Jon Lackman is a PhD student at NYU. His dissertation (in progress) is “Invective in Mid-1800s French Art Criticism.” He has written for Slate, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. He sometimes tweets.
Lackman's Posts:
11 December 2009 | Museums
The former Metropolitan Museum director has died.
11 December 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Gary Schwartz writes of a Jan Steen painting that was cut in pieces long ago but reunited in 1996, and is now in danger of being split up again: Following the U.S. Senate investigations into the Swiss bank holdings of Jewish account holders killed in the Holocaust, attention turned to the art collections of victims [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Telegraph: France’s obsession with the bottom is laid bare this week in a major new documentary and book charting how “les fesses” have shaped history. The highbrow study claims to demonstrate the huge contribution the “derrière” has made to civilisation, mixing the views of top psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists and artists. The role of [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Louis Menand’s forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas is excerpted in Harvard Magazine: Since [in academia] it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of [...]
7 December 2009 | Modern, Museums
Michael J. Lewis writes in the New Criterion: … the Bauhaus is a moving target, and there is no point in its fourteen-year life when it existed in anything like a definitive form. This is one of the insights of “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the spellbinding exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art [...]
7 December 2009 | Contemporary
Carol Yinghua Lu writes in e-flux journal: I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists … As one of the earliest [...]
3 December 2009 | Awards
From the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation: In its 2009 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $710,000 to twenty-six individual writers. These grants range from $5,000 to $50,000 in five categories—articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing—and support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences. Representing [...]
30 November 2009 | Modern, Museums
From the Times of London: “Everything is going to be alright” reads the sign above the entrance to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh … But it is controversy not hope that dominates the mood of the gallery’s first re-hang in 25 years. From a collection of more than 130 Scottish Colourist [...]
23 November 2009 | Contemporary
From the Guardian: … the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the [...]
23 November 2009 | Awards
From the TAXI Design Network: The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2009–2010. They include Bert W. Meijer, Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Florence/Universiteit Utrecht (emeritus), as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Miguel Falomir, Museo Nacional del Prado, as Andrew W. [...]
20 November 2009 | Contemporary
Artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, known as Jeanne-Claude, has died. She was, of course, the longtime collaborator with Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo. Of the numerous obituaries that are now appearing, few seem to want to deal with the questions of authorship, individuality, and gender relations that were raised by their collaboration, which have [...]
18 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Those who proposed sessions for the 2011 College Art Association conference are now receiving their responses. CAA says it received “464 proposals, the highest ever.” CAA 2010 will have about 140 regular sessions (plus another 60 or so sponsored by affiliated organizations). So if 2011 will feature a similar amount, that means that roughly 30% [...]
17 November 2009 | Career
Michael Bérubé wrote recently of the job market in modern languages; job-seeking art historians may find considerable ground for commiseration: It’s that time of year again, only worse. The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some [...]
16 November 2009 | Islamic
Duke University professor Gary Hull (editor of The Abolition of Anti-Trust and co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader) has founded Voltaire Press (which is not affiliated with Duke) and has published Muhammad: The “Banned” Images, which includes the following statement signed by Nadine Strossen, Cary Nelson, Eugene Volokh, and others: A number of recent incidents [...]
16 November 2009 | Contemporary
ARTINFO interviews Gerhard Richter: In his essay, [Benjamin] Buchloh discusses the various associations white paintings can have — with the idea of reductiveness, the end of painting. And of course there are Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and Ryman’s. Were any of these things on your mind while you worked on yours? I don’t know the Rauschenberg [...]
11 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Wayne Dynes writes on Levi-Strauss’ death: When I was teaching at Columbia University in the early seventies I fastened on the idea of trying to adapt structuralism to the field of art history. Lévi-Strauss had himself pointed the way with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. I formed a little group [...]
11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph: One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s [...]
9 November 2009 | Islamic
Oleg Grabar writes in The New Republic: Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though [...]
5 November 2009 | Islamic
From The Baltimore Sun: In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project [...]
3 November 2009 | Uncategorized
From the AP: Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100 … During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964). [...]
