ABSTRACT
David Goldblatt's brilliant writings on aesthetics collected offer a fresh perspective that these writings exhibit the rare virtue of maintaining a close proximity to the aesthetic practices Goldblatt investigates while at the same time keeping an eye out for the larger significance of those practices, those particular cases, those distinct varieties of aesthetic engagement. And indeed, seeing a set of aesthetic issues through the lens of ventriloquism casts light of an uncommon kind, precisely because the novel juxtaposition of a number of somewhat more conventional aesthetic issues with a somewhat less conventional performance genre achieves the primary things: it casts into higher relief a number of philosophically significant aspects of the genre that would otherwise have remained invisible; and, it brings into focus a good number of the spects on both the philosophical and the performative sides of other art-world practices that are instructively parallel to, or in some cases almost extensions of, ventriloquial performance.
