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:
18 September 2008 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Keith Moxey considers the anthology Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science edited by Lorraine Daston: Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. [...]
12 September 2008 | Books
In the September 2008 Art Bulletin, Aruna D’Souza reviews Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture. In her conclusion D’Souza writes: Ultimately, this book approaches–even if it chooses not to address head-on–what is perhaps the most urgent cultural question of our moment: How does art [...]
10 September 2008 | Museums
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis chose the wrong time to announce their new chief curator, the Baltimore Museum of Art contemporary art head, Darsie Alexander. Everyone is now too busy reporting another story, “Ending months of fervid speculation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reached into its own ranks on Tuesday and chose Thomas P. [...]
8 September 2008 | Uncategorized
We’re back from vacation, untanned and badly rested. It was a surprisingly busy summer for art historians, which we dare not attempt to summarize. Instead, select morsels: MoMA named Ann Temkin its chief curator of painting and sculpture. Michael Baxandall died at the age of 74. At the Getty Villa in Malibu, “20 art historians, [...]
28 May 2008 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Monday, September 9.
The Art Newspaper writes up three new books on Harald Szeeman: “It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions,” states—rather provocatively—the introduction to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology. A concomitant phenomenon is the emergence of [...]
20 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times: Philippe de Montebello will … become the first professor to teach the history and culture of museums … Mr. de Montebello, who turned 72 on Friday, said he planned to teach full time. But rather than lecturing on what might seem most obvious — how to run a museum, for [...]
20 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From The Age: Peter Tomory, an inspirational figure in the art world who was foundation professor of art history at La Trobe University, has died in Wales, aged 86. His passionate commitment to art, its history and scholarship was matched by an instinct for pedagogy … [He] was a colourful conversationalist and tireless raconteur, both [...]
19 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: A well-known art historian from Thailand who was indicted in a federal investigation into looted antiquities died Wednesday at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, apparently after a heart attack. Roxanna Brown, a 62-year-old U.S. citizen … was the first person arrested as part of a five-year, undercover investigation into smuggled [...]
14 May 2008 | Journals
The latest issue of Art Journal is devoted to “microblindness and blindsight”: Research has shown “microblindness” to occur when subjects encounter emotionally difficult visual material, while subjects with impaired visual processing may nevertheless be capable of “blindsight,” noting visual detail without being conscious of having seen it. Essays in this issue of Art Journal explore [...]
12 May 2008 | Architecture, Museums
The March 2008 issue of JSAH contains a review by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of the recent Rizzoli website. (JSAH‘s website indicates that Ballon’s and Alofsin’s editorships are now held by David Brownlee and David DeLong respectively.) Rogers seems inclined to pass judgment on the exhibition’s arguments, but hesitant to follow through. (Its main argument, in [...]
9 May 2008 | Career
An article in Die Welt examines the job prospects for German art historians: Currently around 800 unemployed [art historians] are registered at the federal employment agency. That is almost a whole year’s worth of art-history graduates, given that, of around 11,000 students of this field, around 900 conclude their studies each year.
8 May 2008 | Theory
In the May 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff (her former Ph.D. advisor): ["What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic?"] … I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past [...]
7 May 2008 | Conferences
The May issue of CAA News includes Donny George’s convocation address for the 2008 CAA Annual Conference in Dallas, “The Looting of the Iraq National Museum”; an interview with the next CAA president, art history professor Paul Jaskot (“It says a lot—and probably raises a few eyebrows—that the Board would choose as its president someone [...]
5 May 2008 | Contemporary
From The Art Newspaper: One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died … [Curator Paola] Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, [...]
1 May 2008 | Uncategorized
In 1938 Dalí presented a taxi as art, but it was a real taxi that precipitated the death last week of Enrico Donati, the “last of the Surrealists.” Unlike his good friend Marcel Duchamp, who only dabbled in the worlds of business and perfume, Donati, according to the New York Times, was for many years [...]
30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind: In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in [...]
30 April 2008 | Africa
Artnet News surveys the Artforum debates over the most recent Venice Bienniale, declares a pox on all their houses: … The dispute has gotten delightfully nasty, if you like that sort of thing, with some of the art-world’s most sophisticated curators acting like so many playground bullies … One thing seems clear from the contretemps, [...]
24 April 2008 | Uncategorized
We read in The Times of London that art historian Michael Podro “died of cancer on March 28, 2008″: Michael Podro was one of a handful of pioneers who transformed art history, here and abroad, into an ambitious humanities discipline comparable with philosophy, literature and history … In 1956, under the joint supervision of [Ernst] [...]
22 April 2008 | Uncategorized
We belatedly take note of the third annual rankings of the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The index, designed to compare faculty using objective measures such as books published or times cited, has been criticized most for using faulty data. “Many want to see the National Research Council’s long-anticipated [...]
