Reviewing the Past

Zoltán Somhegyi surveys ruins from across the globe, covering remnants of antiquity, contemporary urban decay, ruins pictured in artworks, and artificial ruins from eighteenth-century gardens to present-day shopping malls. His sophisticated reflections draw upon extensive research from several disciplines, providing a wonderfully readable introduction to ruin appreciation as well as an indispensable resource for scholars. -- Carolyn Korsmeyer, Professor of Philosophy, University of Buffalo
The book Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins by Zoltán Somhegyi is a must-read book about a very topical subject. We live in an age of ruins. On the one hand we save, document and reconstruct with great technical and financial effort all the fragments that have been historically preserved, and on the other hand new ruins are created all around, through war and iconoclastic terror and furor. Numerous aspects of the cultural and art historical, aesthetic, political and ideological ambivalences that determine the theme of ruins are dealt with in this legible and knowledgeable work. -- Michael Diers, Professor of Art and Visual History at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and Associate Professor of Art History at the Institute for Art and Visual History of the Humboldt University Berlin