Art and “The War on Terror”: Ten Years On
August Jordan Davis, Winchester School of Art, A.J.Davis@soton.ac.uk
March 2013 marks the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (collectively identified by the Bush administration’s rubric of “the war on terror”) featured in myriad ways (both explicitly and tacitly) within contemporary art production, exhibitions, and criticism of the 2000s. This session offers a forum for a timely review of this decade of art and war (and their interpenetration). The session consists of a roundtable of artists, art historians, and critics, including Martha Rosler, Jonathan Har- ris, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, followed by papers. Papers might address the art and activism of Artists Against the War; pertinent curato- rial projects of this period (e.g., the Whitney Biennial of 2006: Day for Night); the work of “embedded” artists; popular culture’s role in shaping narratives of the wars (e.g., films including World Trade Center, Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss); or consider what the legacy of this recent past might mean for art today.

The “New Connoisseurship”: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
A conversation on the past, present, and future of the “new connoisseurship” brings together leading figures from the academy, mu- seum, and laboratory to consider what matters about the material objects we study. The aim is to go beyond stocktaking to recuperating and repositioning the material object as subject for art-historical research. What lessons can we learn from the ever “new” and serially “scientific” connoisseurship, from Morelli’s forensics to Berenson’s reliance on photographic evidence, to today’s “technical art history”? Given the fate of the Rembrandt Research Project, as well as what scholarship has revealed about artistic practice in the workshop, can or should we aspire to establish a corpus of “authentic” or “autograph” works, or is this a chimera, the wrong question to ask? At this moment can we look squarely and constructively at connoisseurship, a word that has come to be spoken with disdain by so many schol- ars, redolent of an outmoded practice? “Close looking,” so fetishized and admired and freighted a concept, neither accounts for what is below the visible surface, nor recognizes the interventions and transformations of appearance of that surface resulting from the vicissi- tudes of time and restoration. What can be gained from research and rethinking the historical record as it becomes increasingly available in conservation archives? How can we ask better questions and benefit from our varied categories of knowledge going forward? What can or should art historians do to take advantage of—and to train a generation of “new connoisseurs” conversant in—new developments in conservation and technical studies?

The Changing Complexion of Theory
Ian Verstegen, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, ianverstegen@yahoo.com
This panel is devoted to registering the fundamentally chang- ing nature of contemporary theory. For many years, theory was influenced by post-structuralism, and the theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault were largely language-based and devoted to forms of nominalism. More recently, with the sociological determinist approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the materialism of Slavoj Zizek, the realism of Jacques Deleuze (at least as imputed by Manuel de Landa), and Alain Badiou has disrupted this status quo. Today, we are more likely to take for granted the relevance of biology and the natural sciences, while the return of Marx has been more serious than countenanced by Derrida or Foucault. This panel not only seeks to trace the influence of such newer ideas but also raise the very question of theory in the humanities. Papers are sought that go beyond the exegesis of
recent theorists and discuss the relation of theory and the func- tion of relativism and objectivism in the academy.

The sessions I’ve visited thus far have been largely interesting, with some presenters generating more enthusiasm than others. “Deconstructing Costume Histories: Rereading Identities in Fashion Collections and Exhibitions” was highly informative, offering new research from several experts from academia and museums. “Who Do We Teach: Challenges and Strategies in Recognizing Our Students, and Developing and Supporting Curriculum for Multiple Constituencies” offered some interesting perspective on pedagogy, but seemed to not line up well with the expectations produced by the title. Focus was placed not on who students are, but on how certain professors deal with their own expectations of students. Several interesting and relevant questions were produced by audience members regarding how instructors and professors might apply the theories presented to their own practice. The responses seemed highly personal and largely unsatisfying for the audience, suggesting the session successfully identified an area of need, but failed to adequately address that need.

“The Other Histories of Photography: The First One Hundred Years” was comprised of five papers exploring the margins of the field, often with surprising results. In particular Melody D. Davis’ exploration of the positions and operations of stereography in 19^th century culture, and 20^th century historiography, was both enlightening and instructive. Davis’ enthusiasm and expertise effectively brought her subject to life, illustrating it’s history and relevance.  “Technology in the Art History Classroom: A Hands-On Learning Workshop” was an informative workshop offering participant the opportunity to learn briefly about four web-based pedagogical tools, followed by a more in-depth exploration of one particular tool of the participant’s choice. I appreciated the practical applications and solutions offered which helped to concretize and contextualize much of the more theoretical content of the conference.

On that theoretical note, “The Theoretical Turn”, a special session honoring the work of Rosalind Krauss, sought to elucidate Krauss’ influence on other scholars and professionals in art history. Presenters spoke about the effects that Krauss’ work has on them both personally and professionally. Yve-Alain Bois’ introduction neatly summarized the effects of Krauss’ work on his own career, and subsequent speakers elucidated their particular relationships with her work. After hearing these stories, the vast network of Krauss’ influence began to crystallize more clearly, and I appreciated hearing how various scholars have uniquely incorporated her work into their own practice.

On a practical note, the Los Angeles Convention Center could be much more visitor friendly. The lack of food options is surprising, and the existing options are reminiscent of the food one typically finds at a zoo. A few of the temporary walls dividing larger rooms have been found to be insufficient at isolating noise from neighboring sessions. Most of the sessions I visited were not more that half full, implying that smaller rooms would have been more practical and might have fostered greater discussion and debate. Of course, this may be a reflection of my own interests and choices of sessions.

1. The State of the Discipline

Chairs: Sandra Esslinger, Mount San Antonio College; Deana Hight, Mount San Antonio College

While many of us may feel we already have answers to questions this session is likely to pose, it seems important for anyone who wishes to imagine their future in Art History.

2. What Is Conceptual Thinking?

Chair: Steven Bleicher, Coastal Carolina University

Like conceptual art, conceptual thinking is an area that I find to be challenging for my students. I look forward to being in their shoes for a couple of hours.

3. Who Do We Teach? Challenges and Strategies in Recognizing Our Students, and Developing and Supporting Curriculum for Multiple Constituencies

Chairs: Joan Giroux, Columbia College Chicago; Cindy Maguire, Adelphi University

Speaking of being in their shoes, shouldn’t we strive to better understand our students? We spend so much energy helping them understand who we are and what we do, and I for one am often surprised by them.

4. Flying Solo: The Opportunities and Challenges Presented to the Solitary Art Historian in a Small College

Chairs: Laura J. Crary, Presbyterian College; William Ganis, Wells College

Though on it’s surface this session has a narrow focus, I suspect that many of the questions presented will be relevant to even those art historians in larger departments. I, for instance, fly tandem. Nonetheless I am looking forward to learning about how other historians have embraced the challenges of interdisciplinary pedagogy and small departments.

5. Technology in the Art History Classroom: A Hands-On Learning Workshop

Chair: Sarah Jarmer Scott, Wagner College

I’m always looking for new opportunities to engage my students. Many of the technological and pedagogical advancements I’ve experienced have made a positive impact on my classroom, and many of them have been more distracting than productive

———

A Chinese artist in the thirteenth century tasked with decorating a traveling coffer happily borrowed his composition from a Middle Eastern book binding, we learn in the opening minutes of “Art Through Time: A Global View”—the public-television series assembled recently by a hundred leading art historians from MoMA chief curator John Elderfield to Asia Society director Vishakha N. Desai. Artistic borrowing is common; what’s striking is how far “Art Through Time” is willing to stray outside Western art history. In most such surveys, everything is seen through a Western lens—African sculpture matters only insofar as it influenced Picasso, for example.

Globalizing art history is “the most urgent task now facing art historians,” says David Carrier, professor at Case Western Reserve University. “Far and away the most pressing problem facing the discipline is the prospect of world art history,” says James Elkins of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says global art history is now an obsession of his and he believes that its positive influence can already be seen in museums. “The Guggenheim now has a curator of Asian art, there are now more museums looking at Latin American art, going beyond obvious figures like Kahlo. The Rubin Museum just did a show comparing Christian and Buddhist icons. There’s a New York Public Library show bringing together works from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”

Art history has moved beyond its blatantly Eurocentric, colonialist origins, when all non-Western art was considered “primitive”—if it was considered at all—but scholars say that serious problems remain. They note that Intro to Art History textbooks may now boast chapters on, say, “Monumental Olmec Sculpture” and “The Buddhist Temples of Korea,” but those make little impact alongside the books’ central narratives, which as always celebrate the long march of Western art from the Greek kouros to Jeff Koons. A recently published modern-art textbook scarcely ventured outside the West at all.

Why are so many art historians now concerned with overcoming the field’s Eurocentrism? Partha Mitter, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, credits globalization: “The world is coming much closer. People like me are traveling all over, living abroad. And with things like Facebook, there’s lots more conversations between parts of the world.” Kitty Zijlmans, a professor at Leiden University in The Netherlands, believes the biggest factor has been the internationalization of the contemporary art world, but also points to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led many to wonder “what words like East and West really mean,” and 9/11, which triggered debates over concepts like “The Islamic World” and “The West.” Mitter also asserts that the wave of decolonization that culminated in America leaving Vietnam inspired a generation of scholars to question “the fact that Western values had been assumed to be universal, global values.” Other people argue that art history simply won’t be complete until it can explain all the world’s art.

Global art history is still very much a work in progress; a unified theory of world art has proved particularly elusive. (Few even agree on the right name for such a project, notes James Elkins.) Potential globalizers lack answers to many basic questions: How is non-Western art to be categorized – by country, by region, by religion? Is there such a thing as “African” art, for example? How do we decide what is worth studying outside the West without inflicting Western bias? What do we make of objects in cultures that lack a concept of art? Is Western art theory – devised to explain Western art – applicable outside the West, and if not, what is?

“We can’t just assume we can take our hammer to every nail; we need to revise our discipline using new frameworks,” responds Kitty Zijlmans to the latter question. This is lucky, she says. “It gives us another impetus to enrich the field.” Art history typically charts art’s “progress,” in mastering perspective for example, and traces the influence of “centers” such as Renaissance Florence upon “peripheries.” Partha Mitter says we need to “de-center” art history, evaluating each place and time period on its own terms. Such revisionism won’t happen overnight, he says. “We can’t dismantle everything immediately; we don’t want to lose the accomplishments of art history.”

We’ll never be able to write a single history of art, says David Carrier. Histories require causation – “Hokusai painted The Great Wave in Western perspective after seeing Renaissance Dutch prints in a friend’s collection” – but the world’s art traditions have evolved quite separately. Before 1522, the year Magellan circumnavigated the globe, they had virtually no contact at all. “Putting the world in a book,” he says, will require “abandoning the historical survey and developing a conceptual analysis.”

David Summers, a Renaissance-art scholar at the University of Virginia, is taking just such an approach. In his book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, he tries to invent a more flexible formal language for describing artworks that will enable scholars to find connections across borders. “People now specialize so much, in single works of art even. I want to devise a method for looking at any tradition of art,” he said. He first got this urge thirty years ago, teaching undergraduate courses in Pre-Columbian art, as the only member of his department to know anything about it. He found that the West’s aesthetic categories were “about as insultingly bad as they could be” at explaining these objects. The Aztec sculpture Coatlicue, for example, had long baffled Western writers. In Real Spaces, he proposes the concept of “planar oppositions,” which he believes explains Coatlicue as well as Western works such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Summers’s book was extravagantly praised by some, but others found it unsatisfying. David Carrier doubts that any one person could pull off such a book: “This is a subject that no one is prepared to do all of the dimensions of.” For this reason, Carrier questions whether globalizing art history will ever succeed. How will a committee ever agree on such a politicized and polarizing subject? “There are as many visions of world art history as there are writers.”

There are institutional barriers, too, for example museum hierarchies, Carrier notes. At a lunch with the Yale University Art Gallery’s curators, “They pointed out they’re all in compartments, that there’s no one in charge of looking across compartments, and that anyway thematic shows that cut across are considered too confusing for the layman.” Yet another problem is that far too few graduate students today choose to study older non-Western art. “Eighty percent of incoming students want to do contemporary,” he asserts, without much exaggeration—in the U.S. in 2009, eighty-three PhD students completed dissertations on twentieth-century art, just one on pre-modern Middle Eastern art. Carrier doesn’t blame the students, noting that if you don’t arrive at graduate school already knowing Sanskrit or Persian or Japanese, say, you don’t have much choice.

Global art history’s biggest obstacle may be academe’s requirement that scholars specialize. Specialists are quick to smack down wanderers, as David Summers learned when he published his book. “I didn’t know the degree to which fields rule the history of art until I stamped into so many people’s fields.” James Elkins points out that when he recently published his Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, some Chinese-art scholars refused even to crack it open, because that he hadn’t read the Chinese-language literature in the original.

Elkins doubts we can write a truly global art history until non-Western countries start writing more of their own art history—they currently do very little, as he’s shown. Even then, he says, art history will remain “in its basic structure and institutional habits, permanently Western.” He notes that non-Westerners who take up art history typically imitate Western models and goes further to say, “The very idea of writing an art history of some country or region is Western.” Philippe de Montebello agrees, arguing that Westerners will dominate any future art history because of their power and money. Nor can they overcome their own biases; the idea that they could is sheer political correctness, he says. “One always sees in one’s own terms. MoMA organized a show of contemporary Muslim art. Somebody had to make a selection. Somebody chose these artists and these works according to what they think is good. You can’t tell me those curators have gotten under the skin of the Muslim world. Anyway, who’s to say that the native necessarily has a better sense for where the best works are?”

Such statements don’t endear global art history to its critics who see it as potentially imperialistic. Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza, who recently organized a conference on “the global turn,” eschew the idea of “seeking a unifying conceptual term or method.” They reject concepts used by globalizers such as “The Islamic World” as artificial and chauvinistic. (Indeed, the very terms Western and non-Western are problematic.) “Art history is seen as a new colonizer,” Zijlmans admits. “It’s true, it’s the flip side of coin. We in art history can be said to sometimes be in service to global tourism, museums, and the market.” De Montebello also says that global art history deserves much of the criticism it’s gotten. “But,” he says, “if you didn’t do it, think of what they would say then.”

Global art history exposed itself to accusations of imperialism partly because of its popularity among Americans. “In Europe there is very little interest,” notes Partha Mitter. Zijlmans concurs, while noting that things are changing a bit, especially in Germany, the site of the last great attempt to globalize art history, in the late 1800s. Why are American scholars so keen to globalize art history? Many seem to regard it as a form of anti-xenophobic politics. About his book, David Summers says, “There was a hope of saving the world, of turning the history of art into a multicultural conversation.” Not everyone sees global art history this way, though. Asked if such hopes meant anything to him, James Elkins gave a one-word answer: “No!”

I asked Elkins if he thought global art history might at least succeed in producing a satisfactory single-volume history of art—“the world in a book.” To my knowledge, no major scholar has even tried since Ernst Gombrich’s famous Story of Art, published in 1950, and who can blame them, considering all the obstacles? Elkins replied, “I am trying.”

Further Reading

• Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art
• Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums
• David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects
• Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art
• James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global?
• John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art
• Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration
• David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism
• Philippe Vergne, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age
• Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective
• Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme, eds., World Art Studies

Various interesting books have piled up on my desk meanwhile. Given the recent controversy over “Hide/Seek,” the publication this month of Christopher Reed’s “Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas” seems particularly timely and in need of an immediate perusal. The book covers much terrain from the “Sambia” of New Guinea and the ancient Greeks and Romans to Polynesia, Tokugawa Japan, and European art from medieval times through the present. Reed begins his book by asking why his topic hasn’t received more attention yet:

Conventional art scholarship shies away from divisive social issues, habitually treating art as something that is–or should be–purely aesthetic or an act of individual expression with (paradoxically) universal appeal. An identity as controversial and collective as homosexuality fits awkwardly with these conventions. For many historians of sexuality, it is sexual identity that suffers from being linked to the aestheticizing and universalizing conventions of art history and criticism. Homosexual identity, they say, is an invention of modern Western science, so it is there–not in art, and not outside the West or in deeper history–that we must look to understand it.

Also, “the history of art, which is usually based on assumptions of continuity, is not easily integrated with the history of homosexuality, which is conventionally premised on alienation.” However, Reed asserts, to be daunted by such challenges is to “reveal a failure of historical imagination.” There are many ways in which the terms of art and homosexuality can be examined together productively. For example:

The institutionalization of gay and lesbian identity into organizations seeking the political and social normalization of homosexuality … was often marked by disavowals of flamboyantly visual manifestations of minority sexual identity. At the same time, an examination of the history of modern art from the position of the history of homosexuality explodes myths of the avant-garde as either an arena of freewheeling inventiveness or a safe haven for misfits. On the contrary (again), the avant-garde often exploited homophobia to attract attention while energetically suppressing affirmative expressions of sexual deviance and policing the behaviors and beliefs of artists who aspired to its rewards. Groundbreaking visualization of the physical and emotion bonds between people of the same sex, therefore, often originated outside the avant-garde in realms of popular culture before being appropriated as avant-garde spectacle.

Reed’s arguments strike me as admirably lucid and ambitious and they are well-illustrated by a variety of plates, many in color. Unfortunately his book isn’t footnoted (it’s “intended to invite a diverse readership”) but an extensive bibliography answers most questions.

[This movement] was position on the very cusp of postmodernism: it exemplified the last moment in France of grand history painting and the tradition of revolutionary romanticism. Its works are rich with critical satire, strategies of appropriation and a post-Situationist détournement … In a period in which an attempt to contextualize Marxist theory was seen as urgent, the Narrative Figuration movement sought to ‘mirror’ or reflect the society of its times. Militantly figurative, its broken narratives anticipated anticipated Lyotard’s very definition of postmodernism as based on narrative collapse and a critical analysis of the grands récits and the petits récits of the times.

Jean-François Lyotard seems to experiencing a revival, one sign of which is the fact that his 1971 doctoral thesis Discourse, Figure is finally being published in English, translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Of this book Georges Van Den Abbeele wrote in the recent Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought:

This monumental chef d’oeuvre of poststructuralism, comparable in its ambition, critical scope, and conceptual rigor to Derrida’s Of Grammatology or Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, proposes its own theory and history of difference … Discourse refers to the Saussurian semiotic model, whereby signification is a function of negativity and opposition; whereas figure designates the relational differences implied in spatial distribution and depth but also between sign and referent or between proper and figural meaning. In graphic terms, discourse is the realm of the letter, where signification derives from the fact that no two elements can occupy the same space at the same time (the principle of opposition or negation), whereas figure is the realm of the line, where the simultaneity of different graphisms can lead to visual effects of depth and semiotic effects of reference (the principle of difference).

John Mowitt contributes an introduction to Discourse, Figure that includes the following amusing anecdote about the book’s co-translator Mary Lydon:

On 21 April 1998, Jean-François Lyotard succumbed to an aggressive form of leukemia. Shortly after, at the annual meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature hosted by the University of California, Irvine, an impromptu commemorative event … Aware that he was compressing much time and space, Derrida nevertheless permitted himself the observation that toward the end they disagreed most passionately about Marxism: Lyotard sacrificed it to the postmodern, Derrida sustained himself on its weak yet indestructible, hauntological “spirit.” If I begin these remarks by reconstructing this somber scene it is because next to me in the auditorium sat my late friend Mary Lydon who, when Derrida contrasted himself with Lyotard in this way, said under her breath, “oh, la, la,” that oddly translingual statement that when translated specifically from the French might, in this context and with that intonation, simply be rendered as “bullshit.”

The third book, Visible Writings: Cultures, Forms, Readings, edited by Marija Dalbello and Mary Shaw, is a collaboration among French and American academics from several disciplines that grew out of a 2006 conference. “Exploring the concept and history of visual and graphic epistemologies, this multicultural collection provides insights into the many forms of connection between visibility and legibility.” Chapters address ancient Mesoamerican scripts, Mallarmeé, comic books, and the Alhambra, among other topics. Béatrice Fraenkel contributes an essay on the impromptu memorials that appeared all over New York City after 9/11:

The apparent disorder of the shrines and the repetitive nature of the messages led to changing reading strategies that were sometimes compulsive, often erratic, always intermittent, and coherent with the general situation in the city at the time. As writings from “us,” encompassing both the writer and the reader, the pieces displayed gave to the “being together” they helped to define a corporal existence that was both somatic and semiotic.

[W]hat is most Florenskian, or most conspicuously Florenskian, in Lacan is precisely the sense of an image as but a special case of something one finds oneself gazing back at … Lacan was theorizing his three-way Borromean knot [the intertwining of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary] just about when Florensky’s longest and most formidable text appeared in French with Maksimovic’s emblem of three interlocking wreathes … Like other Western intellectuals interested in modern art, Lacan no doubt had some interest in icons; and once Florensky became available in French he could have come to know inverse iconic perspective and the projective iconic appeal to the spectator, all the more with images purporting to be conduits of divine, unconditional love.

The book is obviously tilted toward the modern era. Preface writer Michael R. Leaman observes, “The story of the twentieth century and beyond involves an accelerating and intensifying engagement with the textual and the verbal in the visual arts.” As for the book’s approach, Hunt writes, “The theme of this book is the use of words in visual arts. It is not, therefore, about its converse: literary descriptions of visual things, or any such ekphrastic endeavors.”

Hunt proceeds to create a rough taxonomy of artistic uses of words:

1. Explicitly: when words, decipherable and meaningful by their own account outside the graphic medium, are included in or on the visual artwork. This is the main focus and stimulus for enquiry in this book … It is only [through these works] that we can become aware of and appreciate their other, less direct presences …

2. Implicitly: when visual art invokes, relies on or indeed even seems to depend upon words …

3. Additively or supplementarily: when actual, discernable and legible words are added by way of supplement …

4. Collaboratively: when it would be difficult to adjudicate which of the three categories so far listed applies … because word and image are so interdependent …

“These four modes,” he notes, “are not clearly self-contained. They can merge and can even usurp each other’s function, as when a title like Mona Lisa or Tempestà has so identified itself with the image we see that might as well be inscribed on the surface.”

While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication … it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity.

I look forward to posting some reviews of the book once they become available.

Perusing Wood’s website, I found much other worthwhile reading. He has posted pdfs of much of his excellent art historiography — read, for instance, him on Ernst Gombrich, Michael Baxandall, Otto Pächt, or Alois Riegl, not to mention his introduction to The Vienna School Reader. It would be great to have all these collected in a book.

• 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)