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With the colder weather settling in, why not curl up with an art book? ArtsHub looks at the latest releases that are perfect autumn art reads, and book fairs.

Canada Choate on Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.

On Amada Cruz's cancellation of “Three American Painters: Then and Now.”

As editor in chief of Artforum from 1977 to 1980, Joseph Masheck published a series of five articles tracing ways that twentieth-century abstraction remained subtly rooted in Christian conceptualities and antetypes. With titles like “Cruciformality” and “Iconicity,” these articles were less concerned with religious iconographies (the ubiquity of cross-shaped structures in modernist painting, for example) than with understanding how nonobjective art was (re)processing religious logics, precisely while dispensing with iconographical and pictorial content.

Historicization may be part of what we expect from art, but Fredrick Jameson’s recommendation that one “Always historicize” sounds like a rule. The problem, I think, is the word ‘“always.” It makes it sound as though historicism is always the same and always observed or digested in the same way. “Always” is an absolute, everything else other than absolutely nothing isn’t.