience... [H]er argument will offer baffled museum and gallery visitors a way to appreciate otherwise difficult work."
Library Journal "Heller wants to persuade the bewildered that the emperor of contemporary art does in fact have clothes
confusing and abstract clothes, but clothes nonetheless. She realizes that people dislike contemporary art because it makes them feel stupid, so she shies away from the conceptual in favor of formal aspects that everyone can appreciate ... with jargon-free charm."
Alix Ohlin, The Wilson Quarterly "Heller realizes that a painting is not like a pizza. She also knows, however, that this and the other homely analogies that pepper her introduction to modern art are entirely appropriate for an audience of curious and suspicious neophytes venturing into difficult terrain... The emphasis on difficult and controversial works, which are compared to more traditional works, to each other, and to common things, introduces various ways of interpreting and evaluating art in the context of specific examples... [S]hort, pithy, and intelligent."
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