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:
1 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The 63-year-old actor Peter Weller, known best as RoboCop, recently completed Syracuse University’s MA program in Renaissance art (two-thirds of which is conducted in Italy) and he is now at work on a PhD at UCLA. He recently discussed his life in a commencement address at the City University of New York: I was inspired [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Respected art historian Daniele Di Castro … died last Friday following a long battle with cancer. Born in Rome in 1958, Di Castro revamped the Jewish community’s museum in the mid-2000s and turned it into the city’s leading Jewish cultural institution.” According to a bio, Di Castro taught at [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
Richard John Boileau Walker died May 6, aged 93. From The Independent: After school at Harrow came Magdalene College, Cambridge, and thence, prompted by the Dean, to the Courtauld Institute, where, taught by TR Boase and Anthony Blunt … As Curator of the Palace of Westminster he compiled the five-volume catalogue of its pictures, published [...]
30 June 2010 | Museums
ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest writes: When the Association of Art Museum Directors assembled in Indianapolis for its semi-annual conference … which was attended by 117 of the AAMD’s current 198 members … [it adopted] two major policy changes designed to transform the AAMD in terms of both perception and reality. One plan, sure to spark [...]
30 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From SMU: Following an international search, the Department of Art History at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts today announced the appointment of Dr. Roberto Tejada as the new Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History, effective August 1. The new endowed senior position was made possible by a generous anonymous gift of $2 million, intended [...]
30 June 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
A few weeks ago, Gary Schwartz wrote: Until 27 June a small exhibition of irresistible charm and interest is being held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after a run at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp: Willem van Haecht: room for art in 17th-century Antwerp … Van Haecht was the subject of a dissertation that I [...]
29 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Economist: It was bad enough that an art exhibition attracted the attention of Russia’s criminal-justice authorities. It was worse that the exhibition was in Moscow’s Sakharov centre and museum, one of the few institutions in Russia that stands squarely behind the tradition of human rights, exemplified by the saintly physicist and dissident for [...]
28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video). He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript: 1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the [...]
28 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From Variety: Sam Waterston and Brian Murray will play an art historian and an art dealer, respectively, in the American preem of Simon Gray’s 2004 play “The Old Masters.” Production runs Jan. 19-Feb. 13 at New Haven’s Long Wharf theater … Script revolves around a 1937 meeting between Bernard Berenson (Waterston) and Joseph Duveen (Murray) [...]
25 June 2010 | Theory
A propos of our recent discussion of Ruskin, I recently discovered a new article on Ruskin’s views of art and morality in the Jan 2010 Modern Language Review (105:1) by Jeremy Tambling. He contrasts Ruskin with Nietzsche: Ruskin wishes to believe that art reveals morality, or that morality shows itself in art; in other words, [...]
According to the Guardian: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been [...]
22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes: “[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone [...]
18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”: [T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and [...]
17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster: [M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in [...]
15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes: In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism [...]
14 June 2010 | Architecture
Historians of contemporary architecture (and television) will find interesting this essay by Daniel Harris, “Celebrity Houses, Celebrity Politics,” in the winter 2010 Antioch Review: Elegance in the eyes of many celebrities is bound up with the concept of hugeness. Size and quantity are the key tenets of their aesthetic. Their houses are not prettier and [...]
13 June 2010 | Career
I asked the Getty again if they planned to update “PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later” and heard back this time: [W]e are not considering any funding in this area at this time. Please feel free to view information about our current work http://www.getty.edu/foundation/message_director.html .
8 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA managing editor Christopher Howard reports on the recent art bibliography summit: With internet research ever increasing, especially among undergraduate students, the popularity-driven results of search engines must be countered with reliable sources of knowledge, said Elizabeth Mansfield of New York University … Since BHA covered only Western art—the founding editor Michael Rinehart noted that [...]
Modern Art Notes is recommending summer reading on art. I’d add to his list Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, which has just been re-issued in paperback. (Published in 2008, the book substantially revised the author’s original 1995 French version.) Writing in the Burlington Magazine in Nov 2008, Caroline Levitt called it [...]
7 June 2010 | Uncategorized
In a recent issue of the journal of visual culture (8:2), “The Obama Issue,” the editors posed six questions to various contributors: Is Barack Obama the most “visible” U.S. president? What role did visual media play in the 2008 election? Why do commodities with Obama-inspired imagery sell so well? How did racial tropes influence depictions [...]
