29 February 2008 | Conferences
We’ve extracted a few choice bits from the collected abstracts of the recent CAA meeting in Dallas:
Yvonne Scott: “The paradox of the island is that it is at once an entity and a fragment and consequently functions synecdochically.”
Daniel Savoy: “The architects of early modern Venice created an ‘aquatic aesthetic’ that responded to the visual and perceptual effects of their aquatic geography.”
Alison Mairi Syme: “A garden metaphorics, imagining artists as pollinators and plants, and artistic creation as cross-fertilization, pervaded progressive literary and painterly production.”
Susan Sidlauskas: “Sargent didn’t so much reveal what was beneath the glittering surfaces of the Gilded Age as exploit their revelatory instability.”
Hsuan Tsen: “Historians typically argue that such perceptions [of Japan as a land of aesthetics where everyone had at least a small garden and even children appreciated beauty] are evidence of an Orientalist gaze of internalized Orientalism. I argue instead that [Japan’s display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition] was managed by Japanese businessmen exploiting new marketing strategies located within what Kinoshita Naoyuki calls ‘urban tourism’ in an appeal to what they hoped was a cross-cultural experience of desire.”
Kathleen Chapman: “In its reduction of informational elements to only consumer product and producer name, the Sachplakat functioned as a type of modern ‘hieroglyph’—a pictographic means of creating brand identity and a cipher of the unity of commerce and modernity.”
Rhonda Taube: “The Guatemalans refer to these dances as convites, ‘masquerades’ or invitation dances, and disfraces, ‘disguises.’ They feature nonindigenous, untraditional and current characters from North American mass media, horror-film creatures, Mexican movie stars, and children’s cartoon characters.”
Esther Brummer: “As a document of noble identity, Venetian nuptial allegories served as a statement of justification for an oligarchy that had all but faded from political prominence with respect to the currents of Enlightenment thought and reform found in certain Venetian aristocratic circles.”
Diane Wolfthal: “Northern Renaissance images suggest that the rise of the monetary economy produced a new ideal of masculinity, that this ideal engendered anxiety concerning men’s proper relationship to money, and that women played a role in easing this anxiety.”
Annetta Alexandridis: “Representations of Zeus and Ganymede and Leda and the Swan from the fifth to second century BCE offer examples of heterosexual and homosexual transspecies relationships.”
Jessica Priebe: “At his death François Boucher had more than fifteen hundred shells in his collection. Yet it was not the sheer number of assembled objects that his conchological colleagues admired.”