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 April 2008 | Ancient, Medieval, Theory
The latest issue of World Archaeology (39:4) is largely devoted to two themes: the senses and “symmetrical archaeology.” C. Pamela Graves writes: In the Middle Ages the senses were considered two-way processes. The senses ‘enabled tangible qualities, and indeed, spiritual or intangible qualities, to be passed from one party to another’ and were acknowledged as [...]
18 April 2008 | Books
What’s new with tradition? The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), “an active network of individuals and institutions dedicated to the creation of human and harmonious buildings and places which respect local traditions … [it] brings together those who design, make, maintain, study or enjoy traditional building, architecture and places.” The proceedings [...]
Die Welt notes that Alfred Weidinger’s new catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (which was selected as the best art book of the year by Frank Whitford in The Times of London and by Tom Rosenthal in The Independent) has come under attack from fellow Klimt scholar Otmar Rychlik.
16 April 2008 | Awards
From CAA News: At its October 2007 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors voted to establish a twelfth Award for Distinction: the Distinguished Feminist Award. The award honors a person who, through his or her art, scholarship, or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts. A three-member jury, appointed by [...]
14 April 2008 | Uncategorized
In caa.reviews, Emine Fetvaci considers Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, the catalogue for the recent Metropolitan Museum exhibition: With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase [...]
11 April 2008 | Books
In Die Welt, Alexander Gauland defends Sedlmayr’s 1948 book Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center) from charges leveled recently by Rolf Schneider. Gauland argues that the book isn’t Nazi, it’s just conservative. (For more on Sedlmayr, we recommend the 2000 Vienna School Reader edited by Christopher S. Wood.)
10 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
“Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bloomberg News has an entertaining short interview with “the Met’s Keith Christiansen, who curated the exhibition with Pierre Rosenberg, the retired director of the Louvre”: Hoelterhoff: In pulling this show together, did you make any discoveries? Christiansen: I think [...]
9 April 2008 | Museums
From Carol Diehl, “Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial“: …It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project…. (Todd Alden on Mika Tajima/New Humans) ——————– …invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial [...]
8 April 2008 | Awards
Mark Feeney has won the 2008
8 April 2008 | Uncategorized
In The Globe and Mail, we read of a video installation by Robert Morris titled The Birthday Boy that is now making its first North American appearance. It features two video projections – each ostensibly of an art historian at a lectern, standing next to a rotating model of [Michelangelo's David]. On a table next [...]
7 April 2008 | Awards
From the fields of “Fine Arts Research,” “Architecture, Planning and Design,” and “Photography studies,” there were six winners this year. Here they are, together with their affiliations, and areas of research: Meiling Cheng, Associate Professor of Critical Studies and English, and Director of Critical Studies, School of Theatre, University of Southern California: Contemporary time-based art [...]
7 April 2008 | Theory
In the most recent (Winter 2007) issue of Dalhousie French Studies, which is devoted to “Representations of Trauma” (and, alas, has pages out of sequence), Tom Conley writes: After a decade, in 1999, the reception and appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma too a forceful turn … Jacque Rancière examined its sense of history. [...]
4 April 2008 | Theory
In the March 2008 issue of Cultural Politics, Johanna Drucker argues that image interpreters need to turn away from the de-familiarizing effect that was a tenet of the historical avant-garde. The very identity of aesthetic images was in part linked to capacity for making strange (Shklovsky 1917). In our current, profoundly disturbed, cultural condition, no [...]
3 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the February 2008 issue of The Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck reviews Eric Jan Sluijter’s Rembrandt and the Female Nude: … the scope of [Rembrandt's] genius was such that it still yields genuinely new research, providing that valid questions are asked. Eric Jan Sluijter has done just that in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, [...]
2 April 2008 | Museums, Renaissance
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviews the “Baccio Bandinelli 1493-1560, Dessins et sculptures du Louvre” exhibition now on view at the Louvre. It notes that this is a rare opportunity to reassess the artist, who’s been in disrepute since the Renaissance. His contemporaries starting things off by leaving to posterity “ein Negativbild” of the artist, which [...]
31 March 2008 | Renaissance
In the most recent issue of Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance (69, n3), Frank Lestringant writes on “The Atlas and the Abyss, or the Infernal Cosmography of Jean-Baptiste Trento and Pierre Eskrich: The Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique of 1566″: Despite the upheavals visited upon the 16th century by the great explorations and the concomitant rediscovery of ancient [...]
28 March 2008 | Museums
An anonymous correspondent has provided us with an oh-so-slightly satirized version of a week-long diary recently published by MoMA director Glenn Lowry: Monday To Williams College, which has a strong art history programme (I went there), to deliver a lecture about MoMA’s approach to collecting modern art. I love seeing the energy of students who [...]
26 March 2008 | Uncategorized
From New York Magazine: “Our society now values a Warhol for three times as much money as a great Rembrandt,” [art dealer Larry Salander] thunders, referring to the latest auction reports. “That tells me that we’re fucked. It’s as if people would rather fuck than make love.” An aesthete with no formal art education (nor [...]
24 March 2008 | Books
Should you happen to find it difficult staying awake at CAA one year, you might try gathering tips at the booth of art publisher Abbeville. At one recent conference, they passed the time writing “a story incorporating every single title on display.” Read it at their new blog, the Abbeville Manual of Style, which “discusses [...]
21 March 2008 | Renaissance
Art historian Irma B. Jaffe, 91, is still publishing, which is fortunate, considering that her career, according to the Columbia University alumni newsletter, didn’t begin until almost mid-life: she left the University of Illinois when she was eighteen years old, in her sophomore year, to get married. Twenty years later, the day after she sent [...]
