14 February 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary, Modern, News
About 120 people are here for the “Reframing Modernism” panel in the Hilton’s rather unmodern Trianon Ballroom, where bad lighting is making the slides near-impossible to see. One speaker, Jenny Anger, considers it still necessary to contest Michael Fried’s concept of “theatricality.” Among other things, she believes that there is a fascist element in modernism [...]
7 December 2006 | News, Uncategorized
From an email circulated by Mariët Westermann, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU: “I am very sad to let you know that our beloved Robert Rosenblum died yesterday … In 1956 he earned his PhD from the Institute with his dissertation ‘The International Style of 1800: a Study in Linear Abstraction.’ Robert’s [...]
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports: “At NYU Friday night, Oxford philospher John Hyman refuted the claims of ‘neuroaesthetics’ researchers V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki (last seen at the Columbia ‘Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind‘). Hyman first challenged Ramachandran’s notion that ‘all art is caricature,’ in that it exaggerates the depicted’s essential [...]
29 March 2006 | Contemporary, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from a talk given last night at the New School: “Regarding his apparent obsession with enormous breasts, Currin contended that it’s not simply about sex. ‘It’s a cartoony version of a classical idea of roundness and form. It’s about roundness having a place in contemporary art.’ ‘A lot of my work [...]
27 March 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from last Friday’s star-studded “Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind” at Columbia’s Italian Academy: “As the afternoon session got underway, red and blue 3-D glasses were distributed that Margaret Livingstone then used to demonstrate the neural mechanics of depth perception. She also explained how brain processes create the [...]
3 March 2006 | Contemporary, News, Teaching
Though he starts his new Yale job this July, he’ll teach one more semester at NYU’s IFA this fall and then switch to adjunct status. (And he’ll continue supervising dissertations in progress.) Speculation has of course already begun swirling as to his likely successor at IFA…
2 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums, News
Contributor Anne Byrd writes: “Politics are especially prominent at this year’s Whitney Biennial: the first work that visitors see is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s and Mark di Suvero’s Peace Tower, clad in antiwar paintings. Explicitly political works inside the museum include Richard Serra’s “Stop Bush” poster and video documentations of Steve Kurtz’s interventions. Several artists address racial [...]
“There was no plan to protect the Iraq Museum” during the 2003 siege of Baghdad, said Matthew Bogdanos last night at a Cooper Union lecture sponsored by Saving Antiquities for Everyone (S.A.F.E.). As a result, thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts were stolen. Bogdanos, who holds a master’s degree in classical studies, assembled a multi-agency team while [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary, News
Contributor Daniel Belasco reports: “My concluding remarks, on the discussion of international contemporary art at CAA, will necessarily reflect my experience as a panelist here, my first. (Went well, thank you very much, even though my Powerpoint lost a few hi-res images in the translation from PC to Mac … a metaphor for things to [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences, Modern, News
Contributor Anne Byrd reports: “At Saturday morning’s Minimalism and the Common Culture panel, Anna Chave ground her Rosalind Krauss axe, while younger scholars Mitte Gieskes, Dominic Rahtz, and Nina Murayama offered historical readings of minimalism: Gieskes’s paper was a nuanced (if, as one questioner suggested, somewhat uncritical) discussion of Carl Andre, theories of contingency such [...]
25 February 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports: “Friday’s program offered a feast for Italianists. In a morning session that met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Frederick Ilchman chronicled the hits and misses of Italian acquisitions at the MFA, including an overpainted female portrait, dubiously attributed to Raphael and illicitly exported in a curator’s suitcase. In an afternoon [...]
24 February 2006 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our Ross Finocchio writes: “Talk of Italian festivals warmed the damp chill of Boston on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Celebration in the Arts of Italy’ session took as its theme the Renaissance public processions that transformed their urban setting. The triumph of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1536, for example, was also ‘a triumph of [...]
