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 February 2008 | Crime, Museums
From the Boston Globe: … as one museum after another negotiates deals [to repatriate art], and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading [...]
15 February 2008 | Museums
In caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings: … Timed to coincide with Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday (2006) and the publication of [curator Walter] Liedtke’s masterful two-volume catalogue, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this impressive exhibition puts on display every one of the [...]
14 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Power enough to persuade the London Underground to ban the Royal Academy from using his “Venus” in a Tube advertisement. The Guardian writes: … if Cranach’s nudes didn’t prevent his friendship with Martin Luther – hardly a slouch in the morality department, what with the Reformation and all – you wonder if they are really, [...]
13 February 2008 | Medieval
From The Johns Hopkins University Gazette: Grants of $779,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow The Johns Hopkins University and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France to provide scholars with virtual access to more than half the known versions of Le Roman de la Rose, a medieval poem on the art of love that [...]
11 February 2008 | Contemporary, Museums
What percentage of art museum collections are on display at any time? If the percentage is too small, should the art travel more so that it can be seen? What about the risk to the works? According to the New York Times, Eli Broad recently made the surprising decision not to give his contemporary-art collection [...]
8 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Blogger Sneakysnu analyzes the Barack Obama campaign’s imagery: As an art historian by training, I have been fascinated by the campaign’s use of images and graphic design. It has inspired other Obama supporters to create their own images that produce a specific message: Obama as cultural icon. Below, I am going to engage in visual [...]
7 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon, who recently co-authored a report on art-history publishing with Mariët Westermann, “left Columbia last semester for a curriculum development job at New York University’s new Abu Dhabi campus,” where Westermann is vice chancellor.
5 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The Sacramento Bee writes on a recent TV ad for Orangina: … This has got to be one of the weirdest spots to air in quite a while. With a soundtrack of pulsing dance pop, here are some of the images we see: A flamingo in a G-string, sliding down a vine as if it [...]
4 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Regarding our earlier post (‘The Abu Ghraib Effect’), see also this recent segment from NPR’s “On the Media”: Models wearing designs from John Galliano’s Fall 2008 Mens collection looked as if they’d stepped out of Abu Ghraib prison and onto Paris runways. Do the designs fetishize torture? RISD professor Kathleen McDermott says Galliano is following [...]
4 February 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terri Weissman considers Stephen F. Eisenman’s new book, The Abu Ghraib Effect: The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects … failed to instigate radical political change in the United States … [...]
1 February 2008 | Museums
From Le Monde: The Musée d’Orsay, which is devoted to nineteenth-century art and is one of France’s most important institutions, will have a new chief as of March 7: Guy Cogeval, 52. Formerly the director of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal – he spent nine years there – he was the favorite to replace [...]
1 February 2008 | Books, Teaching
Artist and writer Morgan Meis reviews the new Phaidon megasurvey 30,000 Years of Art: The story of human creativity across time and space: … [I] imagine a group of art historians sitting around a table with a sixth or seventh bottle of wine giggling to each other like schoolgirls. “Take that, art theorists! We give [...]
31 January 2008 | Uncategorized
From Harper’s Magazine: George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born-again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled A Charge to Keep. Bush was so taken by it, he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about [...]
29 January 2008 | Conferences
The annual College Art Association conference convenes February 20–23 in Dallas. If you’re going, please consider writing about your experience! We’ve enjoyed hearing from a variety of people in the past, and it’s an opportunity for you to opine before our audience of 1000+ readers per day. Email your write-up(s), which can be brief and [...]
25 January 2008 | Journals
Citation indexes are often controversial (for one, they can never be comprehensive), but they can be of some interest nonetheless. We recently discovered the citation ranking feature of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. We typed in a few art-history-related journals to see what their most frequently cited articles are. Here is a sampling: {FORMAT: [...]
24 January 2008 | Uncategorized
Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation continues to attract attention. From the Times of London: An historian claims to have solved a Renaissance murder mystery by deciphering one of the world’s most enigmatic masterpieces. The true meaning of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, kept at the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino, has been the [...]
22 January 2008 | Museums
The Washington Post and CultureGrrl report that Philip Conisbee has died. According to CultureGrrl, “the British-born French paintings expert may be best remembered for two glorious exhibitions: Georges de La Tour and His World, 1996, the first American exhibition devoted to that artist; and the recent blockbuster Cézanne in Provence, 2006.” According to the Post, [...]
21 January 2008 | Theory
Nicolas Slonimsky asserted in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective that the human instinct toward “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar” is usually to blame when critics assail a work of genius. Interestingly, there is a body of empirical work supporting the converse idea, that we tend to like what we’ve seen a lot of. See, for [...]
18 January 2008 | Books
Hol Art Books is a new publisher with an interesting idea: [We] will allow anyone to suggest titles, form professional-level publishing groups, peer review one another’s work, and collaboratively develop their title to ultimately be published as a Hol book … Hol takes care of printing, marketing and distributing every book, but we turn the [...]
17 January 2008 | Photography
From Le Monde: It’s a stunning photograph that has caused much ink to be spilled since it was published January 3rd on the cover of the Nouvel Observateur. On the occasion of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth, the magazine chose an image of the writer, nude, seen from behind, in the middle of [...]
