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:
9 October 2007 | Books, Theory
Opening the latest Art History (April 2007), we see that their book reviews are no longer edited by the inimitable Liz James, yet they seem to be every bit as excellent this issue under new editor Cordelia Warr. (If only the section were larger, and the books reviewed closer to their publication date.) In this [...]
8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but [...]
5 October 2007 | Modern
The July-August issue (no. 20) of FMR (available online) includes stunning photographs of Géricault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. The subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, the painting has also appeared recently (in one form or another) on the covers of The New Yorker and Harper’s, freshly relevant in the wake of the [...]
4 October 2007 | Books, Modern
In September 2007 Burlington Magazine, James Beechey reviews Elizabeth Cowling’s Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose: … this is a wholly engrossing book … Penrose’s private notes … reveal him at his sharpest and most sensitive: his insights into individual works are generally acute … As a tale of courtly love, as [...]
3 October 2007 | Theory
In the summer 2007 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets have contributed an article “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art”: The remarkable increase in the number of artworks that foreground scents and odors during recent years suggests the need for an assessment of the aesthetic and artistic possibilities [...]
2 October 2007 | Americas
In the summer 2007 issue of American Art (published by the Smithsonian), editor Cynthia Mills writes: … we can sense a shift in the questions scholars are bringing to the nation’s visual history … from inquiries into science and sensation to a “serious” attention to humor … studies of American art and artists, once considered [...]
1 October 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Village Voice: This month, in an article about the Venice Biennale in Artforum, the art historian and critic Katy Siegel christened [Peter] Schjeldahl and his old friend, the writer Dave Hickey, as “the feelers”—this in opposition to another critical gang she sturdily termed “the thinkers” (namely, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Benjamin Buchloh). [...]
28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable? Skira [...]
27 September 2007 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Jones writes: Why do journalists write the same six generic stories about art over and over again? … Imagine how little news about visual art would appear in the papers if the following generic stories were banned: 1. The most expensive work of art ever … 2. Anything about graffiti … 3. Lost masterpiece [...]
26 September 2007 | Books, Modern
The top Independent Publisher Book Award in the fine arts category went to the first two volumes of the four-tome Eva Hesse, Catalog Raisonne. They were edited by Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, with Annette Spohn and Jörg Daur.
25 September 2007 | Modern, Museums
From the L.A. Times: [The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art keeps] the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S. Ruled by one of the [...]
24 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the (Memphis, TN) Commercial Appeal: Leave it to the art history majors to change the world. That’s what Lynda Ireland did. She graduated from college with an art history degree in the 1960s, taught art for 20 years, then shifted her career to work for a business. In the process, she became a fascinating [...]
21 September 2007 | Islamic, Medieval, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Dorothy M. Shepard summarizes the recent “Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797″ symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which mounted an exhibition on the topic): James Harper of the University of Oregon gave the last paper of the morning. Titled “Iron Curtain and Global Village: The Historiographic Positioning of Venice and Islam,” [...]
20 September 2007 | Modern
Signandsight.com summarizes an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: For art historian Werner Spies, Cardinal Meisner’s comment on “degenerated culture” in his service Friday in the Cologne’s Cathedral (more here) merely gives voice to latent tendencies: the ignorance of the Catholic Church in face of modern art: “This attack on Gerhard Richter’s life’s work (the [...]
19 September 2007 | Modern
From the International Herald Tribune: A visit to the State Tretyakov Gallery’s newly updated permanent exhibition of 20th-century Russian art is as dizzying as the twists and turns of the country’s history and ongoing debates over post-Soviet national identity. It fills 42 halls of the museum’s Krymsky Val affiliate, a vast late Soviet-era labyrinth not [...]
18 September 2007 | Journals
Didier Rykner’s four-year-old online art journal La Tribune de l’Art is best known for having led the recent fight against the Louvre’s deal with Abu Dhabi, but it is more than that, containing a variety of news, scholarship, and editorials, and it now has an English version, which features translations from the French site as [...]
17 September 2007 | Ancient
The Independent has published a “special investigation” by Robert Fisk on the recent destruction of Iraq’s cultural property: 2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining [...]
14 September 2007 | Teaching
How not to win over your students: “The class laughed when my UC Irvine Art History professor said she wrote a letter to Comedy Central explaining that she would boycott the station unless they stopped playing ‘Girls Gone Wild’ commercials.”
13 September 2007 | Teaching
For art history professors returning to the classroom this fall, the signs are good. In a quick survey of student blogs, we noted the following recent comments: “My art history professor is absolutely amazing. I feel so good about this being my major, especially if I can have more classes with him later on. I’m [...]
12 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: Gaehtgens, 67, a native of Germany who has art history degrees from the universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Vienna and Paris, is expected to arrive in Los Angeles in November. He will take charge of the Getty’s program for interdisciplinary scholarship in the arts and humanities, founded in 1984 as a branch [...]
