1 June 2012 | Uncategorized
Adam Budak, Melissa Ho, and Mika Yoshitake have been hired by the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Budak will be the new curator of contemporary art after serving at the Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Ho, an art historian from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Yoshitake, a programmer [...]
10 May 2012 | Uncategorized
So much to write, so little time. Tempted as I am to relate the story of the 13-year-old who corrected a Metropolitan Museum map, I want to talk today about the new Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, which took an unexpected, fascinating dip into art history last week with its 8th episode, “When Nouns Grew Genitals.” [...]
9 April 2012 | Uncategorized
Critic Hilton Kramer died this past week at the age of 84. The New York Times writes: A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably Pop (“a very great disaster”), Conceptual art (“scrapbook art”) and postmodernism [...]
14 March 2012 | Uncategorized
According to the Yale Daily News, Yale art-history department chair Alexander Nemerov will leave after this semester for Stanford. There he joins Chinese art specialist Richard Vinograd, former Art Bulletin editor Nancy Troy, who was recruited to Stanford in 2010 from USC, and others. Artforum reports that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art appointed longtime [...]
30 November 2011 | Uncategorized
Victoria Coates, who earned an art-history PhD at UPenn and has worked at the Cleveland Museum, is Rick Perry’s chief foreign-policy advisor. I struggle to think of an art historian playing this prominent role in politics since Anthony Blunt. Anyone? The Noguchi catalogue raisonné begins. Art historian Semavi Eyice was one of four to receive [...]
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 [...]
11 June 2011 | Renaissance, Teaching, Uncategorized
As a regular teacher of survey courses in Western Art, I find it very satisfying when new scholarship addresses its problems and offers solutions. In the June 2011 Art Bulletin, Margaret A. Sullivan writes: “For artists, whose calling required careful observation of the world around them, this heightened appreciation of the spectator elevated their own [...]
26 January 2011 | Uncategorized
Recent news: The Art Instinct author Denis Dutton has died. Transnationalism’s all the rage at the MLA. European libraries are digitizing. Art in America has a new editor, journalist Lindsay Pollock. The Haus der Kunst has a new director, Okwui Enwezor. The Carnegie Museums have a new president, John Wetenhall. BBC Radio interviews Anthony Caro, [...]
28 December 2010 | Uncategorized
As Falmouth Art Gallery director, Brian Stewart “proved that small galleries can have a mighty impact,” writes the Guardian: Supported by a dedicated team, he masterminded groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Surrealists On Holiday (2004), inspired by the time spent in Cornwall by Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and others in 1937, and a [...]
21 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Today I stumbled upon a publication by the “Lighting Research Center” – an organization I was utterly unaware of. Part of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, their mission is “to advance the effective use of lighting and thereby to create a positive legacy for society and the environment.” This type of research is obviously of importance to [...]
20 December 2010 | Uncategorized
I’m interested in the phenomenon of art historians who collect. (Anything been written on it?) A handful of wealthy academics have assembled amazing blue-chip collections, but just as interesting are those who’ve put together quirkier caches on a small budget. I recently came across Louisiana Tech professor Saul Zalesch, who collects almanacs, according to student [...]
10 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Two posthumous books by art historian Michael Baxandall reveal him to have been a skilled memoirist and novelist, writes the Prague Post. Teju Cole, who wrote an appreciation of Baxandall in 2008, was (at least at that time) “finishing his Ph.D. in art history at Columbia” in early Netherlandish art. He is also a photographer [...]
2 December 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an amusing article, “To Monitor Office Behavior, Colleges Add Windows to Professors’ Doors. And faculty members, to regain their privacy, hang curtains or tape up paperwork.” Surveillance seems omnipresent today in life and in academic scholarship, and our field is no exception. In the September 2010 Journal of [...]
23 November 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Guardian: Rozsika Parker, who has died aged 64 of cancer, was a woman of diverse achievements as a feminist, art historian, psychotherapist and writer … In 1973 Rosie met Griselda Pollock and they formed [a] feminist art history collective, an informal group composed of artists, art historians and journalists … Rosie and Griselda’s [...]
18 November 2010 | Uncategorized
With a dash of overstatement perhaps, Patricia Cohen writes in The New York Times: A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and [...]
28 October 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal have lately been discussing some unusual proposals emanating from Texas A&M University. According to the WSJ: A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students [...]
8 October 2010 | Uncategorized
This Sunday witnesses the premiere of a new 13-part national public television series Art Through Time: A Global View, “a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG for Annenberg Media.” The entire series can be streamed online, on the show’s website, which also includes images and transcripts and bonus material. What is the show’s approach? [...]
24 September 2010 | Uncategorized
André Gunthert has called my attention to a fascinating new “reverse image search” tool called TinEye. Simply put, you give it an image and it finds similar ones. Gunthert found himself wondering where Le Nouvel Observateur had gotten the photo it used to create a recent cover. TinEye located it easily, despite the additional text [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
