Rather than framing the official monuments, architecture, and gardens of Washington DC as only reflecting agendas of powerful people, Savage shows that they were the result of ongoing public debates.  By privileging controversies he wrote a story that is filled with human drama and included the voices of marginalized peoples.  We learn, for example, about the struggle for an African American and Native American presence on the Mall.  We find out that changes to the Mall resulted in personal loss–a fact that humanizes the geography.  We empathize with the people who lived in “Murder Bay”—a neighborhood demolished to expand the public space.

In light of this approach to studying the past, what other places do you think deserve another look?  Do you know of other scholarship that has engaged in interesting ways with official public art and architecture?  Please comment below.

A portrait of a young woman, which had been dismissed as a fake Raphael and lay forgotten in the basement of an Italian palace for 40 years, has been confirmed as genuine by art experts and could be worth up to £25 million.

But I am more excited by “genuine” fakes.  Perhaps the best book to date on this subject is Christopher Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction. It argues that many of the questions of authenticity that we deem important today are modern inventions.  If you have thoughts on great illegitimate art, please leave a comment.

More such journals are popping up all the time.  The University of Pittsburgh, for example, has announced that it will start a new one called Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture.  The editorial team is now taking submissions for the first issue.  Others have been thriving for years.  Indeed, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 129 titles in Arts and Architecture.   What do you think the best open access journals are in our discipline?

This movement seems to be thriving, in part, because many college and university libraries are cutting back on journal subscriptions.  (One librarian friend tells me that subscription prices to journals, particularly online, have risen in price at 10% per year for the past decade … way above inflation.)  We thus have a crisis of access, where only the wealthiest colleges and research universities are subscribing.

Schools that have embraced open access to information are particularly interesting to me.  MIT is in the vanguard. In addition to theses and dissertations, all scholarly articles by MIT faculty must be made available for free online, in a database called Dspace.  Exceptions require the approval of the administration.  I believe that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences now has a similar policy.  I have not worked at such a school, but if any of you do please share your thoughts in the comments.

You may also be interested to know that MIT has a website that any scholar can use, regardless of institutional affiliation, to make an amendment to the publishing contracts that are sent to us all after our work has been accepted for printing.  The goal of such an amendment is for you to retain the right to publish your articles on your personal website or contribute them to an online archive.

My understanding is that retaining such rights to make scholarship publicly accessible is becoming common in the sciences because of the legal requirement to make the results of publicly-funded scientific research publicly available.  (PubMed started this trend.)  Scholars in the humanities have been slower to make the results of research publicly available, but I suspect that we will do so more in the future.