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:
16 January 2008 | Contemporary
When artists fail as marketers, their marketing becomes art that’s easy to market.
15 January 2008 | Conferences
From The Age: The fact that Melbourne is hosting the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art [Jan 13-18, 2008] is no small feat. Held every four years, and considered the “Olympics” of art history, the congress has never been staged south of the equator. The conference, Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration [...]
14 January 2008 | Uncategorized
The Austrian art historian and longtime director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle has published on Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya and Edgar Degas, among other artists. Marion Lauschke and Isabella Woldt also won awards. More here (rough English translation).
11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947. One interviewer notes that He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He [...]
10 January 2008 | Museums
Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello is stepping down. More here: “Director (and Voice) of Metropolitan Museum to Retire” “The Legacy of a Pragmatic Custodian of Human Civilization,” by Michael Kimmelman “Let the Horse Race Begin: The Search for a Successor” CultureGrrl The New York Sun
9 January 2008 | Teaching
From Libération: “In school, children learn to read but not to see.” In these pages, the day after the presidential election, the painting historian Pierre Rosenberg, former Louvre president, reminded candidate Sarkozy of his promise to introduce art history into the schools. If a report Libération obtained a copy of is to be believed, “starting [...]
8 January 2008 | Ancient, Books
A recent issue of the South African Archaeological Bulletin (62:185) includes a lively exchange of letters. We can’t do them justice here; nonetheless, some excerpts: J.D. Lewis-Williams writes: With attacks in (remarkably) two successive issues of the South African Archaeological Bulletin Anne Solomon has raised the boredom rating of her current dispute about San rock [...]
7 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary
When every inch of every building is covered in posters, and the posters change daily, how do you find your way home? In a recent issue of South Asian Popular Culture (5:1), Iftikhar Dadi writes on “Political Posters in Karachi: 1988-1999.” During this time, “Pakistan attempted to ‘return’ to parliamentary democracy.” Consequently, the existence of [...]
4 January 2008 | Theory
The September 2007 issue of Social Semiotics is devoted to “Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification.” The editors, Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray, write in their introduction: … the term “body modification” has a ring of deviance about it. The heterogeneous practices this rubric encompasses — from piercing, tattooing, suspensions, scarification, [and] branding, to corseting, the splitting [...]
3 January 2008 | Photography
A recent issue (29.2) of Studies in American Culture includes an essay by Larry Vonalt (who died in 2005) on “The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams’s ‘Disturbing’ Family Photograph’: The photographs in Shelby Lee Adams’s first two monographs, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), attracted praise and, often in his native Eastern Kentucky, blame. [...]
2 January 2008 | Conservation, Museums
In a recent issue of Studies in Conservation (52:3), Clare Richardson and David Saunders write on “Acceptable Light Damage”: A panel of observers was presented with pairs of reproductions of figurative and abstract oil and watercolour paintings, regions of which had been altered digitally prior to printing to give a known colour difference from the [...]
18 December 2007 | Uncategorized
We’ll return on Wednesday January 2.
18 December 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the October 2007 Text and Performance Quarterly, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli contribute “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade“: On February 25, 2006, the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana (SPLL) hosted the twenty-sixth Annual Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade in downtown Baton Rouge … The 2006 theme, FEMAture Evacuation, took [...]
17 December 2007 | Theory
In the Fall 2007 issue of Symbolic Interaction, Carol Rambo writes: It was 1979. Ms. Marie Miranda, my ninth-grade art teacher, was a short, plump, leprechaun of a woman with yellow-blonde hair stacked in a lacquered, pin curl tower. Typically encased in a floral-print sheath dress, the curvature of her spine positioned her head in [...]
14 December 2007 | Modern
The latest issue (n. 73) of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas is devoted to Brazil. Editor Nicolau Sevcenko writes that “Brazil is changing at a very fast pace … One of the best resources to face these turbulent new times and challenge their entropic trends is represented by the newly-expanded field of cultural [...]
13 December 2007 | Books, Modern
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal, Douglas Greenfield reviews Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, while Vlad Strukov reviews Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Greenfield writes: In her closely argued, challenging study, Maria Gough proposes to read Moscow Constructivism [...]
12 December 2007 | Teaching
According to this article in Spiegel Online, German students are enrolling in art-history programs in record numbers, spurred on in part by the booming art market. However, students aren’t always finding the jobs of their dreams waiting for them on the other side — some settle for a part-time gig or even an unpaid internship.
11 December 2007 | Conferences
Coming this April: “Framing the Other: 30 Years after Orientalism,” a one-day conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London: This one-day conference will focus on the impact of Said’s legacy to analyse visual culture as a crucial component of Orientalism’s (and more generally imperialism’s) political self-justification, in the discursive construction of the Orient. Not [...]
10 December 2007 | Books, Photography
Writing in Le Monde des livres, Michel Guerrin recently panned the new 620-page survey L’Art de la photographie, edited by André Gunthert and Michel Poivert. The editors respond: Michel Guerrin has published … a methodical assassination of L’Art de la photographie. Everything gets it. From the “chilling” price to the deceitful cover. “Grand masters” are [...]
7 December 2007 | Books, Modern
Hans-Peter Riese reviews Andrei Nakov’s new four-volume study Kasimir Malewicz le peintre absolu: … On the other hand, [this book,] the result of Nakov’s decades-long research, can scarcely be overrated, and it finally moves this artist … to his rightful place among 20th-century artists, which is indisputably alongside Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian. In addition, Nakov [...]
