[Craven] died Saturday from an apparent heart attack while playing tennis, his family said. Craven became a professor at UNM in 1993 and was the fine arts department chair for two years. He published 10 books and more than 150 articles in scholarly journals … Craven received his distinguished professor title in 2007 while at UNM. He was fluent in four languages and traveled the world giving speeches at more than 100 universities.

Chika Okeke-Agulu writes:

I just got this news of the transition of David Craven, one of the scholars whose work I really, really admired; a pioneer Latin American art historian in many ways. He contributed immensely to the development of rigorous approaches to the art history of modernism outside of Europe. And who will forget his tour-de-force essay, “Latin American Origins of Alternative Modernism“? Any student of modernism who ignores it does so at his own intellectual peril! But come to think of it; does anyone know of any invention more stupid than Death?

[This book is Buick's] anticipated full-length examination of this sculptor’s career. It is a thoughtful, groundbreaking study that should be a must-read for anyone interested in art of the United States and in a nuanced treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. Buick’s book challenges late twentieth-century identity politics of current art history that maddeningly continue to insist that black or Native American or women artists reproduce their race and gender in their work … Buick situates her subject within the culture that shaped and instructed her in the cultures of “True Womanhood” and of “Sentiment.” But most of all, she reinserts her into the context of nineteenth-century American art, devoid of any hyphenated qualifier….

Contained within Buick’s reinterpretation of Lewis is a critique of, or at least a dialogue with, the field of art history itself … This is something that is definitely missing these days; the lively debates and disputes that used to pepper conferences and Letters to the Editors are now replaced with more politically correct and neutral comments … I find this willingness to take on one’s predecessors a refreshing breath of fresh air. Art historians need to recapture some of this give and take, as we shape the field for a new century and a new generation of scholars.

Siegel is particularly interested in American art’s peculiar obsession with endings:

Mark Bradford’s 2008 project for the Carnegie International spelled the words “HELP US” on the museum’s roof, recalling the citizens of New Orleans … “I have always liked potentiality better than actuality. We all wait for the storm.” The storm that Bradford seeks seems to be on its way. Not only, literally, in extreme climate change, but also, finally, maybe really, in the end of America that so many see prefigured in the current economic and political situation. The short American century, which began with the economic ascension of the country in the 1920s, reached its highpoint with the end of World War II; at the same time, many claimed that moment of domination was also the end of America as historically constituted, as it marked the full entanglement of the nation in global affairs. One end after another has followed: recessions, military defeats in Vietnam and the Middle East, the attack on American ground of September 11, 2001, the economic crash of 2008. From even the slight distance of a few years, they seem of a piece, part of the same end, as well as a ritualistic repetition of America’s historical pattern of crisis, always already a ruin. Is this latest crisis just a repetition, or part of a long good-bye?

Another recently published book, Robert Genter’s “Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America,” which has a narrower time-frame (the 1950s, mostly) and a broader subject (writers and artists), is particularly interested in American society’s “fear over the threat of totalitarianism,” its attempts to resist that threat with a fierce brand of individualism, and American artists’ participation in — or resistance to — that project. In a long chapter on Jasper Johns, Genter writes:

Johns had little respect for the overtly masculine displays of his fellow artists who believed that the potency of their brushwork, either dripped, splashed or poured across the canvas, testified in some way to their heroic natures … Johns refused to believe in simplistic notions of autonomy … Johns offered an image of the human subject as inescapably embodied … [subject to] social and psychic pressures … Johns deflated the excesses of romantic modernism, not merely through ironic detachment as many have claimed, but through an intense reconsideration of the expressive act itself … Johns turned American modernism away from its metaphysical themes and back to the real cultural debris littering the American landscape … [Johns argued that the Abstract Expressionists] in their compulsive quest to reclaim their own masculinities, had forsaken any contact with their own culture, trying to remain aloof from a world on the brink of catastrophe.

The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, just published in five hefty volumes, has enormous strengths. It builds on the excellent Grove Encyclopedia of Art (1996), revising and supplementing its many entries on American art. Its well-credentialed contributors have sifted through mounds of scholarship to produce pithy takes on a staggering variety of artists and themes. These are very useful starting points for research, for the high schooler and the academic alike. There is a good variety of black-and-white and color reproductions.

On the negative ledger, such an encyclopedia easily falls out of date and is sometimes hobbled by the partisanship and self-interest of its contributors. The bibliography for the entry on Jackson Pollock, for example, references no post-1989 scholarship except the author’s own.

It is not even certain that expert-written references are more accurate than their crowd-sourced counterparts. Indeed there are regrettable lapses in The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. For example, the entry on feminism erroneously dates Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document to 1976-80 and states that

After a falling off of activity in the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of activist art in the 1990s, especially in America. Probably the most notable of a host of new organizations are the “Guerrilla Girls.”

This statement leaves the impression that the Guerrilla Girls got their start in the 1990s, when in fact they began in 1985.

I was left wishing that some kind of hybrid of the two types of encyclopedia could be constructed — an online, continuously updated reference that would be curated by experts but would solicit and benefit from the crowd’s corrections and suggestions.

The idea came from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” with its famous account of the centrifugal power of aesthetic acts, the power of even a modest local aesthetic event–the placing of a jar on a hill in Tennessee–to shape the surrounding slovenly wilderness … I have aimed to treat that night’s performance of Macbeth as a place, even as a Thing in Martin Heidegger’s sense … because it would hold a whole world–a social world as well as a natural one … a vivid picture of “the Nothing which we scarcely know.”

This is, needless to say, an unusual and provocative interdisciplinary book. Literature comes into play: “In Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860), set in Rome, the characters, visiting the Roman catacombs, notice that “while their collected torches illuminated this one, small, consecrated spot, the great darkness spread all around” … Likewise, Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) tells of small lights and faceless immensities.”

And art:

When actual monuments appeared in [the Virginia] landscape, they had the effect of an exorcism. [Northern writer J.T.] Trowbridge described the postwar memorial a few miles from Bristoe Station, a “pyramidal monument of rough red sand-stone … a silent preacher, with its breast of stone, and its austere face of stone, preaching inaudible stern lessons” … Virginia during the war–the land Macbeth flowed into, had no such monuments … Blasted into perfect nothingness, it made a nice clear ground only for antimonuments reasserting and even memorably articulating a choked, hollow lack of meaning. An anonymous photograph taken after the war at the Wilderness Battlefield depicts such a ground. The photograph was exposed to sunlight, probably inadvertently … giving it a strange night-for-day glow befitting its grim subject. The solarized photograph shows three skulls on the ground … The photograph says nothing at all. As devoted to a lack of commentary as the patch of wilderness it shows, it implies that this lack of utterance, this bubbling up of an incoherent space into only a silent sign here and there, is the only thing that can fix a place or mark a spot … It understand that a representation, to be meaningful about the war, must approach the wild emptiness and let it work, contour by contour, upon the image’s will to clarity–let the wildness reduce the art, slowly but surely, to an inscrutable sign. That sign would be neither meaningless babble nor mysterious incantation but some wise combination of the two, a profound incoherence.

In a 2007 interview, Gerdts reflected on the low esteem that historians had for American art when he began studying it, and on the current state of the field:

[Bruce] Cole: So what’s the state of scholarship on American art today?

Gerdts: Well, I really don’t like art history anymore. Because I find that most art history that I read falls—this is obviously a generalization—into two categories. Either it’s repetition of what has been said over and over, but it’s for a different catalog or a different essay, or whatnot. And that’s boring.

Or it goes so far out of its way to try to reinterpret art history, usually in the most bizarre manner. This is really Jules Prown’s fault, although I think he started out very well, with great intentions, with his wanting to define American art within material culture and its political ramifications, and whatnot.

The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001 … The ICAA’s signature initiative is [a] web-based digital archive – which is scheduled to launch in the Fall of 2011 … We have established regional centers for the study of Latin American Art in 10 cities … In each location we recover documents, scan and digitize them, catalogue and annotate them … At present we have over 100 researchers … [W]e will have a collection of over 10,000 critical documents and more than 55,000 related images. We are committed to continue to expand this archive which, in theory at least, is limitless …

Q[uestion from the audience]: Have we transcended the need for Latin American Specialists?

MCR: Absolutely not. Latin American Art is now mainstream yet there are still huge gaps in our understanding … The field has grown horizontally yet lacks depth … A persistent issue in the field is that Latin American art has traditionally been considered to be derivative …. Since the early 20th century, Latin American artists have engaged in original research [and] in many cases have anticipated important developments in Europe and the United States. To understand these developments we need to get roots of this art and understand its development in depth. This can only be done through key writings and other documentation that shed light on the intellectual process that nurtured the art. This is the ultimate goal of the ICAA Documents project.

[F]or the Native chief who erected a pole originally, the totem pole is a material record of the privilege that his extended family has to depict certain images, and of the lavish potlatch – a feast at which valuables are distributed by the hosts to the guests – that celebrated the pole’s raising and enhanced the host’s standing in his community … Although aesthetic sophistication may confer additional prestige on a pole’s carver or owner, totem poles were and are not typically objects of artistic contemplation, much less worship, for the communities from which they come … The inhabitants of the [Pacific] Northwest Coast developed cultures quite distinct from those of aboriginal people elsewhere in North America … It was among these hierarchical societies blessed with abundant, easily carved cedar that the totem pole developed … They likely developed in one particular region, around Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) … There were and are variants … “memorial poles” … “mortuary poles” … “welcome posts” placed at the entry points of villages, and “shame poles” or “ridicule poles” erected to humiliate or challenge rival chiefs …

[P]oles generally depict heraldic crests representing beings that, in the past, had interacted with an ancestor and given him the privilege to portray their identifying image … However, in the contemporary popular imagination … totem poles have become signifiers of a great nation, inspirations for poetry and song, symbols of generalized indigeneity, exoticisms appropriate for fashion, strange elements in advertisements, and props for the most unlikely of film scenes … Many misconceptions have followed these poles … [P]oles do not tell narrative stories that can be “read” from top to bottom or bottom to top like a comic strip or hieroglyph … [P]ositions of figures on the pole have little bearing on their significance, despite the cliché “low man on the totem pole”: in fact, some groups put the most important family crest on the bottom, at eye level. Neither are poles suffused with spirituality, despite repeated attempts to portray them as such … Even the name “totem pole” is based on a misunderstanding … [Anthropologists] defined the totem as a particular lineage group’s protective animal that cannot be slain or eaten … However, animal images on Northwest Coast poles represent family crests or narrative characters that are neither protective nor subject to culinary taboo.