394 Book Reviews © 2013 Andrea Acri DOI: 10.1163/22134379-12340038 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Natasha Reichle (ed), Bali: Art, ritual, performance. San Francisco: The Asian Art Museum, 2010, 376 pp. ISBN 9780939117550 (hardback); 9780939117567 (paperback). Price: USD 35 (paperback). This lavishly illustrated coffee-table book edited by Natasha Reichle is intended as a catalogue accompanying the homonymous exhibition— reportedly the first major event on the arts of Bali presented in the United States—on view at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum from February to September 2011. The exhibition focused on objects of ritual importance in the specific, as well as Balinese art, culture, and religion at large. Many of the 130 artworks on display were borrowed from Dutch collections, both pub- lic and private, and mostly originate from pre-World War II Bali. Besides the catalogue entries by Brinkgreve, Reichle, and Stuart-Fox (pp. 133–364), the book contains five essays (pp. 9–131) by Reichle, Stuart-Fox, Brinkgreve, Kam, and Brinkgreve respectively. These reflect the objects presented in the exhibition, but also aim at filling some gaps in material not covered by it. The first introductory essay ‘Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance’ by Reichle outlines the scope, and main focus, of the exhibition-cum-book-project, namely ‘performance’ and its intersection with art and ritual—in Bali most forms of art and ritual are largely ‘performative’ indeed as they may include puppetry, gamelan performances, masked dances, processions, and so forth. Reichle (p. 11) rightly claims the impossibility of doing justice to such a cul- turally diverse place as Bali through a scholarly work of limited scope, let alone a museum exhibition. She further points out that the domain of the book is limited, and understandably so, to the art produced by the ‘Hindu’ Balinese, forming the majority on the island, and leaves out of the picture the ‘original’ animistic Balinese, the Bali Aga, as well as the Christian and Muslim communities. Reichle then introduces the reader to Balinese his- tory, culture, and arts. She concludes her essay with a brief ‘story’ of the first resident Westerners in Bali, which amounts to ‘what they saw and what they took’. She relates the idyllic image of tropical paradise that Bali has evoked for nearly a century, the attraction and fascination it exerted on Western artists, performers, and scholars alike. In fact, the words ‘what they gave’ could have been added to the subtitle: as hinted at by Reichle, several forms of art and performance (both profane and sacred) that are marketed as ‘traditional’ in contemporary Bali actually originate from the 1930s, as a