In a story
helpfully marked “Not the Onion,” Gawker reports that Toronto’s Ontario College
of Art and Design is requiring students to purchase a $180 art history textbook
that has no images of art at all. The father of one student says the publisher
of the book, Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800, apparently
couldn’t get the copyright permissions settled in time for the print run. But
the school’s dean disputes that, saying the textbook was always intended to
have no pictures. “If we had opted for print clearance of all the Stokstad
and Drucker images,” the dean wrote in a letter to students,
“the text would have cost over $800.”
