<p>"Elkin's book...is a gentle jab at his profession's habit of generating 'intricate and voluminous' interpretations of paintings." -- <em>Inside Publishing</em><br />"...Elkins argues that all our responses to pictures vacillate between conflicting desires to interpret, or read, and merely to see. He tracks these impulses from one extreme-- in ancient writing systems and mathematical notation-- to another, in modern abstract painting that tries to contrive a purely optical experience. The survey is arduous, but it is also fascinating." -- <em>The</em><em>San Francisco Chronicle</em><br />"Cogent, conversational and lucid, this book provides a useful, nuanced understanding of what ordinary viewers today share with 'the discipline [that] thrives on the pleasure of problems well solved'." -- <em>Publisher's Weekly</em><br />"A daring challenge to all those who would continue to defend art history's status as a positivistic discipline... a dazzling intellectual achievement." -- Keith Moxey, Barnard College<br />"Written with crystalline elegance and analytical rigor, <em>Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?</em> will be of interest not only to students of visual culture, but also to anyone concerned with interpretation in the humanities as a whole." -- Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley</p>