12 March 2010 | Uncategorized
We belatedly take note of another death … From the Philadelphia Inquirer: John Walker McCoubrey, 86, an emeritus professor in the department of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, died … Dr. McCoubrey became Penn’s first James and Nan Farquhar Professor of the History of Art in 1988, and for several years was the [...]
12 March 2010 | Uncategorized
From Timesonline.co.uk: Lesley Lewis made distinguished contributions to the history of art and architecture as an author and by serving on numerous influential heritage bodies … Lesley Lewis was born in 1909 … she was educated at home by governesses, the last of whom introduced her to the study of the history of art. At [...]
1 March 2010 | Uncategorized
Here.
19 February 2010 | Uncategorized
“The trouble with art history? It’s boring,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones: At just the same time that Simon Schama was calling on art to help bring social history to life, art historians were disappearing up a dark theoretical hole. They were rejecting the kind of old-school art history epitomised by EH Gombrich or Kenneth [...]
9 February 2010 | Uncategorized
Charles J. Pratt, a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU’s new Game Center, writes a two-part review (1, 2) of the recent “Art History of Games” conference in Atlanta, GA, asking first of all, are games art? “It’s interesting that we have to justify this question in the first place,” said co-organizer, author [...]
5 February 2010 | Uncategorized
We recently discovered that the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture launched a blog in June of last year, Enfilade. One recent entertaining entry concerns “Academics and the F-Word” [i.e. fashion]: With the spring conference season here once more, many of us will soon find ourselves rummaging in the closet with an open suitcase on [...]
20 January 2010 | Uncategorized
According to CAA News (pdf), “Barbara Nesin, the department chair of art foundations at the Art Institute of Atlanta, has been elected president of CAA’s Board of Directors for a two-year term, beginning May 2010.” Nesin, the first artist to head CAA, is interviewed in this issue by outgoing president Paul B. Jaskot: As president, [...]
19 January 2010 | Uncategorized
From the Times of Trenton: … Right now Bois’ largest task — and he has basically declined all other work until its completion — is a catalogue pacing out the work and influence of American painter Ellsworth Kelly, who lives in upstate New York. Bois hopes to be finished in under two years, although his [...]
7 January 2010 | Uncategorized
I recently played around with Google Trends, a tool that allows you to see how often a word or phrase has been searched over the last few years. Alas, “art history” has apparently experienced a steady decline since 2004. Likewise for “history of art”, “art,” “painting,” “sculpture,” “architecture,” and most individual artists I tried such [...]
22 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Our next post will be on Monday, January 4. “Citing its high cost in a time of severe budget constraints, the University of Illinois will phase out an art history program headquartered in the nation’s capital. Interim Chancellor Robert Easter decided this week to close the ‘Illinois at the Phillips’ program, created in 2006 with [...]
20 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Once in a while, an art-history dissertation will land you a job and a spouse: Jessica Maier and Nick M. Camerlenghi were married Saturday evening at the Memorial Church at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. … She is an art history instructor at Tulane University. She graduated from Brown and received a Ph.D. in art [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Telegraph: France’s obsession with the bottom is laid bare this week in a major new documentary and book charting how “les fesses” have shaped history. The highbrow study claims to demonstrate the huge contribution the “derrière” has made to civilisation, mixing the views of top psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists and artists. The role of [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Louis Menand’s forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas is excerpted in Harvard Magazine: Since [in academia] it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of [...]
18 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Those who proposed sessions for the 2011 College Art Association conference are now receiving their responses. CAA says it received “464 proposals, the highest ever.” CAA 2010 will have about 140 regular sessions (plus another 60 or so sponsored by affiliated organizations). So if 2011 will feature a similar amount, that means that roughly 30% [...]
11 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Wayne Dynes writes on Levi-Strauss’ death: When I was teaching at Columbia University in the early seventies I fastened on the idea of trying to adapt structuralism to the field of art history. Lévi-Strauss had himself pointed the way with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. I formed a little group [...]
3 November 2009 | Uncategorized
From the AP: Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100 … During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964). [...]
2 November 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA has posted online the paper titles for the Chicago conference (Feb 10-13). A few piqued our interest: “‘Forget Bourriaud’: Queer Relationally and/as a Queer Aesthetics of Existence” “Interrogating Photography’s Indexical ‘Identity Crisis’” “Autofiction as Dissidence: Julius Koller’s Extra-Terrestrial Alter Ego” “The Concept of Anukrti in Rasavada in Abhinavabharati” “Posthysterical: The Study of Comics Advances [...]
30 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Lopez reviews the new book “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” by Nicholas Fox Weber: Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Weber’s text … offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s … Weber’s tendency to stint [...]
20 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Artist Nancy Spero has died. As has longtime Architectural Design (AD) editor Monica Pidgeon. Theorist Peter Weibel and art historian Hans Belting have won prizes. According to ARTINFO, “a fire destroyed 90 percent of the estate of Brazilian neoconcretist Helio Oiticica.” And according to NPR, “The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal” to the [...]
13 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times: Robert M. Murdock, an art historian and curator of 20th-century and contemporary art who organized some notable exhibitions, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 67 … his exhibitions included the first one-person museum show of Richard Tuttle’s work (1971); “Poets of the City: New York and [...]
