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:
31 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From CAA News: CAA warmly thanks the 831 participants in a recent email survey, which was sent to 8,300 members whose database records indicate that their primary profession is: art/architectural historian, artist, administrator, curator, art-museum educator, or librarian. The survey contained one open-ended question: “What are the most pressing issues you face in your profession?” [...]
29 October 2008 | Asia
“Her questionable death in federal custody means we may never know,” writes Rick Anderson in a long article in the Seattle Weekly. “The American-born, Bangkok-based museum director” died in prison of an untreated ulcer: [A] one-paragraph document issued by a Los Angeles grand jury accuses her of aiding and abetting a scheme to defraud the [...]
29 October 2008 | Journals
The journal Word & Image, edited by John Dixon Hunt, made the unusual decision to turn over its entire July-September 2008 issue to two authors, Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, who present their joint research on “Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani,” “the findings of a three-year research [...]
27 October 2008 | Theory
In the October 2008 issue of Frieze, James Elkins has published “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Across the top half of each page runs one narrative, “Five reasons to be pessimistic about the art world”; across the bottom half runs a counter-narrative (printed upside down), “Five reasons to be optimistic about the art [...]
23 October 2008 | Uncategorized
As we’ve noted, art historian bloggers are few and far between. And it would appear that one of the few good ones we had is no longer — anybody know if David Packwood has decided to give up on Art History Today for good? I’m still getting a “Blog has been removed” message.
23 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: Albert Boime, an art historian, educator and author who evaluated art in its social and political context for new insights into French Neo-Classicism, Impressionism and other prominent art movements of the last 250 years, has died. He was 75. Boime, a faculty member at UCLA for more than 30 years … [...]
22 October 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In the summer 2008 issue of Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Pierre Chabard reviews Felicity D. Scott’s Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Politics after Modernism: Architecture or Techno-Utopia, presented as an “alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture,” could appear at first glance to be a pure product of the powerful university machine of [...]
21 October 2008 | Asia
In her introduction to the recently published conference volume Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, Asia Society director Vishaka Desai writes: More than a century ago, great luminaries of Asian art Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Kakuzō, and Ananda Coomaraswamy … began to argue for the rightful place of Asian art in the field of art [...]
16 October 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From Smithsonian: … despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator [...]
14 October 2008 | Uncategorized
… that in 2000 USC art historian Richard Meyer “was sent by the U.S. Department of State to Kazakhstan to conduct a series of lectures and seminars about Warhol and contemporary art in the United States.”
14 October 2008 | Uncategorized
More here.
10 October 2008 | Museums
Vanity Fair has excerpted a new book Mona Lisa in Camelot, by Margaret Leslie Davis. When France agreed in 1962 to lend the Mona Lisa to America, art officials on both shores opposed the idea: The treatment and care of old-master paintings was [National Gallery of Art director John] Walker’s specialty, and he believed extremely [...]
9 October 2008 | Conferences
Amy Poehler “reports”: “An art historian believes that the meal eaten in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was not bread or lamb, as previously thought, but eel garnished with orange slices. The historian will present his theory at the upcoming symposium, ‘Things That Don’t Matter.’”
8 October 2008 | Conferences
Who says art historians are never topical? Later this semester, the German Historical Institute London and the University of Exeter will co-host a conference on “Visual Representations of the Unemployed.” Special Offer: The first unemployed art historian to email us a picture of him- or herself attending the conference is guaranteed to get their picture [...]
6 October 2008 | Journals
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education: A large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it “a dangerous and misguided exercise” … Panels of four to six scholars, appointed by a steering committee, compiled initial lists of journals to [...]
2 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: In the past six months have you regularly: Been glared at in a hostile manner? Been excluded from work-related social gatherings? Had others storm out of the work area when you entered? Had others consistently arrive late for meetings that you called? Been given the “silent treatment”? Not been [...]
30 September 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Yale Daily News: If being deemed a “great teacher” is any indication of a faculty member’s worthiness to assume the job of dean of Yale College, University President Richard Levin’s likely short list can quickly be reduced to one candidate: Mary Miller … But the 55-year old Sterling Professor — the highest academic [...]
29 September 2008 | Uncategorized
According to the (soon to be defunct?) New York Sun, An art history professor at Columbia University jumped to his death from his Morningside Heights apartment. Petrus Schaesberg, an adjunct professor … began teaching in the art history department in 2005 but was not teaching this semester. The German native was also a photographer. According [...]
26 September 2008 | Uncategorized
According to the Telegraph, A portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh that he later painted over has been revealed in more detail than every before thanks to a new X-ray technique … [which] allowed the team – led by Dr Joris Dik, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Professor Koen [...]
23 September 2008 | Africa, Books
In the Autumn 2008 issue of African Arts, anthropologist Joseph Nevadomsky reviews Art, Performance, and Ritual in Benin City by Charles Gore: Gore’s book signals a change of direction in Benin Studies. It chips at the ossifications that had become the boundary markers of Benin research. John Piction, in his blurb, call Gore’s book “the [...]
