To wit, “Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language enable us to predict how those artists will personify things in their art?” co-host Mike Vuolo asks psychologist Lera Boroditsky:

Boroditsky [and Edward Segel] identified works by Italian, French, German and Spanish artists, all grammatically gendered languages, from around 1200 AD up to today. Artworks that depicted a personification of an abstract entity, things like justice, time, fame, peace, truth. Their sample size was about 800 [drawn from ARTstor] and they found that 78% of the time the gender in the artwork matched the grammatical gender of the word being personified in the artist’s native language. In other words, if in your native language death is feminine you’re far more likely to personify death as a woman.

Art is neither created nor viewed in a vacuum. It is this notion perhaps that helped to inspire Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozoi in the organization of their recent book Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Bouvet and Durozoi’s effectively chosen subtitle prepares the reader to view the arts of the period in a set of wider contexts. With chapters discussing daily life in Paris, the history and experiences of this city, and the influential position held by the decorative arts, the authors subtly and effectively reframe their view of artistic life in this often-studied time and place. Tellingly, painting and sculpture are addressed together in the fifth chapter of the book, preceded by the chapters described above as well as “The World of Fashion.” With following chapters that discuss photography, film, advertising, literature, and music, readers are left with a strong understating of the cross-pollination endemic of artistic production in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

Nonetheless there are moments when the purpose of this inclusiveness is not entirely clear. Bouvet’s chapter “The City of Light” provides an overview of major infrastructure and civic development projects undertaken in Paris in the years after World War I. Each of these projects is treated briefly, as one might expect given the scope this book. Unfortunately what they meant for the development of the arts in Paris remains unclear. For example, Bouvet’s analysis of public transport in Paris discusses new motorways, the availability of air travel, and the development of Paris’ tram system. How did this mobility affect the production, display, or sale of art? Did it serve as a subject for art, or alter the consciousness of artists, or their sense of modernity? Certainly this new public mobility had effects on the lives of artists. Here, as in other areas, Bouvet and Durozoi have suggested areas of potential influence on the arts that may be further explored in more focused studies.

The second guiding principle of the book is to include an abundance of relevant, high quality images. Far from making the study into a picture-book, the images reproduced throughout the text serve to frame, inform, and illustrate the text quite effectively. For example, two color photographs of the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriel Modernes are displayed on pages 106 and 107. The photograph on page 106 shows the Porte d’Orsay entrance to the Exposition on what appears to be a quiet day. A few blurry figures stand near the entrance, while the sharply angled lighting and scattered leaves suggest early autumn. The entrance gate is overshadowed by a large decorative panel that is about 60 feet tall and decorated in a Cubist style. The image in this panel is composed of six figures arranged vertically, each representing one of the modes of art on display in the Exposition. The impressive scale of this entrance helps to underscore the powerful role that the 1925 Exposition has played in the development of both decorative and fine arts. Printed on page 107 is a color photograph showing two of the department store pavilions from the Exposition.  The distinctively Art Deco architecture and signage is familiarized by the green of the grass, blue tones in the sky, and sharp red fence demarcating space in the left background. That color photographs of high descriptive value survive at all from the 1925 Expo is remarkable. In the context of Bouvet’s chapter on the decorative arts, they help to bring the artistic experience described by the author closer to reality.

One of the great joys of studying history is the thrill of imagining living and operating in a different time and place. Though not often discussed by historians, this imaginary process is a great reward of deep archival and scholarly research. In the hands of Bouvet and Durozoi the reader’s imaginary experience is quite strong, supported by the numerous and descriptive images, and the ambiance of the everyday. Rich in quality images, thoughtfully organized, and lucidly written, Bouvet and Durozoi’s addition to the vast literature on Les Années folles is directed primarily at readers who are fairly new to its subject. Nonetheless I suspect that those who have studied the arts of the period will benefit from this text, and find its carefully selected images and broad overview of the experience of artistic Paris in the 1920s and 1930s rewarding.

Rooted in the discovery of thousands of snapshots in Edouard Vuillard’s family archive, the exhibition shows Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Rivière Félix Vallotton as well as Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner and Belgian Henri Evenepoel to have been swept up in the craze for handheld cameras that seized the United States and Europe after the invention of the Kodak by George Eastman in 1888. By pairing over 200 of these photographs with 70 paintings, prints and drawings, “Snapshot” forces us to see the work of these artists through their respective engagements with photography.

Though visually exhausting, the sheer number of photos in the show conveys the explosion of images brought by the Kodak, and makes palpable the atmosphere of technological novelty. Aimed at cultivating a mass amateur market, Kodak cameras became a phenomenon in the 1890s by making everyday life a subject for photography. Marketed with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”, the Kodak freed consumers of the need for technical or aesthetic aptitude. Within reach of the middle-class consumer, the box cameras came loaded with a 100-exposure roll, and could be sent to a processing facility where the negatives were developed, the camera reloaded and mailed back to the owner. Indeed these devices seemed designed to prevent deliberate composition: held at the waist, the operator could only approximate the frame and focus through a distant viewfinder. As Clément Chéroux argues in the catalogue, the Nabis were not among the amateurs of the fin de siècle who formed photo-clubs and considered photography a hobby. Rather, these were photo-dilettantes who engaged in visual notetaking of daily life and social gatherings, comparable to today’s Facebook mobile uploads.

This artlessness would seem to place the snapshot at an almost inconceivable distance from the virtuosic manipulation of pigment and surface texture that, giving rise to indeterminate spatial and psychological scenarios, creates an almost synaesthetic effect in the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard. However by highlighting the snapshot’s contingencies of space, cropping, shadow and depth of field, as well as the intimate subject matter brought into view, we are given the sense that around century’s end photography had permeated these painters’ visual awareness in subtle and elusive ways. For instance Nude in an Interior (c. 1935) is a shimmering image of Marthe at her bath that displays Bonnard’s anguishing ability to emanate light from within his paintings. It bears a resemblance to the photograph of Marthe in a similar pose and setting hanging next to it, and we think that we have arrived at the source. However the snapshot, Marthe in the Bathtub, Vernouillet, was taken in 1910, and predates the painting by twenty-five years. In the case of Bonnard, who lost interest in photography in 1916, the snapshot seems to have been a brief preoccupation with questionable authority over the chromatic and spatial investigations that he sustained into the middle of the last century.

Relationships between painted and photographic images are conjured and troubled throughout the exhibition. Vuillard’s Child Playing: Annette in Front of a Wooden Chair (1900) is emblematic of his signature conflation of the subject’s absorptive experience with a patterned interior. Its relation to the strikingly similar snapshot hanging next to it of a boy sitting in a room draped with correspondingly decorative arabesques seems clear, but the photograph was taken by Evenopoel – the Belgian who was included in the exhibition because of his thematic and stylistic convergence with the Nabis.

The final room presents the highlight of the exhibition: a suite of paintings by Vuillard paired with snapshots from the cache discovered in his family archive. Even here, the relationship between his camerawork and painted interiors is mostly a matter of conjecture. In a series of lively snapshots Misia Natanson – wife of Revue blanche editor Thalée Natanson– mugs for and returns Vuillard’s plainly infatuated gaze. However, in the corresponding painting, In Front of the Tapestry: Misia and Thalée Natanson, Rue St. Florentin (1899), her face is obscured and turned away from view. Thalée’s hand likewise covers his face, and the two figures merge into a muted decorative scheme that belies the emotionally fraught scenario. The famous Interior with Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) creates a spatial and psychological claustrophobia that is echoed in the surrounding snapshots of Vuillard’s family apartment, yet the painting predates Vuillard’s engagement with photography by two years. Can it be argued that photography affected Vuillard’s painting before he owned a camera?

The Nabis are often associated with a hermetic retreat from the disruptions of modern life into an aesthetics of bourgeois interiority. Recently, T.J. Clark has held up this aestheticism as an alternative to the 20th century’s legacy of avant-garde negation. By conjuring “a sense of what the aesthetic existence keeps at bay”, Clark writes “Bonnard’s art, in its privacy and privation, internalizes the disaster of the twentieth century in a way that all forms of ‘modern’ fellow-travelling – even the noblest and most well-meaning – to my mind fail to do. Retreat and dream, in other words, are a necessary moment of the art of the last hundred years.” However the comparison that “Snapshot” solicits with the circulation of images in present-day forms of social media suggests that, beginning with the Kodak, this aestheticist retreat was becoming less and less possible, and that one could not return to a form of painting that was unaware of photography. The snapshot, as Douglas Nickel writes, changed “the way people regarded their own histories…the way lives were lived became entangled in the way lives were represented. A modern society of the spectacle was taking shape.”

Could these artists have been aware of the historical implications of this vast expansion of image production at the end of the 19th century? The tension in “Snapshot” between handmade and mechanical images gives a sense that the stakes for art were becoming clear. Though they thrilled to the snapshot in life, the ambivalence of the Nabis’ painted response anticipates Walter Benjamin’s judgment of 1931: “the amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure than the hunter who comes back with quantities of game that is useless to anyone but the merchant. And the day does indeed seem to be at hand when there will be more illustrated magazines than game merchants. So much for the snapshot.”

When I walk into Denny’s office to interview him for this article, I no longer have concerns about tests or papers. As he finishes off his chocolate milk, I pull up a chair, excited to learn where he came from, how he chose Islamic art, and his impressions of working at the Met. Denny grew up in small-town Iowa where he developed interests in physics, math and music. At fifteen, his father got a Fulbright to teach physics at Robert College in Istanbul, where Denny fell in love with architecture, one building in particular: the Mosque of Rustem Pasha. He found it in a French guidebook, given to him by a friend’s mother. “‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. ‘You might want to take a look.’” Eight years later, Denny wrote his thesis at Harvard on this very mosque, whose “decoration came at a crucial moment in Ottoman Turkish art in the 16^th century.” Forty-three years later, this fall, he’s doing an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington on this same period in which Turkish art changed suddenly.

Although Denny is quick to note, “I wanted to be a teacher since I was two,” he has always divided his time between academia and museum-work. He’s worked for the Harvard Art Museums, the Smith College Museum of Art and, for the last five years, the Met.

Every good art historian has to know something about museums because that’s where the art is. They used to ask the bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks and he said ‘because that’s where the money is stupid!’ And it’s true…There’s a group of art historians today that believe that theory is their province and that they shouldn’t have to deal with things and quite frankly that’s an attitude that has come into graduate schools and it’s just as wrong as wrong can be.

Denny travels from Amherst, Massachusetts, to New York every week. His involvement with the Met began nearly five years ago, when a colleague asked Denny if he had a student interested in working on the museum’s Ottoman Turkish art. Denny decided that he himself was interested. He was especially excited to research a particular carpet that had been deemed fake by four art historians and warehoused. He smiles, telling me “It’s one of the greatest carpets they’ve got and in another couple of months it’ll be on display.” (He’ll be giving a lecture on it this week at the museum.) Denny has also worked on the Met’s website, photos, educational materials, tour-guide training and audio guides.

For the new Islamic galleries, he “worked with conservators, designers, helped to write the labels, wall texts and provided photographs.” He’s proud of the galleries’ architecture, which serves to contextualize Islamic art, he feels. The courtyard was made by Moroccan craftsmen and the Damascus room is “a room right out of a palace in the 18^th century.” Generally, it seems that “people really love [these areas].” Although some critics believe museums shouldn’t present architectural reconstructions, Denny defends them. “The museum really told [the craftsmen] what we wanted. That is, we had art historians and professionals do all the planning and then the craftsmen executed it according to what we wanted.” Denny said that “the biggest surprise [he] had was how smoothly things went. There were so many people working on this, so many people on the team and they were so diverse. It was a very nice surprise.”

Denny’s appointment at the Met was originally planned to end with the opening of the galleries, but he was asked to stay, to help rotate the collections. Preserving the objects requires replacing silks every three months, wool every six months, and so on. The museum’s Islamic collection consists of 12,000 works, ten percent on view at a time. Accordingly, the tours, audio, and wall text must also change. So it seems that Denny will stay for years to come, studying the art of his fascination.

I asked Denny if the events of September 11, 2001 changed the museum’s plans for the galleries. As he explains,

They went right ahead with their plans and pretty much what we have there today is what they intended to have all along…I think people are more interested than they would have been, but the Met’s mission is pretty clear. The museum is careful not to have a political agenda and I think it works. These questions were all asked by reporters and Philippe de Montebello, who of course was there when I wasn’t, stated very clearly and unequivocally that this has been in our plans all along. This is not a response to political events. The museum is simply doing what the museum does.

Denny says he hopes the galleries will help to accurately inform people about Islam. He says that the department’s “new mantra is ‘from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean,’” meaning that Islamic art is not monolithic and exists in many different cultures – “Arabs, Turks, Persians, Indians, all kinds of ethnic groups, all kinds of languages.” He notes that there is secular Islamic art, not just religious, and that despite popular belief there are many human and animal figures. Most importantly, however, is the understanding we gain of the people, who as Denny explains “are just like us. Some of them are fun loving, some of them aren’t, they like to laugh, they like to have a good meal and a good time and even lift a good glass, which they’re not supposed to do. And the art helps to show this.” The galleries have been well received. In their first four months 360,000 visited, an extraordinary number for such a small section.

Still thinking about his year abroad at age fifteen, he tells me toward the end of the interview, “What really astounded me at the beginning was not how different Istanbul was from Grinnell, Iowa, because it certainly was different, but once I got to know people, how very similar they were.”

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 (“modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate”).

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been selected as the dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Zaera-Polo has been a visiting lecturer in architecture at Princeton since 2008. On top of his work at Princeton, Zaera-Polo is also the Berlage Chair at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship of Architectural Design at Yale University. Alejandro Zaera-Polo will succeed Stan Allen, the dean since 2002, who will return to full-time teaching and architectural design.

Joel Smith has been appointed the first curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum. Smith has been working at Princeton University Art Museum since 2005 and was named Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography there in 2011.

Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada has named Gaëtane Verna as director. Verna was previously director and chief curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette in Lanadaudière, Québec.

Sotheby’s has appointed Ryoichi Hirano as International Senior Specialist for Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art and Deputy Managing Director, Sotheby’s Japan. Hirano is the former head of the art gallery Hirano Kotoken and gallery director of the Yayoi Gallery in Tokyo.

Art and “The War on Terror”: Ten Years On
August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art, A.J.Davis@soton.ac.uk
March 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (collectively identified by the Bush administration’s rubric of “the war on terror”) featured in myriad ways (both explicitly and tacitly) within contemporary art production, exhibitions, and criticism of the 2000s. This session offers a forum for a timely review of this decade of art and war (and their interpenetration). The session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians, and critics, including Martha Rosler, Jonathan Har- ris, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, followed by papers. Papers might address the art and activism of Artists Against the War; pertinent curato- rial projects of this period (e.g., the Whitney Biennial of 2006: Day for Night); the work of “embedded” artists; popular culture’s role in shaping narratives of the wars (e.g., films including World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss); or consider what the legacy of this recent past might mean for art today.

The “New Connoisseurship”: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
A conversation on the past, present, and future of the “new connoisseurship” brings together leading figures from the academy, mu- seum, and laboratory to consider what matters about the material objects we study. The aim is to go beyond stocktaking to recuperating and repositioning the material object as subject for art-historical research. What lessons can we learn from the ever “new” and serially “scientific” connoisseurship, from Morelli’s forensics to Berenson’s reliance on photographic evidence, to today’s “technical art history”? Given the fate of the Rembrandt Research Project, as well as what scholarship has revealed about artistic practice in the workshop, can or should we aspire to establish a corpus of “authentic” or “autograph” works, or is this a chimera, the wrong question to ask? At this moment can we look squarely and constructively at connoisseurship, a word that has come to be spoken with disdain by so many schol- ars, redolent of an outmoded practice? “Close looking,” so fetishized and admired and freighted a concept, neither accounts for what is below the visible surface, nor recognizes the interventions and transformations of appearance of that surface resulting from the vicissi- tudes of time and restoration. What can be gained from research and rethinking the historical record as it becomes increasingly available in conservation archives? How can we ask better questions and benefit from our varied categories of knowledge going forward? What can or should art historians do to take advantage of—and to train a generation of “new connoisseurs” conversant in—new developments in conservation and technical studies?

The Changing Complexion of Theory
Ian Verstegen, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, ianverstegen@yahoo.com
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally chang- ing nature of contemporary theory. For many years, theory was influenced by post-structuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism. More recently, with the sociological determinist approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the materialism of Slavoj Zizek, the realism of Jacques Deleuze (at least as imputed by Manuel de Landa), and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This panel not only seeks to trace the influence of such newer ideas but also raise the very question of theory in the humanities. Papers are sought that go beyond the exegesis of
recent theorists and discuss the relation of theory and the func- tion of relativism and objectivism in the academy.

Wednesday, February 22

I took a flight from JFK at the crack of dawn, to arrive in time for “The Challenge of Nazi Art.” This was the only panel, other than my own, that I attended from start to finish. The opening remarks by Christian Fuhrmeister made it clear that the organizers wanted to open a dialogue about something that art historians have found it almost impossible to discuss, something I have also struggled with as a scholar of Weimar-era photography and exhibition culture. I was particularly drawn in by Despina Stratigakos’s visual evidence of how domestic design was pitched to young Nazi couples, and that what we think of “modernism” still seeped into much of that design, eliminating an easy bifurcation. Former CAA president Paul Jaskot, a great, natural speaker, spoke about the concept of “banality” and the need for art historical analysis of the era’s cultural products. More provocative questioners may have been intimidated by the largeness of the (double) room, but all in all it was a highly thought-provoking panel.

Thursday, February 23

Packed day. I spoke first thing in the morning, about “Radical Photo Spaces” at a session called “The Other Histories of Photography: The First 100 Years.” I thought our turnout was impressive, considering the time and that we were unfortunately competing with another session on photography (“Photographic Practices in Latin America”) and a video/film themed session that I was pining for (“Mobile Spectatorship”). I enjoyed going last: I think it’s a law of physics that you get the most questions—when I spoke in Chicago two years ago I went second-to-last and got zero questions! But the crowd was clearly interested in one of the main points of the session as a whole, which was how to bring attention to alternative photo practices that have been left out of the canon, and whether that can directly impact how photography is shown in museums now. Consensus seemed to be: yes, but it still doesn’t happen often enough. It’s always invigorating when the historical feels relevant to the audience.

After lunch I finally got to “curate” a time slot for myself, 2:30-5. I started at the standing-room-only Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Rosalind Krauss. Bois did an affectionate opening, and I stayed for Harry Cooper, which I loved, to hear how a practicing curator was influenced by her scholarship, particularly on sculpture. Then I exited to support a former peer of mine from the CUNY Graduate Center, Cary Levine, who was speaking about Pettibon and hardcore punk in a session called “Towards a Rock and Roll History of Contemporary Art” which sounded almost too cool, but Cary did a great job of integrating Pettibon’s subversive Zine imagery with the music of California punkers Black Flag. It brought back memories of my childhood in San Diego in the 1980s when more sophisticated kids were wearing those T-shirts in seventh grade while I still thought “punk” was a playground slur. Although pretty beat, I finished at the HGCEA session (Historians of German and Central European Art) to show fealty, as a member to an organization co-founded by my dissertation advisor, Rose-Carol Washton Long. And speaking of HGCEA, there was a super-cool dinner for members that same evening on the top floor of a downtown theater space, a space so raw that it looked like someone had just torn down some scenery from the walls. Very hip for HGCEA!

Friday, February 24

The morning session was another case of me bopping around. I went to “Live Forever: Performance Art in the Changing Museum Culture” and watched Pablo Helguera, the first speaker, upend the normal mode of speaking from the podium, which was mesmerizing. He engaged with an historical topic (why a preponderance of creative minds all came from a particular small town in Mexico) but turned all the lights off, put a spotlight on himself, and spoke in the middle of the room— a performance-paper hybrid. Kudos to him for thinking outside the box (throughout the conference he also took part in graduate-seminar style gatherings that were open to the public, another very cool way to push for feedback through new models of learning). I made brief stops at “The Modern Gesamtkunstwerk” and the Radical Art Caucus session, before moving on to my shift at the Book Fair table of the Women’s Art Caucus, to try to sell copies of my now-in-paperback The New Woman International, co-edited with Elizabeth Otto. People were not in heavy-duty buying mode, but many flyers and review copies were distributed, which is always a good thing, and these tables become places to discourse with long-lost friends. Once our shift was over at 1pm, I noticed another publication table giving away free food and drink, and ran into grad school classmates who had scattered across the country. That evening my husband, daughter and I met up with my cousin JD Walsh who is now a television actor and director, so we really had the whole breadth of the LA experience, not least of which was staying at the Biltmore, the most glamorous convention hotel ever.

Saturday, February 25

I only attended morning sessions so that we could take my daughter to Disneyland. I was particularly enthused by Kim Sichel’s paper in Jordana Mendelson’s session, “The 1930s,” where she focused on Brassaï’s book Paris de nuit. All forms of alternative (meaning outside canonical museum presentation) photography circulation fascinate me at the moment, including those in books, and Sichel showed Brassaï’s images as they appeared in the original publication, with full bleeds, even spilling over onto the steel spirals—gorgeous. In keeping with my attempt to see as many diverse photo-based papers as possible, I made a last minute dip-in to “Pop and Politics, Part II” to hear Martin Berger talk about Warhol’s Race Riots. This session proved to me that yes, going to CAA can be important to reinvigorate old talking points in lectures to our students. I use Race Riots routinely in my history of photo lectures but I had never closely contemplated the contemporaneous meaning of the word “Riot” before: that although Warhol seems sympathetic to the protesters in his images, the use of the word “Riot” was actually considered quite incendiary and helpful to the anti-protester position. So the images are, at best, ambivalent. Thank you Martin Berger!

All in all, I would say it was a most stimulating CAA, although I have heard some differ. Maybe I got into it because, as a colleague said to me, it was “a great CAA for Germanists.” But mostly I think it fulfilled what we should expect from these gatherings: new ideas, old friends, and a reminder of why we do what we do.

Artforum reports that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art appointed longtime Israel Museum chief curator Suzanne Landau as its director and chief curator. “This announcement comes as a surprise to those who thought the dual position would be split between two people, a curator based locally and a director hailing from abroad, according to Haaretz. Landau will be replacing Mordechai Omer, the former director and chief curator, who died eight months ago.”

According to The New York Times, the J. Paul Getty Museum announced that Timothy Potts, former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, will replace Michael Brand who left the museum in 2010.

Michael Brand was recently named Director of the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, according to ABC Sydney. “His first priority is to ensure the Gallery remains ‘a popular, admired and loved gallery, in a great international city.’ And one thing he’s keen to do is continue the ‘ambitious’ trend the Gallery’s had of generating its own exhibitions instead of taking packaged versions.”

On February 29, the Russian artist and historian Eliy Belyutin died. In 1954 he founded a school of painting called “New Reality” that focused on artists’ feelings and thoughts. He also wrote art-history books including two volumes on 19th century Russian art, which he co-wrote with Nina Molina.

The lack of Internet at the hotel was not so great, however. The only WiFi was in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge, which almost always had a fresh urn of hot coffee, colleagues from across the fields, and easily accessed Internet. I miss the printed-paper abstracts. I know CAA puts them online now, but that doesn’t help when you’re choosing sessions on the fly, with only paper titles. It was like trying to judge a book by its cover – and I wonder what nuggets of scholarly gold I missed.

In my experience, the best panels by far were the two official ones devoted to “Tourism (and) Culture” and the mini-symposium on this topic held at the University of Southern California. Convened by Laurie Beth Clark, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the panels and symposium discussed the role that culture plays in defining tourism and the role that tourism plays in defining culture. Clark did an amazing job organizing this group of over 20 scholars, which I had the privilege of joining. The presenters were a lively mix of art historians and visual artists, but all presented thoughtful research in an engaging way that also stirred great conversations, which extended into the concourse of the Staples Center. The three panels looked at artworks made for sale to tourists, artworks that represent tourists, and artworks that derive from the experiences tourists have. Papers analyzed various existing tourist venues, creative works derived from tourist experiences, and new paradigms for the production of tourist culture.

Every time slot held at least one session of interest. Adam Lerner’s and Steven Wolf’s Thursday morning session Punk Rock and Contemporary Art on the West Coast took a fresh look at California Punk visuals and performance as art. Historicizing the “the Local” in Contemporary Art likewise presented an old topic in contemporary terms. Everywhere I went the focus seemed to be on the modern and the contemporary, lending in large part to the liveliness pervasive throughout the conference.

The Centennial Reception at LACMA on Wednesday evening was not to be missed, although I could have done without the twenty-minute coach ride listening to the two older female art historians sitting next to me discuss how they pamper their cats with homemade food. This was a fitting prelude to In Wonderland: Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists, LACMA’s current exhibition. This show is the best I’ve seen in years. Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington held their own, without overpowering the lyrically disturbing work of Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo. The installation was quietly beautiful, allowing viewers the luxury of winding through a maze of extraordinary work, without forcing a chronological reading. The only flaw was the copious didactic text. The art spoke for itself.

The scheduled trip to Venice Beach and Santa Monica was lackluster in terms of execution and art. At the Santa Monica Museum we were treated to an excellent exhibition of the ceramic sculptures and vessels of Beatrice Wood, but had less than 45 minutes to view the exhibition and make our way around the entirety of Bergamont Station’s numerous other private galleries, most of which were hosting opening receptions that evening.

I am curious to know why the conference convened right after the majority of the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions closed. With nine or more sessions devoted to the art, architecture, and material culture of California, several focused specifically on “Pacific Standard Time,” it was disappointing to not be able to see the relevant shows. Such exhibitions (and CAA conferences) are planned years in advance. The “Pacific Standard Time” installations at The Getty Center, the Watts Towers Art Center, Redcat, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LA MOCA, the Hammer Museum, and the California Museum of Photography, to name a few, were all closed and being de-installed.

That said, this year’s CAA brought new life to the conference. Let’s hope that New York maintains that momentum.

The first paper, presented by Allan Doyle, explored the tensions inherent in Xavier Sigalon’s copy of Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment” and examined some of the post-Enlightenment controversies over the role of creativity versus academic instruction. Demonstrating that originality and copying were not always mutually exclusive, Doyle shed light on a widespread, too often-ignored nineteenth-century phenomenon that formed an integral part of that century’s artistic practice and vision. This paper was followed by Jeremy Melius’s eloquent analysis of John Ruskin’s “Ariadne Florentina” lectures delivered in 1873-76 during his Slade Professorship at Oxford. Melius convincingly argued that even on the level of language, Ruskin’s analysis of a set of Florentine prints (erroneously attributed to Botticelli at the time) betrayed his deep investment in historicity and his conception of art as a living embodiment of the past that self-consciously allegorizes its own relationship to history. Lastly, Sarah Schaefer’s fascinating discussion of Gustave Doré’s Biblical illustrations touched on the often-neglected topic of the fate of religious imagery in Modernity. Arguing that Doré’s illustrations aspired to create a “transnational” and “pandenominational” Modern Judeo-Christian visual vocabulary through the incorporation of new media and new modes of representation, Schaefer claimed that Doré attempted to forge a new sense of piety and spirituality in the face of Modernity’s constant flux and fragmentation.

Taken together, these three papers persuasively staged Modernity’s “other” side by raising questions of past artistic heritage, restoration, revivalism, historicity, spirituality and the fate of religious imagery – subjects that are typically left out of nineteenth-century art historical narratives. As with last year’s session, the 2012 “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History” panel demonstrated the continuing and very welcome thematic and geographic expansion of the field beyond the standard Franco-centric accounts of the ascension of the avant-garde.