27 October 2008 | Theory
In the October 2008 issue of Frieze, James Elkins has published “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Across the top half of each page runs one narrative, “Five reasons to be pessimistic about the art world”; across the bottom half runs a counter-narrative (printed upside down), “Five reasons to be optimistic about the art [...]
22 October 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In the summer 2008 issue of Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Pierre Chabard reviews Felicity D. Scott’s Architecture or Techno-Utopia. Politics after Modernism: Architecture or Techno-Utopia, presented as an “alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture,” could appear at first glance to be a pure product of the powerful university machine of [...]
18 September 2008 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Keith Moxey considers the anthology Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science edited by Lorraine Daston: Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. [...]
8 May 2008 | Theory
In the May 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff (her former Ph.D. advisor): ["What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic?"] … I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past [...]
30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind: In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in [...]
21 April 2008 | Ancient, Medieval, Theory
The latest issue of World Archaeology (39:4) is largely devoted to two themes: the senses and “symmetrical archaeology.” C. Pamela Graves writes: In the Middle Ages the senses were considered two-way processes. The senses ‘enabled tangible qualities, and indeed, spiritual or intangible qualities, to be passed from one party to another’ and were acknowledged as [...]
7 April 2008 | Theory
In the most recent (Winter 2007) issue of Dalhousie French Studies, which is devoted to “Representations of Trauma” (and, alas, has pages out of sequence), Tom Conley writes: After a decade, in 1999, the reception and appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma too a forceful turn … Jacque Rancière examined its sense of history. [...]
4 April 2008 | Theory
In the March 2008 issue of Cultural Politics, Johanna Drucker argues that image interpreters need to turn away from the de-familiarizing effect that was a tenet of the historical avant-garde. The very identity of aesthetic images was in part linked to capacity for making strange (Shklovsky 1917). In our current, profoundly disturbed, cultural condition, no [...]
21 January 2008 | Theory
Nicolas Slonimsky asserted in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective that the human instinct toward “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar” is usually to blame when critics assail a work of genius. Interestingly, there is a body of empirical work supporting the converse idea, that we tend to like what we’ve seen a lot of. See, for [...]
4 January 2008 | Theory
The September 2007 issue of Social Semiotics is devoted to “Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification.” The editors, Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray, write in their introduction: … the term “body modification” has a ring of deviance about it. The heterogeneous practices this rubric encompasses — from piercing, tattooing, suspensions, scarification, [and] branding, to corseting, the splitting [...]
18 December 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the October 2007 Text and Performance Quarterly, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli contribute “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade“: On February 25, 2006, the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana (SPLL) hosted the twenty-sixth Annual Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade in downtown Baton Rouge … The 2006 theme, FEMAture Evacuation, took [...]
17 December 2007 | Theory
In the Fall 2007 issue of Symbolic Interaction, Carol Rambo writes: It was 1979. Ms. Marie Miranda, my ninth-grade art teacher, was a short, plump, leprechaun of a woman with yellow-blonde hair stacked in a lacquered, pin curl tower. Typically encased in a floral-print sheath dress, the curvature of her spine positioned her head in [...]
6 December 2007 | Modern, Theory
The recently published book L’Œil-cerveau, written by Éric Alliez with the help of Jean-Clet Martin, seeks to understand modern painting in terms of “hallucination,” “a central notion for the nineteenth century that links artistic creation to ‘psychophysiological’ research”. “[Through close examination] of those works and statements constituting modern painting and the idea of modern art [...]
5 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Jacques Ranciere’s essay collection Le destin des images has been translated into English, as The Future of the Image. In the title essay, he writes: … Does not the term ‘image’ contain several functions whose problematic alignment precisely constitutes the labour of art? … What is being spoken about, and what precisely are we being [...]
3 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Published recently, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery, “assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s.” David Carrier writes on Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville on Michael Fried, Mignon Nixon on Melanie Klein, Alex Potts on [...]
30 November 2007 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Peg Brand considers Alexander Nehamas’ new book Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art: This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s [...]
26 November 2007 | Photography, Theory
The summer 2007 issue of new formations is devoted to Siegfried Kracauer. Edtior Jan Campbell writes that his “contribution to twentieth century thought is undeniable. Yet he is difficult to define in relation to any particular tradition or discipline of knowledge.” Some of Kracauer’s writings concern photography: In his famous Photography essay Kracauer reveals how [...]
21 November 2007 | Architecture, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of New German Critique (99), editor Andreas Huyssen writes: Since the waning of the debate about “postmodernism” and the rise of “globalization” as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s provocative quip that any work of art has to be [...]
19 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the most recent issue (40:5) of the provocative art-science journal Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), Jan Baetens reviews Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, edited by Patricia Johnson: This collection of essays is great reading … [it] opens new ground for the [...]
31 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
Also in the Spring 2007 Biography is an essay by Susan Bruce on author Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical writings: [I] advance the argument that the advent of photography changes our perception of ourselves in time … its most fundamental and melancholy legacy. The advent of photography ushers in an age in which we are at once [...]
