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:
2 August 2010 | Uncategorized
There are of course other kinds of diversity besides those of academic background. When completing the U.S. government’s “Survey of Earned Doctorates” today, I noticed that it asked about race/ethnicity, and so I went online to see what the latest data was on that for art history. Of the 207 people who received PhDs in [...]
30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop [...]
29 July 2010 | Contemporary
On The Huffington Post, Daniel Grant writes: For some time, the ground has been shifting, moving the line between what is and is not considered acceptable for artists to pay for … Critics, museum curators and art historians regularly are approached by artists to write catalogue essays; for some of them, it is a lucrative [...]
28 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The Art Newspaper editor Anna Somers Cocks writes: [In 1944 London University agreed to] “maintain and preserve the Warburg Library in perpetuity, provide it with a suitable building near the university centre and keep it adequately equipped and staffed” … So why is the Warburg fighting for its life against London University? … There are [...]
28 July 2010 | Architecture
From The Telegraph: Professor John Burland has spent the last two decades striving to save – and understand – the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After defying gravity, Italian bureaucracy and accusations of corruption, it seems he’s finally cracked the case … By a quirk of local geography, Pisa’s water-table rose higher on the tower’s north [...]
27 July 2010 | Contemporary
From The Moscow News, an update to the story of the censored curators: Moscow’s Tagansky District Court convicted prominent museum curators Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev of “inciting hatred and denigrating human dignity” by staging a controversial art exhibit – but allowed them to avoid a jail term, ordering them instead to pay 350,000 roubles [...]
23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice: As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best [...]
22 July 2010 | Awards, Books, Renaissance
A Virginia newspaper, The News Leader, profiles UVA professor Cammy Brothers, whose book Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture recently won the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians: Michelangelo stands apart from his contemporaries. But is he [...]
21 July 2010 | Conservation
The L.A. Times recently did a piece on the ongoing diagnosis of the Ghent Altarpiece: Anne van Grevenstein, an art conservator who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, along with Ronald Spronk, an art historian from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, head a team of art experts and trainees conducting a detailed technical analysis of [...]
20 July 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums
Tolu Ogunlesi’s review of Art Basel alerted me to a recent provocative essay by professor and Aachron Editions publisher Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker (A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art),” which he recently presented at a UC-Santa Cruz conference The Task of [...]
19 July 2010 | Uncategorized
More on the history of American collectors from the L.A. Times: With names like Morgan, Getty and Huntington attached to impressive collections available for public view, the history of art collecting in America has acquired a new level of scholarly scrutiny … Art historians tend to concentrate on connoisseurship and aesthetics. That’s beginning to change. [...]
16 July 2010 | Books
Also in caa.reviews recently, Laura R. Prieto reviewed Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940: It is an open secret that many museums, large and small, owe the strength of their collections to women patrons, yet few scholars to date have studied women as serious art [...]
16 July 2010 | Ancient, Architecture, Books
In caa.reviews, Thomas J. Morton considers a new book by Katherine E. Welch: The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. [...]
15 July 2010 | Journals
If you read German, I recommend the young online magazine Artefakt, published by beginning and advanced students (and alumni) of the Institute of European Art History at the University of Heidelberg. In recent issues, contributors interviewed a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor about the state of art criticism, artist Derek Ogbourne about his work, and an [...]
13 July 2010 | Architecture, Books, Theory
In his new book What is Architectural History? Andrew Leach surveys the history and current state of the discipline. His book is written for students and professionals, and assumes a certain familiarity with architecture. There is considerable new material for him to synthesize — architectural history and historiography have both been expanding. He argues that [...]
The book Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment, an investigation of the artist’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), by Herbert Molderings, had already appeared in German and French, and is now available in English too. The book attempts to overturn the popular of image of Duchamp as an “artist-engineer-scientist,” arguing instead that he [...]
8 July 2010 | Architecture, Contemporary, Museums
The Winter 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry is gripping, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention. Editor W.J.T. Mitchell gives the background in his introduction: In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in [...]
7 July 2010 | Conferences, Theory
The theme for this year’s Stone Summer Theory Institute is “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic”: This year’s event addresses one of the central puzzles of contemporary art practice: the choice between continuations of modernism (with its aesthetic values) and the many kinds of postmodernism (which privilege politics, gender, identity, and many issues outside of [...]
6 July 2010 | Theory
In an article titled “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence” in the March 2010 PMLA, Tim Dean writes: Leo Bersani’s contributions to queer theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”) Bersani’s writing on [...]
5 July 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
There’s nothing like a holiday weekend for catching up on unread issues of The New York Review of Books. I belatedly discovered Willibald Sauerländer writing in April 8 issue: “the full richness of eighteenth-century French sculpture—as spirited as it was virtuoso—has been little noted outside its homeland.” And Ingrid Rowland in the March 11 issue, [...]
