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:
21 May 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA executive director Linda Downs writes: Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn … Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online … The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and [...]
19 May 2009 | Uncategorized
From a recently lauded commencement address given by former Getty director John Walsh: Make yourself clear. This is risky. To say clearly what you think is to risk being more clearly wrong. To fudge what you think – to qualify it, complicate it, overload it – is usually a defensive move. It’s a strategy for [...]
18 May 2009 | Uncategorized
UC-Irvine historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom writes on “The Mythology of Blogs”: Misconception 3: Blogging is a fad that is bound to go away soon, so we can just ignore the phenomenon and wait the trend out. No one really knows how long any form of communication will stay popular or significant. It seems doubtful, though, [...]
15 May 2009 | Conferences, Theory
Patrick Harrison reports on the recent conference, “On the Idea of Communism,” in n+1: … Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, [Terry] Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, [Michael] Hardt’s mentor and collaborator … joined Hardt at the conference … [Hardt's] intellectual performance came straight out [...]
14 May 2009 | Books
In Art in America (which finally went online a couple months ago), Sarah Hromack reviews Manon — a Person: Part photo essay, [it] presents a comprehensive survey of a career that began during the 1960′s in Zurich, where the Berne-born Rosmarie Küng (her given name) began a modeling stint that soon segued into experiments in [...]
13 May 2009 | Teaching
Smarthistory, created by Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker out of discontent with “the large expensive art history textbook,” now with 157 videos, has won a 2009 Webby award for best education website. The Guggenheim Museum won in the category of “cultural institutions.” Dreamgrove won the “netart” category. Keith Tyson won in “art.”
12 May 2009 | Uncategorized
John Armstrong, a philosopher specialising in aesthetics and vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, wrote recently: The [humanities'] core problem can be expressed in the language of economics: the humanities are geared to supply, particularly to supply research. They ignore demand … Research needs to be redefined to embrace a wider range of cognitive virtues [...]
11 May 2009 | Medieval, Museums, Renaissance
Recently arrived in our inbox: MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA, SUMMER 2009 An incomplete list, compiled by Nick Herman [Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University] Belgium Charles the Bold Groeninge Museum, Bruges, 27 March-21 July Canada From Raphael to Caracci: The Art of Papal Rome Ottawa, National Gallery [...]
8 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
From Le Monde: The second edition of the exhibition, “The Power of Art,” has opened its doors. This triennial event, organized by the minister of culture and communication, the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Réunion des musées nationaux, comprises three sections … Among the 42 “resident” artists, just 7 women are presented … [...]
7 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Former Met director Thomas Hoving is publishing a memoir serially on Artnet: Despite my successes, I found that first year [of graduate school] to be exceedingly boring and unfulfilling. I was especially annoyed that all I ever looked at were photographs of originals. No one suggested field trips to the great museums in New York [...]
At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.
6 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Art is perenially awash in stories of fakes, fakers, and fakery. According to the AFP, The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art [...]
5 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum attended the press preview for Pictures Generation, “the Metropolitan Museum’s much discussed, uncharacteristically risk-taking theme show.” The preview was convened by Douglas Eklund, the Met’s associate curator for photography, but she found herself more interested in the thoughts of Douglas Crimp, also in attendance, whose 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space “provided the [...]
Sociologist Michèle Lamont’s new book is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. She “observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length.” She shows how “judging quality isn’t robotically rational; it’s emotional, cognitive, and social too,” particularly when academics serving on multi-disciplinary panels are forced to evaluate [...]
2 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Laura K. Jones writes in Artnet: Artnet News can now reveal that the Obama Administration has a definite relationship to the avant-garde Fluxus art movement. Deputy White House Social Secretary Joe Reinstein is married to academic Hannah Higgins, who arrives in D.C. this June from Chicago along with the couple’s daughters Zoe, 13, and Nathalie, [...]
1 May 2009 | Books, Conferences
Due out this month from Yale UP: Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, proceedings of a 2005 symposium held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday of its Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The center’s dean, Elizabeth Cropper, [...]
30 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
Contra Vasari, Perugino and Florence weren’t the sole significant influences on the young Raphael. The artist’s father, Giovanni Santi, as well the Montefeltro court, had a positive impact too; so argues an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. The exhibition presents research partly based on documents from the Santi family bottega newly uncovered in [...]
30 April 2009 | Awards
Grant-hunting season has re-opened at The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. The “Arts Writers Grant Program supports individual writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 USD. Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply in the following categories: articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, [...]
29 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Taipei Times interviews Pompidou chief curator Didier Ottinger about Arcadie, his exhibition of modern art whose “main theme investigates Arcadia, a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. Each of the exhibit¡on’s 10 sub-themes addresses a detail of The Arcadian Shepherds by Renaissance painter Nicolas [...]
28 April 2009 | Awards
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences inducts “leaders in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector.” Since 2006 (the last time we checked in on the academy), it has elected the following art historians: Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard) John (Jas) Elsner (Oxford) Benjamin Buchloh (Harvard) Gülru Necipoglu (Harvard) [...]
