Jon Lackman received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU in 2011. His dissertation was "Invective in Mid-1800s French Art Criticism." His paper, "The Guerrilla Clock-Fixers of UX," was presented at the 2010 College Art Association meeting in Chicago. He has written for Slate, Harper's, and The New Yorker.
Lackman's Posts:
23 November 2011 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary
The Autumn 2011 African Arts (44:3) continues that journal’s tradition of fine reporting on important conferences, with five dispatches from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Art last March at UCLA, which featured 46 panels. The Triennial’s theme was “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Marketplace.” Susan Rosenfield writes: dele jegede, alongside [Sylvia] Forni, and [...]
21 November 2011 | Conferences
With apologies to the Harper’s Index (which I once helped to produce) I present a few statistics regarding CAA’s 2012 annual conference: Sessions: 203 Sessions with co-chairs: 93 Participation slots (chair, panelist, discussant): 1194 Participants: 1095 Participants playing more than one role: 75 Most roles played by any one participant: 4 People playing that many [...]
18 November 2011 | Conferences
The 100th annual conference of the College Art Association convenes February 22-25. Among the sessions I’m looking forward to: Theorizing the Body Chair: Jean M. Borgatti, Clark University Medusa as “Seduction of Excess” Basia Sliwinska, independent scholar Body of Work: Stylization and Ambiguity in the Benin Plaque Corpus Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, New York University Body [...]
15 November 2011 | Books
Without my noticing, my minivacation from blogging turned into a multi-month hiatus. Well, I’m now feeling excited to get back to it, so without further ado I’ll begin what I hope will be the first of many posts this fall. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art is a new, provocative anthology of writings [...]
1 September 2011 | Books, Career
New books by favorite authors are piling up on my desk — Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art by Mieke Bal, Florence & Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science by Hans Belting, Queer Beauty and A General Theory of Visual Culture by the prolific Whitney Davis, The Passionate Triangle by Rebecca Zorach, [...]
3 August 2011 | Books, Medieval, Renaissance
Three new books on medieval and Renaissance Venice and Florence caught my attention recently. Most significantly: Blake de Maria’s Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. The famous social stability of the multicultural Republic of Venice he calls partly a myth and credits partly to its “ethos of mediocritas, a state dictum [...]
30 June 2011 | Journals
CAA now refers to The Art Bulletin as “the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship,” and has done so for about a year it seems. This proposition seems worthy of debate. The leading publication? (Is that word “international” hedging the claim? Is “scholarship”? Or “art-historical”?) Elsewhere CAA has referred to The Art Bulletin as “the [...]
27 June 2011 | Journals
For twenty-five years Word & Image has flourished under its founding editor John Dixon Hunt. Now, the reins have been passed to Michèle Hannoosh and Catriona MacLeod, professors of French and German at Michigan and Penn respectively. They write in their first issue (27:1): While maintaining our acknowledged strength in medieval and modern subjects, we [...]
23 June 2011 | Uncategorized
The quest to save the Bibliography of the History of Art seemed to achieve success last year, but in the latest issue of Art Libraries Journal (36:2) Svein Engelstad writes: Users should be concerned about several problems with this solution. First of all, the old BHA content will not be available from the new provider [...]
A quick preface: I managed somehow to post regularly for five years straight, but over the last few months I truly got in over my head — between finishing my PhD (I am done, and after just 14 years!), writing two long articles and taking a delicious sabbatical at the MacDowell Colony to work on [...]
29 April 2011 | Photography
A writer for the French blog Niouzesetweberies writes: Fabienne Cherisma is a fifteen-year-old Haitian adolescent. She escaped the tragic earthquake. But Fabienne happened to be among the ruins when she received three bullets to the head from Haitian police trying to disperse looters. This photo by Paul Hansen won best photo of the year in [...]
18 April 2011 | Americas, Books, Contemporary
In her new book “Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art,” Katy Siegel examines artists’ “preoccupations with issues of race, mass culture, the individual, suburbia, apocalypse, and nuclear destruction” — noting that “while a leading textbook like Art Since 1900, for instance, assumes that the most important art is American or European, those [...]
31 March 2011 | Journals
The College Art Association is also marking its centennial by assembling lists of greatest hits from Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. Canon definition is a perennially controversial exercise — witness the brouhaha over one recent attempt to name the 64 “greatest” artworks “made since World War II,” which prompted one commenter to ask, “Will [...]
29 March 2011 | Books, Medieval
I apologize for having posted little lately, but I return with a book to strongly recommend: “The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France,” by Stephen Perkinson. I come to this book a bit late — it was published in 2009, but my review copy went to the wrong address, [...]
I recently received three striking publications that consider the intersection of word and image from a French perspective. My personal favorite is Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. Don’t let the cover’s drab reproduction of a Henri Cueco painting fool you — this book crackles visually, lavishly reproducing the fascinating French artists [...]
28 February 2011 | Architecture, Modern
Architectural historian Loretta Lorance died Feb. 26, of breast cancer, according to an email sent to the CAA Student Members list-serv. She obtained her PhD from CUNY, taught at various universities, and published the 2009 book Becoming Bucky Fuller with MIT Press. Felicity D. Scott reviewed the book in the September 2010 Journal of the [...]
24 February 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
Those of you still recovering from a marathon four days of conference-going earlier this month may wince at the notion of “100 Years of the College Art Association,” but in the hands of Susan Ball, it’s an appealing subject. She has just published a fine volume she edited on CAA’s history, “The Eye, The Hand, [...]
14 February 2011 | Conferences
Apparently I have conference-reporting fatigue. I have rounded up (and sometimes contributed to) CAA coverage for the last five years, but this year I just can’t seem to muster the enthusiasm necessary to comb blogs and tweets for the pithiest aperçus into the power-point-a-thon that is the College Art Association annual conference. Next year I [...]
9 February 2011 | Conferences
The 2011 College Art Association conference begins today in New York. Alas I couldn’t make it this year, but I look forward to rounding up coverage as it appears. Charlie Finch writes about sexism in hiring. On Twitter, @ardmara writes, “Jonathan Katz quite brilliant on the NPG/wojnarowicz censorship issue. This is a political moment.” Art [...]
2 February 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books
Women collectors are the subject of several recent publications including the Morey Award nominee Empresses, Art, and Agency in Song Dynasty China by Hui-shu Lee, who notes that “studies of imperial involvement in the arts in China have scanted the role of women.” This is the first art history book I’ve read that opens with [...]
