• In the Economist, reviews of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate, and Bronzino at the Palazzo Strossi.
• In the FT, Jackie Wullschlager on four books on Caravaggio (Strinati, Fried, Graham-Dixon, Schütze).
• At the NYRBlog, a teaser of Willibald Sauerländer’s article on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.
• In the Guardian, Rosemary Hill on the pre-Raphaelites and Italy at the Ashmolean, and Alan Hollinghurst on Gauguin at Tate Modern.
• James Elkins debuts a column at the Huffington Post, with an installment on Mondrian.*
• In the NYT, Janet Maslin reviews R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf).
• At BadAtSports, a podcast with Elkins on “Beyond the Aesthetic and Anti-Aesthetic.”
• At SpiegelOnline, a review of Thorsten Klapsch’s book on Berlin’s Palast der Republik.

* This is the single best use of the internet public sphere to communicate disciplinary expertise that I have seen. The HP is a general-interest publication, but the topic of this column isn’t simply criticism, still less auction price/scandal/etc. Rather, it is a (brief) piece of serious, detailed analysis with excellent illustrations. I hope HP readers will be tempted to click away from the slide shows on Bristol Palin, Miley Cyrus and Minka Kelly, and over to Elkins.

1. The simple act of publishing this data provides more public information than was available before. Who could have known anything about the average time to degree at 50 different programs, before this was published? To the criticism that the data is old, I would respond: old data is an improvement over no data at all.

2. The mere existence of these rankings provides an active incentive to improve upon them. Any department that feels itself to be unfairly disadvantaged by some misleading aspect of the rankings has the tools and the motivation to make its case. This will allow a healthy debate to flourish. So long as these rankings didn’t exist, it was possible to avoid bringing up the issue; now the debate must be joined.

3. While it may be the case that not providing an absolute ranking is a cop-out, I would argue that different constituencies will have legitimately different interests in evaluating a program, and with modern computing technology, it will be very easy to plug in only the factors that matter to each constituency. For example, deans may be fixated on publications, citations and grants, whereas prospective students may care more about the percentages of students with full support, and of Ph.D.s with academic jobs. (An excellent example is provided by the Livability Calculator of Nate Silver’s New York City neighborhood ratings; you can just focus on schools, safety and transit; or bars, green space and diversity, or whatever you like.)

4. If one prefers a set of rankings centered on faculty reputation, a great model is at hand with Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), which asks specialists to evaluate lists of current faculty (without the name of the institution attached, to eliminate the “halo effect.”) These are updated every year and include rankings in specialties (i.e. metaethics, or philosophy of biology). Many humanities fields, including ours, would benefit from a ranking such as this, and it’s a shame that the PGR hasn’t been more widely imitated.

5. Even without waiting for any of the above to take place, much can be learned about different programs simply by studing the (free!) online dissertation listings at CAA.Reviews. It’s very easy to locate the relatively few programs that produce a disproportionate number of scholars in any given field. For example, in Egyptian/ancient Near Eastern art, the entire roster of dissertations in progress in 2009 were sponsored by just a few schools: Columbia, Brown, Princeton, IFA/NYU, Minnesota, Emory and Harvard – this amounts to a readymade short list for anyone curious about that area.

6. Of course, data can be misused, and on the other hand, the considered judgment of experts is quite valuable. Nonetheless, data and judgment can, should and do complement each other; they don’t need to compete with each other. If the expert judgment contradicts the data, it’s interesting to know why, and if they agree, that tends to provide mutual confirmation of the judgment and the data. All things considered, I laud the NRC for its collection and dissemination of this data.

• Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National)
• On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan Jones and slide show (The Guardian); Mark Hudson (Financial Times); Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times); Waldemar Januszczak (Sunday Times); London press roundup
• On Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel at the V&A: Souren Melikian (New York Times); Jonathan Jones (Guardian); Martin Gayford (Telegraph)
• PD Smith on Mark Hudson, Titian: The Last Days (The Guardian); Keith Miller (The Times), Serena Davies (The Telegraph)
• James Hall on Salvator Rosa at Dulwich Picture Gallery (The Guardian)
• Jed Perl on Susan Lake, Willem de Kooning: The Artist’s Materials (The New Republic)
• Martin Herbert on Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (The Telegraph); cf. Gayford on Freud’s Bacon (Bloomberg)
• The Economist on Damien Hirst
• On Umberto Eco on beauty: Arthur Krystal (Harper’s/Powell’s); Mike Phillips (The Guardian); cf. Nicola Copping on Roger Scruton, Geoffrey Jones, and Carol Dyhouse (Financial Times)

• Arshile Gorky, The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, 1944
• Clyfford Still, 1948–C, 1948
• Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948
• Adolph Gottlieb, Romanesque Façade, 1949
• Barnett Newman, Achilles, 1952
• Jackson Pollock , Convergence, 1952
• Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34, 1953–1954
• Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956
• Hans Hofmann, The Golden Wall, 1961
• Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée 0, 1983

There is a press release and a brief blurb. I regret not having noticed this sooner, because the plain old stamps have apparently sold out — only special editions etc. are listed in the online store. (Culture Monster and CultureGrrl were among the only blogs to notice the event; also the Washington Examiner.) 

In spite of the excellence of the selections, part of the fun should be rounds of second-guessing. Why a Pollock from 1952 vs. 1947-50? What about Franz Kline, Sam Francis, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes? Does “Abstract Expressionist” mean the same thing in 1983 for Mitchell, as it did around the Cedar Bar — shouldn’t we stop before 1960, and if not, what about Frankenthaler…?

In terms of institutional validation, it must be hard to beat having one’s work appear on a postage stamp. And yet having one’s work shrunken to that scale must also be strange — there is something weird and toylike about a postage-stamp Pollock, more so than even a quarter-page reproduction. After all, “one square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue.” A Postal Service with true cultural ambition (I know, I know) might want to commission artists to create works with postage-stamp scale in mind. I nominate Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha.

• “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum
• Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE)
• Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB)
• Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian)
• Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at the National Gallery (WSJ)
• Bill Brubaker, “In Haiti, the Art of Resilience” (Smithsonian); also, “Art After the Quake,” a slideshow of works by Haitian artists (New Yorker)
• Hilton Als, Angus Cook and Peter Doig, “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master,” (NYRB)
• Edmund White reviews Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery (NYRB), and Richard B. Woodward reviews Dennis Hopper: Double Standard at L.A. MoCA (WSJ)
• Daniel Siedell on Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Books & Culture)
• George Johnson reviews Craig Childs, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession (NYT)
• Michael Dirda reviews Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss (WP), on a particularly poignant netsuke collection

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews Ćurčić and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog)
• “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously at NYU and reviewed by John Noble Wilford (NYT)
• Mark Brown, “National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence,” The Guardian
• Blake Gopnik, “At National Gallery, Edvard Munch’s ‘Prints’ reveal artist’s methodical process,” Washington Post
• Jed Perl, “Individualism: Getting Matisse weirdly wrong, and getting Renoir weirdly right,” The New Republic ($)

Peter Blundell Jones obituary in The Guardian, Anna Winston at BDOnline, Thorsten Dörting (Spiegel), and in German, W. J. Stock (SZ), Dieter Bartetzko (FAZ), Corinne Elsesser (NZZ).

Wikipedia commemorates the “Baumeister der Demokratie” only in English and German (by comparison, Jean Nouvel has entries in 30 languages, Sverre Fehn has 22, and Thom Mayne 19; even Snøhetta has six), and in fact, remarkably few of the projects listed on his page were completed outside North America or Germany.

Teachers of art history survey courses will be familiar with Behnisch’s 1987 Hysolar Institute at the University of Stuttgart, chosen to illustrate “Deconstructivism” on page 1011 of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History (2009; Google Books; Flickr).

I had wondered about the choice of this particular building to represent Behnisch for first-year undergraduates. Although the obituaries uniformly mentioned Munich and his Bonn parliament as his greatest achievements, the Hysolar Institute is undoubtedly a better example of “Deconstructivism.”  This is far from the only case in which the best monument to represent a key concept is not necessarily the peak of a particular artist’s achievement.

• The Education of the Virgin (c. 1617), in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, has been reattributed by curator John Marciari to Velázquez. See Marciari’s article in Ars Magazine (full text not online); The Guardian; Los Angeles Times; El Pais.
• “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” at the British Museum, reviewed by James Hall in the TLS
• On Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks: Jonathan Jones in the Guardian
• On connoisseurship and the controversial “forensic art expert” Peter Paul Biro: David Grann in the New Yorker (16000 words)
• Also on connoisseurship and attribution: “Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries,” an exhibition at the National Gallery (London) reviewed by the Economist and by Peter Campbell in the LRB
• Photography: book reviews of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andy Grundberg’s essay collection Crisis of the Real: Jackie Wullschlager in the Finanical Times
• On Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, in the Economist
• Kevin Starr, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge, reviewed by Herbert Gold in the WSJ

When the morning sun reaches across the Arno and hits the varied ochre tones, the whole bridge glows as one in the hazeless Florentine light. Visually, distinct elements weave together like immutable strands— genius, commerce and tyranny, to name three big ones—of the Florentine character.