by Jon Lackman | 2 September 2010 | Modern, Museums
One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”:
He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification smacks of cliché and his naiveté was only superficial. The artist explored an entirely personal, baroque, and strange universe where the seen, the felt, the familiar, the strange, and even the incongruous intermingled. By transgressing norms, he heralded the arrival of the twentieth century as much as Cézanne did, though very differently … What finally characterizes Henri Rousseau is the oneiric quality of his canvases … [I]t was a source of inspiration for Max Ernst and Magritte, because these paintings were nothing less than the “photographs of dreams” that André Breton said defined surrealist painting.
by Jon Lackman | 1 September 2010 | Awards
From The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art:
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Victor I. Stoichita, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2011. Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge has been named the 60th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2011.
CASVA also announced the appointment of seven senior and four visiting senior fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, 18 predoctoral fellows, and three predoctoral fellowships for historians of American art to travel abroad.
Other fellows and their projects:
Elizabeth Sears
Warburg Circles: Toward a Cultural-Historical History of Art, 1929–1964Daniela Bohde
Disarray on Calvary: Passion Scenes in Early Sixteenth-Century German ArtCammy Brothers
Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of RomeLaura Weigert
Images in Action: The Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art in the Late Middle AgesSarah Betzer
Surface and Depth: Antiquity and the Body after ArchaeologyRachel Kousser
Ancient Iconoclasm: Destroying the Power of Images in Greece, 480–31 BCJohn-Paul Stonard
Against Henry MooreHeather McPherson
The Artist’s Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century FranceLucia Tongiorgi Tomasi
The Emblematic GardenFredrika H. Jacobs
Dialogues of Devotion: Votive Panel Paintings in Renaissance Italy, c. 1450–1610Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
The London Square, 1580 to the PresentMegan E. O’Neil
The Lives of Ancient Maya SculpturesMarden Fitzpatrick Nichols
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-Fashioning at the End of the RepublicPriyanka Basu
Kunstwissenschaft and the “Primitive”: Excursions in the History of Art History, 1880–1925Shira Brisman
The Handwritten Letter and the Work of Art in the Age of the Printing Press, 1490–1530Christina Ferando
Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1822Dipti Khera
Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” between the Mughal and British Empires:
Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its EnvironsBeatrice Kitzinger
Crucifix and Crucifixion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Breton Gospel Books: The Early Medieval Liturgical Cross and Its RepresentationsJason David LaFountain
The Puritan Art WorldLisa Lee
Sculpture’s Condition/Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas HirschhornBenjamin Anderson
World Image after World Empire: The Ptolemaic Cosmos in the Early Middle AgesDana E. Byrd
Reconstructions: The Visual and Material Cultures of the Plantation, 1861–1877Jason Di Resta
“Crudeliter accentuando eructant”: Rethinking Center and Periphery in the Art of Giovanni Antonio da PordenoneRazan Francis
Secrets of the Arts: Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft HeritageMeredith Gamer
Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain’s Early Modern Eighteenth CenturyNathaniel B. Jones
Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Fictive Picture Gallery in Augustan RomeDi Yin Lu
Reassigning Civilization: Cultural Property Law Enforcement in Shanghai, 1949–1978Kate Nesin
Twombly’s Things: The Sculptures of Cy TwomblyAnna Lise Seastrand
Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings, 1500–1800Jennifer M. S. Stager
The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean ArtMiya Tokumitsu
“Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine”: The Sculpture of Leonhard Kern (1588–1662)
by Jon Lackman | 30 August 2010 | Uncategorized
Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education painter Laurie Fendrich asks why it is “that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence”:
A lot of people can’t understand how art of any kind conveys meaning … At the same time, many are terribly intimidated by art—especially modern and contemporary art … The stock and trade of academics is words, not images … [And] they rarely ever try their hands at creative work … In sum, even though almost everyone reacts to works of art almost instantaneously, and even though most people, either consciously or unconsciously, ascribe to the principle that all judgments about art are by nature equal, almost everyone is insecure about their art judgments.
by Jon Lackman | 23 August 2010 | Books, Conferences
As someone whose dissertation is a mixture of fiction and essay, I’ve been keenly interested lately in Paul Barolsky’s new book A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso. He writes in the preface:
I attempt to demonstrate the powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist. My approach goes against the grain of art history as an academic discipline, which, emerging in the nineteenth century, sought to follow a scientific model and detach itself from imaginative writing about art and artists. Although that way of thinking may now seem somewhat ingenuous, art historians nevertheless still resist thinking about the origins of their craft in poetry.
I hope to have more to say about Barolsky soon. On this topic I’m looking forward to attending the upcoming Clark Art Institute conference, “Fictions of Art History,” whose speakers include Barolsky, Thomas Crow, Alexander Nemerov, Joanna Scott, Edward Snow, Gregory Crewdson, Michael Hatt, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, Ralph Lieberman, Maria H. Loh, Hélène Bonafous-Murat, Allan Sekula, Cole Swensen, Marianna Torgovnick and Marina Warner. The conference’s goal “is to address the complex relationship between art history and fiction, a relationship that will be investigated in art historians’ need to tell stories, their viewing practices, their rhetoric, their writing, and in the interest of art historical work beyond the academy.”
This is so incredibly interesting. As an art historian, I finding it a bit frightening as well…though an important exercise in which to engage.
by Jon Lackman | 20 August 2010 | Books, Museums
In Artnet sculptor James Croak hypothesizes that Thomas McEvilley’s review of the 1982 MoMA exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art “generally broadened the entire museological approach to both contemporary art and global culture,” making possible such shows as the recent MoMA blockbuster retrospective devoted to Marina Abramovic:
His irreverent review, published in Artforum and titled “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” (variously a Hoagy Carmichael tune and a jump-rope rhyme), garnered an ad hominem response supposedly researched jointly by 35 MoMA staff members and signed by curator William Rubin, which was very poorly received. McEvilley’s text caused much soul-searching among art historians — one asked, “where were you when you read it?”
McEvilley has a new book out, on Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay, which Croak calls “an engaging read, with a narrative that is more like that of a novel than an academic treatise.”
The original review launched an exchange of responses between McEvilley, Rubin and Kirk Varnadoe, that are exhausting in their rhetorical flourishes. They were republished in their entirety in Beckley, Bill with David Schapiro eds. Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (Allworth Press, 1998). I lost a whole afternoon while studying for orals reading them.
by Jon Lackman | 19 August 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
The newspaper Nigerian Compass interviews Okwui Enwezor, who is visiting Nigeria for the first time in 8 years. It appears to ask about Sylvester Ogbechie’s recent indictment of his curatorial practice:
But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African art before you came into the scene?
I think it’s up to evaluators of what I have done to address this question … I know that I came of age as a curator [in New York] at a time of radical transitions on the global sphere … [T]he transitions were of movement, migration, the intersection of many different subjectivities; national imagination, social temporalities and so on … At this particular point, it was almost unimaginable to see the work of an African artist … So, what really set my work apart was that within this small village of New York, there were not that many young curators like myself who were thinking Africa in this particular way. It does not mean there were no African things happening …
How do you see the relationship between African artists based abroad and at home, and how do you work with them?
We do not travel as a band; there are differences in our projects. As it should be, we do not all head one direct[ion] like a delegation … I work with all artists. I understand and I am somewhat sympathetic to current debates that we have; and these debates are not new. We had it in 2002. We are repeating it now; and I see it as part of an anxiety. I am somewhat sympathetic too … [O]ne way to confront this anxiety is to create a situation in which we are not only answering to the hosts somewhere but that we also become host … I have not visited Nigeria for long. But I keep abreast of what people are doing. I would then say that there is a crisis of content production in contemporary Nigerian art … In a place like Lagos, artists here should put their heads together and, through the arts, make Lagos a place that people want to come to. Everybody wants to run to Dakar (Senegal) for example, every two years, because it is a meeting place.
Enwezor says that he plans to “come back for a comprehensive visit of Nigeria, in terms of the arts. That visit would not stop at Lagos or Nsukka. I can certainly tell you that my next visit to Nigeria will be in less than a year.”
by Ben Lima | 18 August 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Modern, Museums
Press clippings:
by Jon Lackman | 17 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Journals
Caa.reviews has started reviewing artists’ books recently. (If this started earlier, I must have missed it.) Clifton Meador (who in February reviewed a book about artists’ books) writes on The Square by Emily McVarish:
Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she writes, designs, and prints—artists’ books. The publication of The Square offers the opportunity to experience a new work by this artist, a product of her long-running and deep engagement with the book as an artistic vehicle. The Square is typographically sophisticated and superbly well-produced, but its objective is not a celebration of craft, nor is it intended to be a luxury product for high-end consumption. It is an original, inventive, and transformative work of art that offers a nuanced performance of texts, an exploration of ideas about public space, rhythm, and the everyday, explored through McVarish’s poetic use of language and the typographic manipulation possible within a book.
Jennifer Tobias reviews a book by William E. Jones titled Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton, “an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture.” The book reflects “a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media.”
NYU’s Lucy Oakley is the current editor of caa.reviews. Tony White, of Indiana University, is the field editor for caa.reviews specializing in “Artists’ Books and Books for Artists.”
by Jon Lackman | 16 August 2010 | Books
In a recent column titled “Don’t do Art History,” Mary Beard explains why she spends untold hours hunting down images and permissions for her books:
The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show — well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image … [T]he editorial rules, as usual, expressly forbid just scanning one from another book; and almost anything on the web already does have enough DPI … You start to love those electronic archives that offer free, publishable out of copyright images; and you look especially keenly at old out of copyright books with clear plans and line drawings. But even that is not hassle-free … The next thing I write is going to have NO pictures.
I know what Mary is referring to, but what does that have to do with Art History per se?
There is definitely something hugely broken with imaging rights.
As much as having a book with no pictures would be easier – it would also make something considerably less appealing to many.
I was going to do a post on this because I have similar problems; although with me it’s not so much about tracking down the image- more about chasing people up in museums, orgs that hold the image rights.That can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Little did I know that an art history career wasn’t about coming up with original research, but negotiating the mine field of publishers, copy right agencies and other wolves lurking in the forest.
Can’t help thinking this is all wired up wrong.
David
The print publishing industry as a whole is widely joked as still as stuck in the distant past.
I imagine Mary Beard was being flippant with her blog post title, but this really affects everyone, not just Art Historians. I imagine writers, legal types and publishers should work together towards a more robust solution to suit the modern publishing climate. The EFF.org exists to outline and protect bloggers, surely writers and academics have a similar body they can call upon to affect change in this area? If such a body doesn’t exist – then people need to stop lamenting and start the ball rolling on it. Waiting for the publishing industry to make the first move is no going to happen!
H
Mine is due out this fall from a major univ press — my budget around $8000 for images, fees, permissions, fed ex. Contracts with museums, VAGA, ARS. In one case, 16 mos. to receive important rights. Careless editing and frustrating communication. If I had realized, I wouldn’t have. I agree; next book no images. But also one step further — straight to Kindle!
Question:if reproducing text for the purpose of criticism is protected as “fair use”, why does a similar protection not exist for images?
I have been reading Susan Bielstein’s book, Permissions: A Survival Guide. Incredibly useful, and not (often?) taught in graduate school.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226046372
by Jon Lackman | 13 August 2010 | Architecture, Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Roy Eriksen considers Christoph Luitpold Frommel’s 2007 book The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance:
The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true … He channels into the volume a lifetime of in-depth studies of Italian Renaissance architecture, and presents an account that is stunning in its amassment of fact and fact-based interpretations and proposed solutions … The volume provides a much-awaited bridge between continental and European or Europe-based research on the inner principles and particular dynamics producing the variegated forms of Italian Renaissance edifices … Frommel’s work is impressive, stunning, overwhelming, yes, but also non-definitive, limited, and technical in the sense of being less than open to the evidence of the exchanges between architecture and other arts and artists working alongside architects in Early Modern Italy. This avoidance is deliberate. For Frommel does not mince his words; his is a full-frontal attack on the architectural historians who have focused on historical and cultural contexts in their approaches … According to Frommel, “architecture does not narrate”
by Jon Lackman | 12 August 2010 | Books, Theory
Christopher Kul-Want has just assembled a new anthology Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists that includes:
Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh’s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud’s postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art.
I’m a sucker for books like this. I call myself a sucker because they usually frustrate me more than they inspire, and yet I seem to be compelled to read each new one that appears. In Kul-Want’s, the postmodernists get more than half the book to themselves. The full list of authors: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Adorno, Kofman, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Agamben, Nancy, Badiou, and Rancière. Not a particularly surprising list, although he doesn’t necessarily pick the most conventional text from each author. (Not that the point of such a collection is to surprise.) The least familiar to me was Sarah Kofman, who, according to Kul-Want,
… proposes that the image is essentially lacunary: an image of loss. The image of loss does not possess a referent — the object of (repressed and envied) desire, such as that of the Oedipal Mother — since signification is composed of an infinite series of substitutions between one signifier and another … [T]he referent does not haunt representation in abstentia, since it exists only as an outcome of the structure of representation. In other words, the fiction of a referent is understood outside of a dialectical relationship to truth or idealism, a position traditionally occupied by the Oedipal Mother … [Unlike Lacan] Kofman believes that the language of representation inevitably reveals its own structure through the processes of condensation and displacement that, as Freud proposed, primarily work through fantasies, dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and works of art.
This for me falls into the frustration category, I’m afraid.
Kul-Want includes no Marx, de Saussure, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Irigaray, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Said, or Spivak – all of whom appear in Jae Emerling’s similarly sized 2005 volume Theory for Art History. Emerling in turn has no Hegel, Nancy, or Rancière, and I assume the selections are generally shorter, considering the longer list of authors. For a volume that includes art historians alongside theorists, try the 2009 edition of Donald Preziosi’s assuredly surprising The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. On the theory side, you only get Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Benjamin, because the majority of the book is given over to figures such as Vasari, Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg, Wind, Gombrich, Panofsky, Schapiro, Baxandall, Bal, Bryson, and Summers, as well as a host of other names, many of them lesser known.
There’s one thing worse than hearing a psychoanalyst prattle on about art – a philosopher prattling on about art!!
Hopefully this won’t dissuade actual Historians, or even Art Scholars like Andrew Graham Dixon and Martin Kemp from keeping up their great work.
H
philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy …
words about art have nothing to do with art
I’m not opposed to philosophers or psychoanalysts writing on art and have enjoyed some of both at times. For me Kant and Barthes have been particularly stimulating. But there seems to be something about the anthology format that makes them seem particularly impenetrable and unlovely. Remove their words from their original context and something essential is lost — particularly when an entire book is being reduced to a short excerpt. Similarly, I rarely become enamored with a poem upon finding it in an anthology, or even in the poet’s own collected poems — the original chapbooks are the only way to go for me.
Regarding the idea that “words about art have nothing to do with art,” I have to disagree. No art arises from vision alone. Artists are inevitably affected by their reading of and conversation with friends, patrons, critics, historians, and theorists and psychoanalysts, at times. So too is the artwork’s reception affected by language.
I sometimes think we give too much credence to philosophers’ writings on art -if for no other reason than that most of the time these thinkers are writing about beauty and aesthetics, not necessarily art, though they project ideas of beauty onto art. The history of art and the history of beauty are not the same thing. Eco wrote about this in the introduction to his History of Beauty.
“philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy … ”
So much for an interdisciplinary approach.
I have to agree with Jonathan. When thoughtful and intelligent people write about a topic you love (and is the foundation of your professional activity), even if it is out of their primary field, it is worth paying attention.
by Jon Lackman | 11 August 2010 | Americas, Books
The hefty new book The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History by Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass appears to be the definite take on this fascinating subject. Exploring the pole’s origins along the Pacific Northwest coast as well as its afterlives in aboriginal and popular culture, this book “is situated comfortably within the transdisciplinary field of visual culture studies,” melding history, art history, anthropology, and media studies:
[F]or the Native chief who erected a pole originally, the totem pole is a material record of the privilege that his extended family has to depict certain images, and of the lavish potlatch – a feast at which valuables are distributed by the hosts to the guests – that celebrated the pole’s raising and enhanced the host’s standing in his community … Although aesthetic sophistication may confer additional prestige on a pole’s carver or owner, totem poles were and are not typically objects of artistic contemplation, much less worship, for the communities from which they come … The inhabitants of the [Pacific] Northwest Coast developed cultures quite distinct from those of aboriginal people elsewhere in North America … It was among these hierarchical societies blessed with abundant, easily carved cedar that the totem pole developed … They likely developed in one particular region, around Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) … There were and are variants … “memorial poles” … “mortuary poles” … “welcome posts” placed at the entry points of villages, and “shame poles” or “ridicule poles” erected to humiliate or challenge rival chiefs …
[P]oles generally depict heraldic crests representing beings that, in the past, had interacted with an ancestor and given him the privilege to portray their identifying image … However, in the contemporary popular imagination … totem poles have become signifiers of a great nation, inspirations for poetry and song, symbols of generalized indigeneity, exoticisms appropriate for fashion, strange elements in advertisements, and props for the most unlikely of film scenes … Many misconceptions have followed these poles … [P]oles do not tell narrative stories that can be “read” from top to bottom or bottom to top like a comic strip or hieroglyph … [P]ositions of figures on the pole have little bearing on their significance, despite the cliché “low man on the totem pole”: in fact, some groups put the most important family crest on the bottom, at eye level. Neither are poles suffused with spirituality, despite repeated attempts to portray them as such … Even the name “totem pole” is based on a misunderstanding … [Anthropologists] defined the totem as a particular lineage group’s protective animal that cannot be slain or eaten … However, animal images on Northwest Coast poles represent family crests or narrative characters that are neither protective nor subject to culinary taboo.
by Jon Lackman | 9 August 2010 | Books, Renaissance
Diane Wolfthal, author of the widely reviewed books The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400-1530 (1989) and Images of Rape: The “Heroic Tradition” and its Alternatives (1999), now has a new book out – In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe. “This book explores images whose sexual content has all too often been either ignored or denied,” examining canonical and obscure art as well as material culture. “[It] demonstrates that the insistence that sexual intercourse should be confined to marriage, performed in a particular manner and reserved for the purpose of procreation was subverted and undermined both in the visual culture of the period and in reality.”
In the Renaissance, much like today, viewers were confronted with a growth in the number and variety of sexual images. One finds an abundance of same-sex desire, adultery, prostitution, and violence. The images made and consumed by certain individuals of that era reveal them to have been more frank and open-minded sexually than many 21st-century westerners. One drypoint etching she discusses, from 1485, depicts a man and a woman, an engaged couple most likely. It contains several traditional symbols of love – the touch of the hand, the turning of the head, the walk together, the wreath, the falcon. This same artist produced, at the same time, in the same style, an etching of two men hunting. They walk, they touch, one turns his head toward the other, he wears a wreath, there is a falcon. This is also an amorous couple. There are minor differences between the two images, but the artist’s intent is clear, Wolfthal says – to depict the two couples as identical, and therefore equal. This is a powerful visual statement, and she strikingly compares it with the events of September 1, 2002, when the The New York Times began including in its Weddings pages notices of same-sex marriages (and commitment ceremonies). The image that these pages presented – photographs of gay and straight couples in identical poses and outfits – inspired double takes in readers and energized supporters and opponents of gay marriage alike.
[...] Another book I can’t wait to read (what a title, ahem), via an indispensable blog. [...]
by Jeremy Miller | 5 August 2010 | Museums, Renaissance, Teaching, Theory
A show at the Yale University Art Museum points to an issues that many graduate programs seems to be addressing in one way or another. Laurence Kanter says:
“Original works of art have been forgotten. They’re being used as data, without any sense of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.”
He added: “No one wants to turn art history back 150 years. But we’re lacking an important tool that we threw out the window 70 years ago.”
In my graduate program (graduated in 2007), post-1950s theories of methodology were emphasized, even while we were encouraged to maintain an object-centered approach. Our initial assignment in my first graduate seminar was to perform a roughly ten-page formal analysis from a work of art actually viewed (not from reproductions). As mundane as that may sound, I believe we all learned much from performing the analysis and hearing others do so.
I’m curious to hear from those with recent graduate school experience regarding the approach in their programs concerning the relationships between theory and object / post-disciplinary approaches and traditional methods such as iconography and conoisseurship.
The goals of the graduate program are a factor. Some work in close proximity to local art museums and require museum internships, some do not or cannot.
Faculty reputation and background is a factor. Do the faculty publish a lot of theory, or are they from a museum background?
Geography and money are factors. There are some excellent art history grad programs in Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, and Georgia, but they do not have as many immediate opportunities to see comprehensive collections as a programs in Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. Programs at urban campuses like the IFA at NYU, or well-funded research centers like the MA program at Williams, are in a unique position to be object-focused.
Academic trends are a factor. Many programs discourage traditional methods because departments push grad students to produce professional (that is, *publishable*) work. The rule of thumb is ‘don’t write anything you can’t publish.’ Suffice it to say: your methodology has some bearing on whether or not this will happen.
My MA program worked closely with local museums, my PhD program emphasizes social history (the TJ Clark variety). In my opinion, ideally one should be exposed to both the museum world and the academic world. Also, if you are a masters student in art history, you haven’t *mastered* the discipline without at least being made aware of ‘outdated’ or unpopular methods such as connoisseurship or iconography.
I think the formal analysis assignment is widely used but flawed as a tool for developing visual judgment.
True expertise a la Feigen would have to come from intensely studying not just the single example at the local museum, but scores or hundreds of examples such that you are able to pick up on the details that matter, and ignore the ones that don’t. I believe this 10,000 hour rule (as cited by Gladwell) would be indispensable for the connoisseurial skills in many fields — whether Morelli, a surgeon, a police detective, a golfer, etc., etc.
Plenty of bright sophomores can describe a painting in painfully exact detail and at stupefying length, but lack the base of visual experience to know what counts and what doesn’t.
I would also doubt whether, as long as fakes and fakers exist, connoisseurship could ever be “outdated.” That so many “advanced” academics think it is, is just a testament to profound irresponsibility. Presumably, their reasoning is, why bother to teach a useful skill when you can instead teach students complex pseudoscientific “theories” that allow them to buttress their youthful emotional reactions and left-wing reflexes with a scaffolding of pretend “evidence”?
Some might reasonably argue that it is hard to say whether anything like connoisseurship could ever exist for the entire, dispiritingly vast post-Duchampian school of readymade art. On the other hand, it could also be argued that deep familiarity with the whole artistic persona of a Gabriel Orozco or a Felix Gonzalez-Torres could allow “connoisseurial”-type skills to come into play even when deciding whether a particular pile of yogurt lids, dish rags, Twinkie wrappers, single-serving Dorito bags, Yoo-Hoo bottles, etc., did in fact bear a plausible claim to originate in the “artist”‘s “studio,” in the absence of determinative documentation one way or the other.
One of the seminar courses offered during my master’s program was actually on connoisseurship. In addition to reading the work of connoisseurs (and detractors of connoisseurs) from the last several centuries (Morelli, Berenson, Wollheim, Riegl, Bosse, d’Argenville, Richardson, Friedlander… to name a few), we also put the connoisseurial skills we acquired into practice on objects of questionable attribution in the collection of the museum to which the program is attached. (Well, to a point, since of course we only had a semester to develop our ‘eye.’)
While it’s not an accepted methodology in and of itself, I found the connoisseur’s eye (or more specifically the emphasis put on physically looking at the object) to be a rather novel experience. It’s been my experience–and while perhaps I’m alone in this, I rather doubt it–that it can be easy to forget art starts with the object. The entire discipline of art history exists to demonstrate it doesn’t stop there, of course, but I think it’s quite easy to go off on some tangent about an object and forget to look at it again. Sometimes when you do it’s surprising to see how far (off) you’ve gotten.
This evolution was inevitable. As a scientist with an interest in Art History, the gulf that exists between Science and connoisseurship was made evident to me first hand in a recent experience regarding a Botticelli piece.
Art schools can only benefit from incorporating awareness of the scientific method on top of their education about symbolism, aesthetics and allegory.
Empirical study looks at data gaps with consternation, whereas connoisseurship can brush over ambiguities with florid language and leave us none of the wiser.
As long as people are clear on why they are taking a scientific approach -eg. attributions, dating, as opposed to interpretation of meaning, then the two modes of analysis will have no problem co-existing, and strengthening the factual foundation of Art History knowledge.
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
Connoisseurship on art history courses in the U.K. is a rare thing. I can think of only a few people who would teach it, including me- and probably under the guise of something like ‘Art History Methodologies’ or similar. Now, the connoisseurship issue seems to have relocated to the public museum where it was in the 19th century. It seems to centre on the debate between “scientific connoisseurship” and traditional connoisseurship, although intuitive describes the latter better. During his tenure as director of the London NG,, in the mid 19th century, Sir Charles Eastlake wrote:
“The term connoisseur “indicates an acquaintance with facts rather than with truths, with appearances and results rather than with their causes. In its general acceptation it comprehends a familiarity with the characteristics of epochs, schools, and individual masters, together with that nicer discrimination which detects imitations from original works. The chief distinction between the connoisseur and the amateur is that the knowledge of the first assists the exercise of judgment while that of the latter tends to kindle the imagination.”
At times in its history, the amateur type has influenced purchases and shaped acquisition policy at the NG, which was evident to me on visiting the Close Encounters show in London a few weeks ago with its parade of fakes, misattributions etc based on personal whim and imagination, rather than judgement. Inevitably, scientific connoisseurship has reacted against the amateur ethos with a vengeance; but as I’ve said before, we do need the intuitive side of connoisseurship to intervene when scientific connoisseurship is used to “validate” fakes, often purchased with public funds.
Although connoisseurship should be taught more to foster visual acuity, it now impacts on moral, economic and political topics, my point being it has greater relevance for other disciplines as well as art history itself. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.
@David Packwood.. I would imagine that a 19thC definition of the term is no longer representative of the bigger picture. Given the increasing reports of difficulties faced by Art History as an institution, I would hope there is a concerted move to make the syllabus something that combines the strengths of both the Humanities and Sciences. If getting an Art History degree entailed some type of scientific or achaeological qualification back in my day, I would have jumped at it. The only thing on offer to me at local institutions was almost entirely dedicated to appreciation of style and allegory, with a pinch of history thrown in. It was quite dismaying!
Hiyaz- Don’t hold your breath where modern art historians and the scientific method are concerned.
I think the only place you’re likely to see a convergence of art analysis and an empirical approach is on curatorial and conservation programme.
But it just occurred to me there’s art crime too- forensics etc, but we know how well that’s going down with traditional art historians!
@David Packwood – it’s a shame these traditional Art Historians are so resistant! You would have a better idea than myself about how well populated and funded art history courses currently are – surely things must be going sufficiently well for them to close themselves off like that?!
funding is drying up fast in the U.K. i think the economic meltdown and re-structuring of universities- forced by govt- might result in greater working across the disciplines. my research is becoming more interdisciplinary, e.g. baroque anatomy and art.
@David Packwood! Everything is becoming interdisciplinary! We’re experiencing this in the Health Sector too! I personally welcome it – I have learnt a whole new set of skills which increase my knowledge and ability to work in different types of jobs. By multi-skilling art history students, I would hope they would become more employable than the present perception is. Did you see this about US college degrees: http://2.ly/cjtn It’s a shame! I hope something can be done about it.
by Jon Lackman | 5 August 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Last February, a conference convened to discuss the “Art History of Games.” This February, a CAA session will address “Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga.” And now on view in Paris is “MuseoGames: Une Histoire à Rejouer” (“MuseoGames: A Story to be Replayed”), as ARTINFO reports:
This multimedia exhibition chronicles three decades of rapid technological advance along with the new role that video games have taken on in the home. In the “Collection” area, Atari consoles, first-generation synthesizers, and other such fossils are displayed on stands like pop-art objects … Video screens place each game into its historical context, with captions and commentary. Supported by critical and sociological analysis, the exhibition also shows the significant influence of video games on contemporary art.
by Jon Lackman | 4 August 2010 | Uncategorized
The Los Angeles Times has written an interesting profile of Getty Research Institute director Thomas Gaehtgens. It seems unfortunate to me that they decided to bill this article as a demonstration that Gaehtgens has “quietly gained acclaim” and “gained the admiration of his staff,” when the only proof of this in the piece is two admiring quotes from people who report to him. Some outside perspective would have been nice. But it makes good reading anyway:
[In] early 2009 … he had to define priorities and slash his budget by 25%. (His annual budget is now $20 million, with a yearly acquisition budget around $2 million.) … [He] took the opportunity to make sure that most of his 175 employees — about half of whom have advanced degrees beyond college — had the chance to do real research, not just shelving books or shepherding other scholars’ projects … One example is the launch of the Getty Research Journal, an annual arts publication that includes articles by Getty staff … [A] dozen or so projects now underway are all over the map, including the history of alchemy in medieval Europe, a look at German art sales from 1920 to 1945 and a study of Latin American Surrealism.
by Jon Lackman | 3 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Rosalyn Deutsche’s new book Hiroshima after Iraq (based on her Wellek Library Lectures) examines three contemporary video works whose subject is the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Its press release announces that Deutsche “reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.” In her introduction, she writes:
Two years ago … the journal October … asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?” … October’s impatience with current antiwar activity in art – and its paternal demand that younger generations identify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics – is symptomatic of a more longstanding mood in art criticism, a mood that emerged in the late 1970s and that I have elsewhere called, following Walter Benjamin, left melancholy … [M]elancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide the subjective and the material, the public and the private, and the social and the psychic as though war has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no work of the psyche in the waging of war. In this, antiwar criticism mimics dominant discourse about the war.
Deutsche has identified three works that she believes represent “the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war”:
[B]ecause contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers; because, in so doing, art has developed strategies for what Theodor Adorno called turning toward the subject; and because these strategies question the rigid forms of identity and triumphalist fantasies whose maintenance helps cause war, there is, I think, a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis … I want to use these essays to explore art’s ability to combine a concern for subjectivity with a concern about the problem of war and therefore to resist both dominant and left melancholic discourses.
According to Deutsche, After Hiroshima mon amour, by Silvia Kolbowski, “challenges the myth of pure identity – individual, racial, ethnic, and national … [T]he multiplicity and uncertainty of the characters’ identities … block spectatorial identification and disidentification, which work to fix identity.”
OfLet Me Count the Ways, by Leslie Thornton, Deutsche says:
[A]s Jacqueline Rose writes about [Sylvia] Plath, Thornton, too … ‘forces the viewer to enter into something which she or he is often willing to consider only on condition of seeing it as something in which psychically no less than historically, she or he plays absolutely no part.’ In the case of Let Me Count the Ways, this disavowed something has to do with group behavior, from which no individual is immune’ …it is [an] important function of the group to shield individuals from guilt feelings by sanctioning aggressive impulses.
She turns finally to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection:
Insisting on inadequate vision, the Hiroshima Projection belongs within a feminist practice of contemporary art that produces what have been called critical images, images that undo the viewing subject’s narcissistic fantasies, fantasies that blind us to otherness, either rejecting it or assimilating it to the knowing ego or the Same .. [C]ritical images trouble the visual field, promoting non-indifferent vision and contributing to the transformation not only of the blind eye but also of the deaf ear. Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection increases this transformative potential by engaging viewers in a kind of seeing – and listening – known as witnessing, an act that is crucial in our time of collective, human-inflicted, traumas, such as war and torture, that call out for witnesses … [It] also facilitates the emergence of a public sphere in which the appearance of others is prized because, questioning the social order, it keeps democracy from disappearing.
I find myself buoyed by the subtlety of her analysis, the breadth of her erudition, and the optimism of her vision. I wonder if there’s any chance that these artworks will actually do the things that she imagines they can. I wonder if her (and my and October’s) hopes – that art could stand for something, do something, make itself useful – are misplaced. It’s not that I believe that “poetry makes nothing happen” or in “art for art’s sake.” It’s that I am perpetually reminded how slippery, unpredictable, and chameleon-like artworks are. How easily the pacifist’s emblem become the tyrant’s trophy. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, perhaps it’s enough that I enjoyed the book, that it could “teach the free man how to praise.”
Thank you for your review of this text. I’m currently researching Deutsche’s work with regard to the public and private experience of wearable art and found your presentation of her latest text very interesting.
by Jon Lackman | 2 August 2010 | Uncategorized
There are of course other kinds of diversity besides those of academic background.
When completing the U.S. government’s “Survey of Earned Doctorates” today, I noticed that it asked about race/ethnicity, and so I went online to see what the latest data was on that for art history.
Of the 207 people who received PhDs in art history, art criticism, or art conservation in 2008, 161 were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. These are the only people SED tabulates ethnicity on. Of those 161 people, zero reported themselves to be American Indian, six Asian, three Black, two Hispanic, three Other, three Multi-race, and 144 White. That adds up to 89% white.
By contrast, the PhD recipients in “Letters” (English/American literature & classics) who were citizens or permanent residents were 71% white. In philosophy, the figure is 69%; in history, 65%.
By the way, among humanities fields, only German literature and Musicology/Ethnomusicology are more white (94% and 91%).
by Jon Lackman | 30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop out, but the rest of the students seem to fare as well as conventionally trained applicants, and they help diversify the nation’s pool of doctors.
I think the art history field would benefit similarly were its graduate programs to recruit and admit a greater number of unconventional students. Admissions committees everywhere seem to focus on the same criteria — g.p.a., test scores, the number of college art history courses taken, and recommendations from respected figures in the field — as the best predictors of how well students will do in coursework and how likely they will be to stick around for the PhD. These criteria have validity, but they exclude some highly creative individuals who don’t score well on traditional measures and don’t have extensive background in art history but have the capacity to make a big impact on the field.
Note that many undergraduate institutions have anemic art-history departments (that may or may not even offer a major in art history). Even undergraduates with access to a good department may not discover it until late in their college career, particularly when their high school education and hometown museum offerings did little to ignite their interest in art history.
Art history graduate schools are going to have to get creative if we’re to have any hope of diversifying the field. As things stand, the population of graduate students seems to be composed overwhelmingly of wealthy white students who grew up with regular access to art and/or attended the private high schools that offer (or even require) art history courses — a population that, despite its merits, doesn’t have the widest possible set of experiences and perspectives.
Thanks for this great post.
The PhD program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine has some of this diversity in its grad students. Students come in with Art History and Film and Media Studies backgrounds, but also Sociology, Science Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies, and others.
The Irvine PhD program is interdisciplinary in nature (the faculty sit in the Art History and Film and Media Studies departments), which helps. But, visual studies is also a discipline more open to such diversity than art history has been traditionally.
I would imagine this diversity may also be found in Rochester’s Visual Culture program.
Thank you for this comment, Mary. It is very informative? Are you currently involved with University of California, Irvine?
by Jon Lackman | 29 July 2010 | Contemporary
On The Huffington Post, Daniel Grant writes:
For some time, the ground has been shifting, moving the line between what is and is not considered acceptable for artists to pay for … Critics, museum curators and art historians regularly are approached by artists to write catalogue essays; for some of them, it is a lucrative sideline, since the going rate is one or two dollars per word and essayists often require a minimum of 1,000 words (critic Peter Frank claimed that also may be “an extra charge if the writing needs to be turned around quickly”). The New York City-based artist career development company, Katharine T. Carter & Associates, has formalized his process, placing on retainer a number of New York area art critics who for two dollars per word, 600 words minimum, will write catalogue essays … Artists need to keep their hopes and expectations in check, when hiring a noted critic. Just because Richard Vine, the managing editor of Art in America and another of Katharine T. Carter’s critics, wrote about a given artist does not mean that artist has any “in” with the magazine — in fact, none of the artists he has written up as part of his association with Katharine T. Carter has ever been reviewed or profiled in Art in America. “You have to realize that you haven’t bought this person body and soul for the price of an essay,” Eleanor Heartney said, adding that “all of us who write these catalogue essays are trading on our reputations.”
I’ve heard the rumor, several times, that some art critics accept free or discounted works from artists (or their galleries) whom they review favorably, although I’ve never seen the proof to back it up.
Can critics, who offer services for hire, still consider themselves critics? What then is the distinction between writing a critical essay, and getting paid $2/word to write about an untalented artist?
Although there is no real means of enforcement, art historians accepting works of art from artists about whom they have written are breaching professional ethics. Here is what CAA’s Standards and Guidelines says on the matter:
C. A more difficult situation is one in which an art historian is offered the gift of a work of art by an artist who is a friend, or about whom he or she will be writing or has written. There is no question but that in most cases the art historian’s publication about the artist will contribute to the increased value of his or her work, as well as of the art historian’s gift. The art historian is then placed in a situation where questions of conflict of interest can be legitimately raised. The tactful but outright refusal of gifts from artists may be frustrating, but such practice insures integrity of the process and should not incur loss of respect from the artist. To have works of art given by artists to members of your family similarly creates a conflict of interest.
Excellent! This is a lovely illustration of a missing aspect of the impact of Art on the web. The actual dilemma isn’t that people are disagreeing or insecure about their opinions, this is part of the human condition – and found in online interactions on all topics.
It’s the lack of community, a difference in outlook between Art@Web practitioners that is not celebrated…and should be!
Having Art bloggers affixed to journalistic presentations is the crux to this failure – you will never engender a convincing esprit de corps in this context.
Why would people make a comment when their responses will get ignored, attacked or …even worse misunderstood?!
Fortunately, there is change in the wind. Thanks to the work of some amazing Art historians (and their amateur counterparts) on the web, Art blogs with this personal passion are slowly coming to the fore as cherished resources, and as a means to interact with these wonderful people in personal and moving way.
Art History Today, Alberti’s Window, Earthly Paradise, Arttrav, Art History Salon (etc) – these type of sites are the future of Art blogging, and the foundations of a vibrant Art History online community.
I will be starting a series of interviews with the wonderful people behind these sites – with the amazing M from Alberti’s Window as my first special guest. For those interested – it should be up by the end of Sept.
Kind Regards
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
I see two reasons why readers may fail to respond although they may be interested:
1. Lack of faith in medium of the blog / web-based conversation to produce meaningful experiences.
2. Readers may not feel the need to broadcast their opinions, particularly in such a casual medium over which they do not have ultimate control.
I think that people are intimidated by art, and I also think that many art historians are intimidated by the blogging medium. Like Jeremy mentioned, perhaps people feel like blogs can’t produce meaningful experiences (or conversations).
When I first started to blog about art history, I remember being preoccupied about the number of comments (specifically, the lack of comments) that I received. Although I am continually interested in generating discourse about a topic, I realize that will not happen with every post. I have noticed, though, that when I write posts in a more accessible manner, people will give more comments and feedback. Perhaps the real problem is that art blogs are written in an esoteric manner?
I agree with H’s point about the difficulty in fostering art community on the web. There’s only a few of us seriously blogging, and to most visitors, it might seem like a private conversation.
That leads on to M’s point about the esoteric tone that art blogging can have. I know I’m guilty of this because I’m a professional art historian whose posts are halfway between the journalistic, impressionistic style and the academic writing that I publish off-line.
I can’t figure out exactly why art historians loathe blogs. There are lots of blogs by professionals in other disciplines such as history, sociology. Why are art historians specifically so wary of publishing on-line?
it might tie in to the whole “art history should be scientific” thing from the last post. Maybe they’re off-put by the informal nature of blogs?