Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art represents an apposite study of the biennials and triennials – also known as mega-exhibitions – that are proliferating around the world. Apposite since, with the exception of Bruce Altshuler’s two-volume account from 1863 to 2002, no art-historical text has offered a scholarly appraisal of these extravaganzas.

The current tally of international mega-exhibitions is a whopping 207, of which thirty-four will take place in 2017. They range from the grandfather of them all: the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895; the most august: documenta (founded in 1955 and occurring every five years); to the new kids on the block: Karachi Biennale; Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art; and Desert X in the Coachella Valley, California (each launched in 2017). Melbourne will host the inaugural NGV Triennial in December. Remarkably, 2017 also brought the first Antarctic Biennale; an expedition aboard a research ship-cum-cruise vessel which took place over twelve days in March.

This study, which first appeared in German in 2011, was hailed at the time as definitive: properly so, as it incorporates so many aspects from so many areas of research. It marks a significant contribution to such fields as musicology, cultural history, the relationship between art and politics – not just in the Nazi era, but the periods preceding that, which saw the emergence of the two orchestras – and the role of the state and of the audience in shaping repertoire, and the relationship between the orchestra and the media.

The introduction manages the difficult task of summarising the crucial historical issue of ‘two cities, two orchestras’ while also reminding the reader of more contemporary questions such as the ‘German sound’ of the Berlin Philharmonic – which led to what the author describes as a ‘hot debate ... [which] emerged from a polemic against the principal conductor of the orchestra, Simon Rattle’ – versus the Vienna Philharmonic’s approach, which ‘hews neither to the German sound nor even an Austrian one’. These convenient shorthand descriptions are deftly set against each other and analysed, even before the author spells out the work’s primary aim.

Jeff Buckley is a man frozen in time, not just by virtue of being elevated into the pantheon of ‘died-too-early-rock-gods’. Before his untimely drowning in 1997, Buckley appeared to exist in a sort of musical and emotional stasis: a young fogey caught among the cultural ruins and vestiges of his estranged father, who died aged twenty-eight from a heroin overdose in 1975. It is a topic that Jeff Apter passes over but doesn’t mine in his re-released Jeff Buckley biography, A Pure Drop.

Does William Shakespeare still matter? The question was posed frequently throughout 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. Those sceptical of Shakespeare’s enduring relevance faced the challenge of explaining the seemingly endless proliferation of films and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in an age ostensibly dislocated from early modern sensibilities and politics. R.S. White’s timely book on the influence of Shakespeare on Hollywood cinema offers a refreshing account of the ‘contestatory and symbiotic’ relationship between Shakespeare’s generic innovations and the development of cinematic genres in early Hollywood. For White, although the influence of Shakespeare on contemporary film culture can be measured by the sheer number of explicit adaptations, a more significant legacy can be discerned in the degree to which Hollywood’s comedies of love exhibit ‘a deeper, structural analogy’ to Shakespeare on the level of genre itself.

White’s thesis is that Shakespeare’s presence in virtually every cinematic genre imaginable is less the product of the ‘apparent ease’ with which his plays can be referenced, but rather ‘the fact that his plays have had some part in the creation of these movie genres’. (An intriguing by-product of this claim is the observation that resistance to Anglo-centric tradition made France’s film industry a distinct outlier in the global market precisely because it escaped the formative influence of Shakespeare on its cinematic genres.) Occasionally, White overstates the originality or ‘singularity’ of Shakespeare (to borrow Gary Taylor’s term from Reinventing Shakespeare, 1989), but his usual practice is to more cautiously suggest that ‘Shakespeare helped to prioritise some paradigms of love’ that were ‘absorbed into movies’.