9 February 2010 | Uncategorized
Charles J. Pratt, a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU’s new Game Center, writes a two-part review (1, 2) of the recent “Art History of Games” conference in Atlanta, GA, asking first of all, are games art?
“It’s interesting that we have to justify this question in the first place,” said co-organizer, author and IGF Nuovo Award finalist Bogost (A Slow Year) in his opening remark … “Is the art of games found in the visual arts?” [John] Sharp asked, adding, “Another place we can look is that the art of games is in their worlds. This lends itself to thinking of games as sculptural.” The speakers pointed out that, of course, games can also be enjoyed from a technical point of view … “[Or] is the art of games in the game design?” Sharp asked … Sharp laid out one final way that one could claim games are art. He pointed out that the act of play itself has creative aspects. “Is the art of games found in the player’s performance?” he mused. “This suggests that the real power lies with the player rather than the designer” … Sharp pointed out that “you don’t usually see games in a museum. A lot of our historical understanding of games comes from representations in art. There’s a sort of paradox there” … “If we look at a definition of art we can see that games meet most criteria,” Sharp said. “Games have the potential to deliver deep meaning, just not in the places we’re used to looking” … [Game designer Frank] Lantz argued that perhaps the trick is not to change games to make them more like our conceptions of art, but to change the way we think about art in light of games … if aesthetics cannot take games into account then we should re-engineer our ideas about aesthetics: “The way we think about aesthetics needs to change.”
5 February 2010 | Uncategorized
We recently discovered that the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture launched a blog in June of last year, Enfilade. One recent entertaining entry concerns “Academics and the F-Word” [i.e. fashion]:
With the spring conference season here once more, many of us will soon find ourselves rummaging in the closet with an open suitcase on the floor, asking ourselves what an art historian should look like now … Academic Chic offers a fascinating glimpse at the unique challenges professors and college instructors face. In the site’s own words: “Three feminist PhD candidates at a Midwest university, on a crusade against the ill-fitting polyester suit of academic yore.” They continue:
We are three Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, who believe that academia and fashion are not at odds. When beginning graduate school we each had an existential wardrobe crisis. What does one wear in grad school anyway? We recognized that our undergraduate hoodies and jeans were no longer appropriate but were unwilling to accept the shoulder-padded khaki polyester suit that was ubiquitous among our female professors. As feminist scholars, we were also forced to reconcile the perceived-superficiality of our interest in style with our academic commitment to questioning gender and class essentialisms.
Today, in the face of all our eye-rolling colleagues, we defiantly wear dresses, fitted jackets, and pointy toe shoes. To teach in. And sometimes just to the library!
2 February 2010 | Career
As the College Art Association conference approaches (Feb 10-13, in Chicago), the unemployed and the underemployed spell-check their CVs, oil the squeaks out of their voices in mock interviews, and iron their professional-yet-scholarly formal wear. What are their chances this year? The CAA has released a few statistics. Job listings for art historians declined 14.3% from FY 2008 (July 1, 2007–June 30, 2008) to FY 2009 (July 1, 2008–June 30, 2009) and are on track to decline another 36.9% in FY 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
Ouch.
CAA notes that “indicators from the US Department of Education and the American Association of University Professors show an increase in contingent faculty (e.g., part-time or adjunct positions). CAA, however, is not able to keep statistics on contingent faculty since most hires are made locally and not posted nationally on the Online Career Center.”
I’m afraid I don’t understand what they mean by “most hires are made locally.” There are many, many jobs ads for VAPs and part time positions posted on CAA’s career center. Is this just a fancy way of saying that they do not really want to address the situation?
1 February 2010 | Modern
Lee Rosenbaum recently noted the rising popularity of exhibitions about attribution mysteries: “One side-effect of museums’ efforts to cut costs may be a proliferation of this subset of the ‘dossier exhibition’—the attribution exhibition. If museums must curtail sprawling (and expensive) blockbusters, they’re going to need a hook to attract visitors to smaller shows.”
In ARTnews, William D. Cohan reports at length on “the authenticity of 74 ‘recently discovered’ plaster casts of Degas sculptures”:
Those who remain unconvinced that a previously unknown plaster of the Little Dancer was made during Degas’s lifetime have started mobilizing in opposition. A meeting was held at an undisclosed location in New York on January 19 [including Gary Tinterow, Richard Kendall, Theodore Reff, Patricia Failing, Shelley Sturman, Daphne Barbour, and Arthur Beale]. For now, the curators and art historians who met in New York are remaining silent, fearful of the lawsuits that might result from any public challenge to the validity of the so–called lifetime plasters … [B]ecause of the increasing threat of litigation against them, art historians have opted to remain silent lately in a number of cases … [Dealer Gregory] Hedberg has a long list of “sculpture experts and art historians who have carefully studied the actual plasters themselves and who basically concur that these plasters must be lifetime casts” … The dispute erupted late last year, when the little–known Herakleidon Museum published a glossy catalogue in three languages to accompany a show of 74 bronzes cast from the “recently discovered” plasters … [curator Walter] Maibaum said he would welcome a symposium where the evidence could be presented and opposing views aired. “A great art discovery such as this one is truly hard to accept unless it’s associated with a major institution,” he said. “This is not associated with an institution, so it’s troubling to some.”
29 January 2010 | Journals, Medieval
Also in CAA Reviews, Sherry C.M. Lindquist reports on Different Visions, the “new, peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal edited by Rachel Dressler and dedicated to the “intersection of critical theory and medieval visual culture”:
The journal’s inaugural issue is entitled “Triangulating Our Vision: Madeline Caviness’s Approach to Medieval Art” … Caviness is known for her meticulous, award-winning work on medieval stained glass, and also for her employment of critical theory—particularly feminist and queer theory—to medieval objects. Always erudite, always imaginative, always thought-provoking, and frequently hilarious, Caviness’s theoretical work is widely read; it has, it must be said, garnered some criticism. Her work, like that of the much missed Michael Camille, makes startling juxtapositions that knit together the past and present in unexpected ways. It is playful. It is risky. It is subversive. And it drives some people crazy …
The benefits and practical applicability of Caviness’s model are evident in all of the contributions to this intriguing collection. They engage, question, correct, and destabilize accepted notions about major monuments and concepts in medieval art history today; as such they are ideal reading for undergraduate and graduate courses as well as for discussion among specialists …
Different Visions is most welcome, as it demonstrates the expertise, vitality, and commitment of emerging and established scholars concerned with discovering how the quintessentially human activities of art making and viewing structure human subjectivity and social systems. Introductory material with a certain conversational quality prefaces strong, peer-reviewed, syllabus-worthy chapters. Each section is generously illustrated with color pictures and converts instantly into a handsomely designed PDF file. Schleif, Dressler, and the editorial board at Different Visions are to be congratulated for their innovative initiative of “triangulating” the desirable aspects of scholarly conferences, academic publishing, and electronic media in a way that is both energizing and inspiring.
29 January 2010 | American, Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Kate Morris considers Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 by Bill Anthes:
[Anthes] asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he insists that “bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism.” Over the course of six chapters and a postscript, Anthes substantiates this claim, demonstrating that the major concerns and characteristic themes of postwar art and culture—the shaping of individual and national identities, the expansion and contraction of geopolitical realms, tensions between representational and abstract forms, between the traditional and the avant-garde, and between urban and rural existence, as well as an ongoing fascination with primitivism, authenticity, and (self-)invention—are inextricably entwined with the very real circumstances of Native American lives and cultures in transition at mid-century.
22 January 2010 | Modern
According to The Art Newspaper, “Joan Banach is suing to be reinstated onto the board of the Dedalus Foundation [devoted to Robert Motherwell],” a board including Jack Flam, Dore Ashton, John Elderfield and David Rosand:
Before he died in 1991, Motherwell signed a letter guaranteeing Banach “lifetime employment” at the foundation, she claims. She alleges she was wrongfully ousted by foundation president Jack Flam, “a man with overstated expertise in Motherwell’s work”, and “a temper against any who would challenge him”, according to her suit. Flam orchestrated “a malicious campaign” to remove her in retribution for disagreements over authentication of major Motherwell works of art.
22 January 2010 | Modern
From the University of Virginia:
Lydia Gasman, a retired art history professor at the University of Virginia, died Jan. 15 in Charlottesville. She was 84. Gasman, who grew up in Romania, was on the U.Va. faculty from 1981 to 2001. She was an expert on symbolism in Pablo Picasso’s artwork. “She contributed as much to Picasso studies as anyone,” said David Summers, a retired art history professor who knew her well.
According to Gasman’s cv (pdf here), numerous art-history texts reference and praise her work, particularly her 1981 dissertation, “Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso, 1925-1938: Picasso and the Surrealist Poets.
20 January 2010 | Uncategorized
According to CAA News (pdf), “Barbara Nesin, the department chair of art foundations at the Art Institute of Atlanta, has been elected president of CAA’s Board of Directors for a two-year term, beginning May 2010.” Nesin, the first artist to head CAA, is interviewed in this issue by outgoing president Paul B. Jaskot:
As president, what areas of the organization are you most interested in working on? I remember when I started my term I was most concerned about the growing contingent-faculty issues in our universities, as well as helping to shape the new strategic plan. What goals do you have for your term?
I am interested in several things. One is making our endowment work harder for us … Number two is the important question of service to not just artists but also our design members … I also hope that we might strengthen our partnerships with our affiliated societies … [Lastly,] expanding our sphere in the international community is definitely something I hope we will achieve in the coming years.
Thanks for running this news item. Please note however that I am not the first artist to lead CAA! In fact, when I was elected to CAA’s board, Ellen Levy, a wonderful mixed media artist, was then president. Nonetheless, this IS a time when CAA is focusing more on its artist members, so I invite your readers to http://www.collegeart.org to view the many opportunities for artists to get involved! Your ideas and energy are wanted!
19 January 2010 | Uncategorized
From the Times of Trenton:
… Right now Bois’ largest task — and he has basically declined all other work until its completion — is a catalogue pacing out the work and influence of American painter Ellsworth Kelly, who lives in upstate New York. Bois hopes to be finished in under two years, although his research comprises seeing every painting Kelly has ever completed.
Along with this, Bois envisions an exhibit on the phenomenon of “look-alike.” This involves the study of pieces of art in entirely different parts of the world and, indeed, from different centuries that are nonetheless almost identical in appearance. Bois wants to use pieces to explain the phenomenon, debunking a few entrenched theories along the way.
… [And] he wants to curate an exhibit — quite possibly in Princeton — on the painting technique of impasto, essentially the practice of piling paint onto a canvas with thick, textured strokes. Most of the art world looks down its nose at this technique, says Bois.
17 January 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Gary Schwartz exposes some of the sausage-making that goes into Rembrandt attribution:
In June 2009 a grand conclave of Rembrandt specialists took place at a castle in Sussex … Given the circumstances – notably that none of the more than 50 scholars in the room had at one time or other not been pilloried in print or pointedly ignored by one or more of the other participants – the atmosphere was friendly if somewhat strained … The following exchange took place:
Schwartz: Peter, do you still think that the core list of Rembrandt drawings is no larger than 70?
Schatborn: Yes. It may be a bit larger, say 75.
Schwartz: Have you ever published the list?
Schatborn: No.
Schwartz: Why not? Shouldn’t you and Martin [Royalton-Kisch] back up your claims with argued information? In preparation for my book of 2006 I began assembling a list of the drawings that answer to your criteria, and there were 125 items on it.
Schatborn: If you show me your list I will cut it down to 75.If anyone else in the hall shared my impression that this was a trifle arrogant, they kept it to themselves … In order to submit them to your judgment, I have taken the trouble to make scans of all the drawings, paintings and etchings concerned … the next get-together of Rembrandt specialists [will be] at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on February 2nd, at which the opening talk is: Peter Schatborn, “The core group of Rembrandt drawings.” There I hope to spark a more satisfying discussion of this matter than that at Herstmonceux. Unless, of course, Peter Schatborn succeeds to the contentment of the field to slash my list back down to 75.
This project has been going on for so long that these arguments seem to simply perpetuate itself rather than submit to a futile discussion
14 January 2010 | Museums
Apparently some museum has a new director. Passing comparisons have been made to another dealer-turned-director: Walter Hopps. This 2005 essay by Ken Allen describes Hopps’ difficulties balancing art and commerce and navigating between the cultures of New York and L.A.:
… Edward Kienholz’s 1959 piece, Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps, is a cunning assemblage portrait of his business partner, but one which literally embodies the contradictions that Ferus quickly came to represent as the contemporary art market developed in Los Angeles … As Hopps’s founding partner in the Ferus Gallery, only Kienholz could make such a biting caricature and perhaps only he was willing to challenge the shift in the gallery’s direction, from a cooperative arrangement devoted to the California avant-garde to a commercial endeavor positioning itself to represent New York artists in Los Angeles. … Shortly after this piece was made in 1959, in fact, Ferus opened the 1960 season with a show entitled 14 New York Artists that included works by deKooning, Kline, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Hoffman, Motherwell and others. This was the first time Ferus had shown work other than that by Los Angeles and San Francisco artists. By this time, the gallery had moved across the street in a new, more professional space designed by [Irving] Blum. As Hopps remarked at a recent museum talk, the new Ferus space “was slicker than deer guts on a door knob.”
11 January 2010 | Journals
In its December 2009 issue, The Art Bulletin uses the word “hip-hop” for the first time, in an article by Krista Thompson on “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” which centers on two contemporary artists, Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert. Elsewhere in the issue, Guy Delmarcel reviews Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court by the new Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell (”numerous detailed analyses,” “a lively dialogue,” “sometimes strays too far”). And Michelle Kuo reviews Branden Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (”magisterial,” “a tour de force of both interpretive and historiographic acuity,” “Joseph’s scintillating and landmark study holds profound relevance for all the arts and beyond”).
8 January 2010 | Ancient, Conservation
From the January 2010 issue of Chemistry World ($):
Art conservators have long been armed with analytical techniques to explore the chemical make-up of paints and dyes but in the past five years a method called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has started to attract their attention. Experts predict that in the next five years it will become an established part of the art world’s analytical toolbox … [Marco Leona, a conservation scientist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art] showed that SERS could be applied to a 4000-year-old fragment of an Egyptian painted quiver. He discovered that the red translucent dye on the quiver belonged to madder, an organic plant pigment. The presence of madder-based pigment in such an ancient object is the first evidence of humans having sufficient chemical knowledge to extract a compound from a plant source and precipitate it into a solid pigment … The findings, Leona explains, demonstrate how SERS can potentially change the understanding of human history. In the case of the quiver, the technique didn’t simply allow the analysis ‘to be done a little bit better or a little bit faster’, he says. ‘It was really a difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it.’
7 January 2010 | Journals, Theory
We welcome the launch of a new publication, the Journal of Art Historiography, whose first issue is devoted to Viennese and German art historiography. From its mission statement:
There is a double danger that contemporary scholarship will forget its earlier legacy and that it will neglect the urgency and rigour with which those early debates were conducted. The earlier legacy remains embedded in ‘normal’ practice. More recent art history also stands in need of its own scrutiny … Besides articles, [this journal] will accept notes, reviews, letters, bibliographical surveys and translations. It will be published every June and December and include both peer-reviewed and commissioned contributions. It will be the first contemporary journal dedicated specifically to the study of art historiography and its ambition is to make it the point of first call for scholars and students interested in that area. It is being supported by the Institute for Art History at the University of Glasgow, which will also support a programme of monographs.
From the editor’s introduction (pdf):
Robert Bagley’s recent book, Max Loehr and the study of Chinese bronzes: Style and Classification in the History of Art (Cornell 2008) could well be missed by historians of Greek art simply because its topic is Chinese bronzes. The study of art history has become so specialized that much valuable work that has general implications for the practice of the discipline gets either lost or ignored. How does one identify a class of object? Students of the ‘fetish’ might like to take a look in the direction of A.A. Donohue’s Xoana and the origins of Greek sculpture, published by the American Philological Association in 1988. It is a text sadly missing in art historical literature. Why is it that Peter Lasko’s Ars Sacra: 800-1200 (Harmondsworth 1972) happily included jewellery and ritual objects whilst the same is not done for other periods in history and cultures? Why is there no art historical survey that includes carpets? Why is there so little interest in prints?
7 January 2010 | Uncategorized
I recently played around with Google Trends, a tool that allows you to see how often a word or phrase has been searched over the last few years. Alas, “art history” has apparently experienced a steady decline since 2004. Likewise for “history of art”, “art,” “painting,” “sculpture,” “architecture,” and most individual artists I tried such as Michelangelo, Jan van Eyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Monet, Duchamp, Matthew Barney, and Hokusai.
Most interested in “art history,” according to Google, is New Zealand, followed by the U.S.A., Ireland, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, India, Italy, Netherlands, and Germany. Among U.S. cities, Santa Barbara is most interested by far, confirming, perhaps, Dave Hickey’s observation that Santa Barbara is “a hellish paradise.”
6 January 2010 | Modern
Speculation boileth over concerning who sliced van Gogh’s ear and why. Most recently: a book from Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, a lengthy article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, and a new hypothesis out now from Martin Bailey.
According to published accounts, Bailey “devised his theory after meticulous detective work” and Kaufmann and Wildegans “spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists’ letters.” All this … for what? “The mystery behind the most famous mutilation in art history may finally have been solved.” Or maybe not.
4 January 2010 | Books, Theory
Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor have recently published a new edited volume Rediscovering Aesthetics that
brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines. Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic practice seemed to focus exclusively on political, social, or empirical interpretations of art, aesthetics is being rediscovered both as a vital arena for discussion and a valid interpretive approach outside its traditional philosophical domain. This volume is distinctive, because it provides a selection of significant but divergent positions. The diversity of the views presented here demonstrates that a critical rethinking of aesthetics can be undertaken in a variety of (possibly incompatible) ways. The contributions open a transdisciplinary debate from which a new field of aesthetics may begin to emerge.
In one essay, Michael Ann Holly writes,
What is research in art history today anyway? Are the research paradigms now any closer to capturing the “truth,” the poetry, even the immediacy, of a work of art, or does “research” push them farther away? The research impulse is, in its own way, a mimetic impulse: the attempt to make the historical representation and the “real” coincide. Yet the “real” so often refuses to play the game of rationality … Granted, when the researcher emerges from either the library or the archive, facts have been discovered, connections have been made. But the romance of writing about the past has been squeezed out of our profession[.]
For more on the idea of “research” in art history, see the volume she recently edited with Marquard Smith, What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, which grew out of a seminar on this topic at the Clark Art Institute.
22 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Our next post will be on Monday, January 4.
22 December 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
According to ArtDaily, an Italian exhibition that brings together reputed Giorgiones
has aroused controversy among scholars and art historians … [Castelfranco Veneto] is staging a wide-ranging exhibition … from December 12 [2009] to April 11, 2010 … The exhibition, a challenge both from the scientific and the organizational points of view … is curated by Lionello Puppi (the Chairman of the Regional Committee for the Fifth Centenary), Antonio Paolucci (Director of the Vatican Museums) and Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo (from the University of Verona) and co-produced by the Comune di Castelfranco Veneto and Villaggio Globale International. The exhibition does not intend to provide definitive answers or solutions (despite the archive research that has been conducted and the reflectographic and diagnostic examinations that have been carried out on many of the paintings) but rather to suggest, evoke and marvel, leaving it to the extraordinary works collected in this small town in the Veneto, together with the documents and evidence, to bring this remarkable account to life. Some of the major international museums – the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the National Gallery in London, the Galleria Borghese and the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, the National Gallery in Edinburgh, the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the Louvre in Paris, the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples and Castle Howard in Yorkshire – have accepted and contributed to this challenge … Alongside the numerous paintings by Giorgione, on exceptional loan, the exhibition will also include important works by Giovanni Bellini, Vincenzo Catena (in whose workshop Giorgione is believed to have trained), Albrecht Dürer, Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian, Lorenzo Costa, Il Perugino, Cima da Conegliano, Palma il Vecchio, Boccaccio Boccacino, and Garofalo.
Medievalists trying to be Modernists? If you teach well, no one cares how you dress.
Where would we be without pointy toe shoes?