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:
15 December 2008 | Architecture
We belatedly take note of an interesting article published in July on Signandsight.com: The German feuilletons spent the spring debating the relationship between architecture and morality … De Meuron told an interviewer that it would be stupid and cowardly not to build for China on the grounds that it has no democracy. Albert Speer, the [...]
12 December 2008 | Career
In the Wall Street Journal, we read that according to “a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc.,” art-history majors have a median starting salary of $35,800. Ten years after graduation, their median salary is $64,900. In that respect, they beat majors in anthropology, biology, criminal justice, drama, [...]
10 December 2008 | Americas
From The New Criterion: Anyone who suspects that nineteenth-century American art has less to teach us than twentieth-century modernism should take a drive up the winding road of Route 23A, up Kaaterskill Clove in the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains. Here in the town of Hunter, New York, a group of young artists is [...]
8 December 2008 | Uncategorized
There still are not many art historians blogging, but let’s note a couple worthwhile sites we’ve not yet indicated: Jonathan Janson considers all things Vermeer. An artist himself, he writes with particular sensitivity to technical aspects: Vermeer used glazing as other Dutch painters, with parsimony. They knew glazing is not an answer-all technical solution and [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he was senior curator and oversaw the department of classical art for 40 years … Although his bibliography of articles and books filled 60 printed pages, Dr. Vermeule may have been the least stuffy classicist to prowl the MFA’s halls. He was fond of draping plastic Hawaiian [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
I read in the York University newspaper that With Halifax’s vaunted ‘Golden Generation’ jettisoned out into the real world of 9 to 5, mortgages and finding school for the littl’un, it has taken the leadership of metrosexual art historian Joseph Harrison-Davis to blend the new blood of rotund-ladies man (the ladies being rotund) ‘Lundy’ with [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
The Fluxus artist just died in a retirement home in Cologne at the age of 82 years, according to this short article from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
3 December 2008 | Architecture, Conservation
Smithsonian Magazine writes about current attempts to restore and safeguard Hagia Sophia: “For months at a time, you don’t see anybody working,” said [Zeynep] Ahunbay, a professor of architecture at Istanbul Technical University. She had directed a partial restoration of the building’s exterior in the late 1990s and is regarded by conservators as its guardian [...]
1 December 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to ANSA, Caravaggio’s reputation for revolutionary artistic genius has received a further boost following the discovery he may have used fireflies to create primitive ”photographs”. Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at the Florence-based SACI institute, believes the baroque artist created a firefly powder as an essential tool after converting his entire studio into a kind [...]
28 November 2008 | Conferences
The 2009 CAA conference in Los Angeles now has sessions and individual paper titles listed on its website. A few highlights: “The Disciplined Body and Rational Architecture: The Foro Mussolini in Rome as the Setting for Performative Ritual of Synchronized Gymnastics” “Statelessness: Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter, Clean Torture, and Guantánamo Bay” “Riding the Rails of [...]
26 November 2008 | Photography
Just as Sarah Palin’s fashion was hamfistedly spruced up by individuals hoping to help her fit in on the national stage, so a French minister’s image was recently edited by a sympathetic newspaper worried she might stand out in the wrong way. Or was it? André Gunthert writes in Actualités de la Recherche en histoire [...]
24 November 2008 | Medieval, Theory
In caa.reviews, Kathryn A. Smith considers A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, edited by Conrad Rudolph: The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future [...]
21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann: Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The [...]
18 November 2008 | Modern
From the Baltimore Sun: Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. “There will be no [...]
14 November 2008 | Uncategorized
In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Laurie Fendrich writes: … I stopped by the Met last week (as I’ve said, the pleasure of $60 Met membership is that you can do drop-ins) to check out the current Morandi exhibition, up through December 14th. I’m happy to report that Morandi is still great. Go see [...]
13 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
It’s caviar for modern art skeptics: Tate Modern hung Rothkos on their side and it made so little difference that barely anyone noticed. The truth of the matter is a bit more complex. From The Times of London: Curators of the blockbuster Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern in London have displayed two of the artist’s [...]
10 November 2008 | Photography
An article in Le Temps recounts the controversy that ensued in 1994 when Time darkened a photograph of O.J. Simpson for its cover. Then it writes: Fourteen years later, it’s impossible not to notice how scrupulous such magazines have been to present Barack Obama favorably, taking care to neither darken nor lighten overmuch the skin [...]
6 November 2008 | Uncategorized
Perhaps now is a good time to start analyzing art related to Barack Obama.
5 November 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In caa.reviews, Oleg Grabar considers “the unease most of us feel about traditional categories like Islamic and medieval, which are still the categories in which the field of art history is divided. We can probably agree that national labels are inadequate or misleading when dealing with the past, even though they are essential in identifying [...]
4 November 2008 | Photography
Rémi Coignet, who blogs about photography and books for Le Monde, recently reviewed Playboy: Posters, La collection complète, which is a kind of catalogue raisonné comprising all the hundreds of centerfolds the magazine has published since 1953: Flipping through the work, you get an impression of great repetition, an impression confirmed by a quick tally [...]
