6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Tonight at the Metropolitan Museum, Salman Rushdie in conversation with curator Carmen Bambach, curator Navina Haidar Haykel, and Harvard professor David Roxburgh: Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence brings together Renaissance Italy, Mughal India, and the cultures that lie between in a tale that has been described as a “sumptuous mixture of history and [...]
6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From Artinfo.com: On Wednesday night, at a benefit to help fund upcoming projects, [The] X [Initiative] honored legendary dealer Paula Cooper and Picasso biographer John Richardson … [Richardson] unleashed a devastating attack on art history professor Rosalind Krauss, a vocal Richardson critic, who — Richardson cheerily noted — once suggested that he would “set Picasso [...]
30 September 2009 | Uncategorized
Artsjournal.com blogger Tyler Green has taken aim at an ongoing contest sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program, a contest being co-directed by Artsjournal.com founder and editor Douglas McLennan (Green hasn’t mentioned the connection): Several weeks ago, the National Arts Journalism Program launched a contest hoping to find new models for arts journalism. I questioned [...]
15 September 2009 | Uncategorized
With this quote from Morelli — “. . . [the] art historian will gradually disappear, no great loss either, you will admit” — the Dictionary of Art Historians injects welcome notes of modesty and humor into what could otherwise come off as a po-faced celebration of largely trivial figures. We’ve often linked to the Dictionary, [...]
8 September 2009 | Uncategorized
We return from hiatus to continuing controversy over the Muhammad cartoons, this time triggered by the decision Yale University Press made to remove them from Jytte Klausen’s new book, “The Cartoons that Shook the World.” In other news, Harvard has recently tenured one East Asian art scholar and two American art scholars: Former Associate Professor [...]
1 June 2009 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Tuesday, September 8, 2009.
26 May 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Wall Street Journal: The Obamas are sending ripples through the art world as they put the call out to museums, galleries and private collectors that they’d like to borrow modern art by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and female artists for the White House. In a sharp departure from the 19th-century still lifes, pastorals and [...]
21 May 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA executive director Linda Downs writes: Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn … Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online … The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and [...]
19 May 2009 | Uncategorized
From a recently lauded commencement address given by former Getty director John Walsh: Make yourself clear. This is risky. To say clearly what you think is to risk being more clearly wrong. To fudge what you think – to qualify it, complicate it, overload it – is usually a defensive move. It’s a strategy for [...]
18 May 2009 | Uncategorized
UC-Irvine historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom writes on “The Mythology of Blogs”: Misconception 3: Blogging is a fad that is bound to go away soon, so we can just ignore the phenomenon and wait the trend out. No one really knows how long any form of communication will stay popular or significant. It seems doubtful, though, [...]
12 May 2009 | Uncategorized
John Armstrong, a philosopher specialising in aesthetics and vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, wrote recently: The [humanities'] core problem can be expressed in the language of economics: the humanities are geared to supply, particularly to supply research. They ignore demand … Research needs to be redefined to embrace a wider range of cognitive virtues [...]
7 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Former Met director Thomas Hoving is publishing a memoir serially on Artnet: Despite my successes, I found that first year [of graduate school] to be exceedingly boring and unfulfilling. I was especially annoyed that all I ever looked at were photographs of originals. No one suggested field trips to the great museums in New York [...]
6 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Art is perenially awash in stories of fakes, fakers, and fakery. According to the AFP, The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art [...]
2 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Laura K. Jones writes in Artnet: Artnet News can now reveal that the Obama Administration has a definite relationship to the avant-garde Fluxus art movement. Deputy White House Social Secretary Joe Reinstein is married to academic Hannah Higgins, who arrives in D.C. this June from Chicago along with the couple’s daughters Zoe, 13, and Nathalie, [...]
13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure [...]
10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline: Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and [...]
8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Thomas W. Gaehtgens notes that Willibald Sauerländer’s 85th birthday was recently celebrated in Munich and Princeton, which held a two-day conference in his honor. Sauerländer recently lectured on David’s painting of Marat. Oskar Bätschmann remembers art historian Hans A. Lüthy, who died recently. Once the director of the Schweizerischen Instituts für Kunstwissenschaft, Lüthy published on [...]
8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Here at The Art History Newsletter, we’re contemplating making more changes. You asked for the ability to post comments — done. What else would you like to see? What other blogs (academic or otherwise) do you enjoy and wish this one more resembled? And what do you think of these ideas?: We could give anyone [...]
27 March 2009 | Uncategorized
For technical reasons we’ve been unable to post for the last few days, but we should be able to resume shortly.
14 March 2009 | Uncategorized
The 67-year-old conceptual artist apparently died of lymphoma. Obituaries in Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Tagesspiegel, Die Welt, and Der Standard.
