I’m happy to see that Sue Ward, the always charming former editor of the sadly shuttered AAH journal The Art Book, is helming a new monthly art publication, Cassone. It is nearly all, alas, subscription-only, but available for an affordable £10/year. Recent topics include the Mougins Museum of Classical Art, Leonardo da Vinci, Beryl Dean, Richard Dadd, Edward Hopper, and Steve Jobs.

A former classmate of mine, San Diego Museum curator Ariel Plotek, has launched a new free online journal of reviews of exhibitions and books, Tabula Quarterly. The first issue considers “Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe,” “Roma Naturaleza e Ideal: Paisajes 1600–1650,” “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” “Bronzino One Year On,” and “Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners.”

Finally, the new journal Modern Art Asia examines the “globalized interdisciplinary context at the intersection of scholarship, criticism, and the market” with “peer-reviewed postgraduate articles, insightful commentary, and international exhibition reviews to encourage a broader vision of art produced throughout Asia after 1700.” In the first issue, Yayoi Shionoiri writes on photographs by Hosoe Eikoh in which images of writer Mishima Yukio are “superimposed upon images of Western painting.” Marci Kwon argues that Takashi Murakami’s work “should be read as an appropriation of the systems that drive capitalist consumption.” Gwyn Helverson examines work ”using traditional Japanese materials and/or incorporating traditional imagery, but invigorated with modern themes from, for example, hip-hop and otaku(geek) culture,” incorporating the “theories of feminist art historian Chino Kaori.”

Various outside bodies have tried to rank journals, using citation indexes or expert assessments or both. In 2008 The European Science Foundation gave 112 art-related journals its highest rating, including The Art Bulletin. Norway has its own list, which strikes me as idiosyncratic. The Art Bulletin, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, Leonardo and Oxford Art Journal all belong in the second rank, below 118 other journals?

Perhaps the most interesting rankings are those produced by Australia in 2010. It gave its highest ranking to seven “art theory and criticism” publications: The Art Bulletin, Art History: journal of the Association of Art Historians, Art Journal (also published by CAA), The Burlington Magazine, Ligeia: dossiers sur l’art, October, and Renaissance Quarterly. I must confess I haven’t read Ligeia in years (none of the major universities near me even carry it). Renaissance Quarterly is too general a publication to compare with The Art Bulletin. The other four seem worthy competitors to The Art Bulletin‘s claim for pre-eminence.

Why not call yourself “a leading journal”? It’s healthy for journals to compete and to take pride in their accomplishments. But to claim top status — without evidence or even argumentation — seems immodest and pointless. No matter how superlative any one art journal gets, it’s unlikely to become a true authority, nor should it.

While maintaining our acknowledged strength in medieval and modern subjects, we encourage submissions in other periods such as antiquity, early modern, romanticism and the nineteenth-century, and contemporary; in Western and non-Western subjects; in philosophical and theoretical approaches to word and image; in book arts, photography, new media and virtuality; in translation and adaptation. On-line technologies now make it possible to include supplemental material and video images on our website, thus expanding the possibilities for illustration beyond the printed page. We envisage a series of critical assessments of key words in the history of word and image studies. We welcome ideas from our readers for other initiatives in which the journal could take the lead.

A future special issue honoring Hunt will focus on ekphrasis. Submissions due Dec. 1, 2011.

The College Art Association doesn’t pretend to present the “greatest” works of art history. Its lists are inherently limited — judges could choose only from writings published by the journals in question. Nonetheless, their choices deserve scrutiny. To begin with the criteria that aroused so much controversy above — Of the 38 essays and reviews chosen by The Art Bulletin‘s editorial board, 17 were written by female authors (another was co-written by a woman and a man). Not much to apologize for there. There are other problems however, which the board addresses frankly:

[Some] gaps are simply revealing of the state of the field: there are very few pieces by women for the early years because few women were publishing in The Art Bulletin at the time. There are also few works by scholars of color and Jewish scholars because there were few in the field at the time; academe and museums were seldom hospitable, and Meyer Schapiro remains an exception for the 1920s and 30s. However, the fact that African American scholars remain few despite their presence on and at the head of the journal’s editorial board is still significant in what it says about the state of American and European cultural institutions. The gaps are filled in interesting ways that also speak to the state of the field, as when, from the early 1970s, feminist work appears and, from the early 1980s work on race appears alongside articles about the arts of Africa and of African Americans.

On another level, it’s interesting to note how few of their selections won the association’s Porter Prize when they appeared — just four of the twenty-seven eligible (the prize was founded in 1958). How surprising! Is it that hard for art historians to recognize great scholarship when it appears? Either that’s the case, or the field is so highly fractured that every board ends up with highly idiosyncratic choices — which seems even less plausible.

There is another way to measure the importance of individual articles — with a citation tracker such as ISI’s Web of Knowledge (which includes the Arts and Humanities Citation Index). This method has its own disadvantages, but is arguably more “objective.” According to ISI, these are the ten most cited articles from Art Bulletin, only two of which appear in CAA’s centennial list:

1. “Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, ‘Petrarchismo’, And The Vernacular Style” by E. Cropper (1976). Times Cited: 57

2. “Semiotics And Art-History” by M. Bal and N. Bryson (1991). Times Cited: 52

3. “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” by J. Schulz (1978). Times Cited: 38

4. “Contrapposto – Style And Meaning In Renaissance Art” by D. Summers (1977). Times Cited: 36

5. “Augustinian Interpretation Of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling” by E.G. Dotson (1979). Times Cited: 23

6. “The Feminist Critique Of Art-History” by Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews (1987). Times Cited: 20

7. “Artists And Rederijkers In The Age Of Bruegel” by W.S. Gibson (1981). Times Cited: 19

8. “Jerome Nadal And Early Jesuit Art In Rome” by T. Buser (1976). Times Cited: 19

9. “The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii,” by B. Bergmann (1994). Times Cited: 18

10. “The Sleeping Nymph – Origins Of A Humanist Fountain Type” by E.B. MacDougall (1975). Times Cited: 18

Art Journal chose 13 items from its archives. Of the 10 selections created by a single individual, 4 are by women, including the oldest selection, Ruth L. Benjamin’s 1935 article, “Japanese Painters in America.” In an accompanying note, Karen Higa writes that this piece “underscores that even in their earliest incarnations, CAA’s publications registered the global in the formation of American art.”

According to ISI, these are the 5 most-cited Art Journal pieces, none of which appear in CAA’s centennial list:

1. “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” by R. Krauss (1982). Times Cited: 23

2. “‘Galileo, Florentine “Disegno” and the “Strange Spottednesse” of the Moon” by S.Y. Edgerton (1984). Times Cited: 20

3. “The Traffic in Photographs,” by A. Sekula (1981). Times Cited: 15

4. “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II: The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio” by T.D. Kaufmann (1978). Times Cited: 12

5. “On Paradigms and Revolutions in Science and Art: The Challenge of Interpretation” by R.S. Root-Bernstein” (1984). Times Cited: 10

Now the center of this spectrum has come into focus. There are several instances of free online scholarly publications which maintain an editorial review board of credentialed scholars and practice peer review. Here is a cross section:

http://www.riha-journal.org/

http://nonsite.org/

http://www.shockwrite.org/

http://stretcher.org/

http://www.wornthrough.com/

Clearly the people involved in these projects have recognized the relative ease and freedom of online publishing vs traditional. Furthermore, they have found outlets for the their work, which might not otherwise have been published, and have claimed a degree of authority by utilizing the methods of the traditional academic press.

How will these new types of publications compete with more traditional publications as authors become more frustrated with the difficulty of having a piece accepted for publication and look toward alternatives (the growing surplus of art historians in the West is no secret)? Will any of them be able to achieve the same level of gravitas as, say, The Art Bulletin, or October? If October were started in 2011, would it have been an online publication? Will traditional publishers appropriate for themselves some of the space being carved out by this new species?

We can appreciate [the Bocca] not so much as a head carved on a slab as a face that wells up in a pool. Indeed, the sculptors responsible – just like the cameo cutters who prospected the veins in agates in search of latent images – chose the Bocca block so that the deity’s head would be contained within its “birthmark.” In so doing, they captured a paradox. Were this marble disk a frozen pool, the face would seal its thinnest part, where the surface showed darkest. And this darkness is where the stone becomes virtually transparent, so that when Oceanus reared his head in public he seemed not so much the tip of the iceberg as the face of the deep.

The slippage in antiquity between idea and material was brought up in a recent talk by Rachel Kousser at the Getty Villa. In her lecture, “Bound, Mutilated, Confined, Concealed:  ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in Classical and Hellenistic Greece”, Kousser discussed fourteen known examples of small statues employed in ancient Greece in a manner similar to Haitian Voodoo (implying, of course, that many more examples linger, unpublished, in storage). The statues were rudimentary and their forms varied – some verged on representational, while others were nearly indistinct masses of lead or wax. Common to them all were bound arms, and often the figures’ heads and feet were reversed. Part of the understudied practice of magic in antiquity, they served primarily in issues of love and law – a patron commissioning a statue might stab its tongue in order to cause an adversary to flub his legal speech. Kousser presses the distinction between a literal reading of the statues, which could assume the user wanted his adversary to show up with a needle through his tongue, with the metaphorical way in which they were actually used. She then suggests, provocatively and insightfully, that the way the Greek viewer related to these figures should be invoked in our consideration of the relationship to so-called “high art” statuary. The metaphorical possibility of the voodoo dolls, and the ease with which the user would move from the physical to the verbal, urges us to reconsider depictions of offerings to statues and other ritual gestures.

The metaphoric potential of artifacts has been similarly underestimated, Richard Sharf argues in another Art Bulletin article, in relics of Buddha’s finger bones found in a crypt beneath the Ming dynasty pagoda at Famensi. While the ritual role and context of the reliquaries has been examined, the materiality of the relics themselves has been disregarded – a particularly striking omission when one notes, as Sharf does, the blatant falsity of the bones. The hollow tubes obviously do not resemble finger bones, and certainly not those of the Buddha. Rather than seeing this as a gesture of bad faith or naïveté, Sharf complicates the understanding of the Buddha’s “true body” – the “dharma” or transcendent body. One might argue, as Eugene Wang does, that the true body is no body at all. But Sharf suggests

The multivalent expression ‘true body’ deftly captures the dialectical or ‘self-emptying’ logic exhibited in the very design of the finger-bone relic. The term ‘true body’, like the relic itself, must be understood as sublimely ironic. In short, the Famensi finger-bone relics might be approached as sophisticated works of art. And this means coming to appreciate the creative, aesthetic, and playful dimensions of the crypt and its treasures.

Classifying the relationship between viewer and object as one of art “opens up new interpretative and analytic avenues.” This move also has significant consequences for “global art history,” a subject much-discussed at this year’s CAA. Throughout the conference, there were several calls to eliminate fraught terminology, including “art.” Sharf acknowledges the postcolonial implications of wresting ancient artifacts from their lived context and inscribing them within a “modern, ideologically laden” category. Yet,

Perhaps we have swung too far in the other direction, leaving us with relentlessly functional readings that are denatured and reductive…. In abandoning the rubric and logic of “art,” we become blind to the more playful dimensions of Buddhist material culture. To dismiss the category “art” as parochial, romantic, Orientalist or intellectually bankrupt may lead us into another rut that is equally parochial, romantic, Orientalist, or intellectually bankrupt.

This is an official production, edited by a former CAA executive director, and so its overall tone is predictably boosterish. That said, many authors offer good critical commentary along the way, and the book is full of interesting information. To start with a minor example, I didn’t know that CAA board members are required to donate at least $500 to the organization each year. Nor did I know the organization’s true beginnings. As Ball writes:

On more than one occasion art historians have argued incorrectly that CAA was “founded by art historians with the idea of promoting the history of art” … [Rather, CAA] had its origins in drawing and manual training … [in] the teaching of teachers of art.

CAA quickly took on a dual role, aiding artists and art historians — a multiple role, really, as it also serves art librarians, curators, and so on. Consequently, the organization often suffers from an “identity crisis.” That crisis has fueled the most lively of CAA’s internecine battles, but I found myself most interested in Craig Houser’s chapter on “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing.” He argues among other things that the importance of European refugees to American art history has been overstated:

[This] argument does not acknowledge that much of the art history of the German-speaking nations was already somewhat familiar to U.S. scholars in the 1930s … In addition, U.S. art historians sometimes challenged the ideas of European scholars … free from the petty scholarly politics and national biases that had been plaguing some of the Europeans’ scholarship.

Of course, American art historians enjoyed their own kind of national pride and played their own kind of politics:

On April 7, 1936, a letter was submitted to the CAA board of directors by sixteen members, including Helen M. Franc, Meiss, and Meyer Schapiro, as well as two editorial board members, Cook and Dinsmoor. Among their varied concerns, they stated that given Art Bulletin was “the only scholarly art periodical in America … it would only be fair to restrict the articles … to the work of American scholars” … [They proposed] that articles by foreigners be limited in number to those who were affiliated with United States institutions or were truly exceptional.

Houser also notes that many early Art Bulletin board members “used their position with the journal as a means to advance their careers” and their favorite subject matter. An interesting table tracks the topics of Art Bulletin articles from 1919 to 1944, during which time a total of zero articles tackled African art, Egyptian art, Ancient Near Eastern Art, Native American Art, Ocean/Australian art, Outsider/Folk Art, Pre-Columbian Art, or Prehistoric art. By contrast, ninety-nine articles treated Early Medieval/Romanesque/Gothic art, and sixty-one Renaissance art. No other topic even came close.

For those of you looking to advance your own career in Art Bulletin, note that it has been accepting just 20-25% of submissions since 1980, but that now is a comparatively good time to try to break in — the annual volume of submissions in recent years is about 10% lower than it was in the 1990s.

In her contribution to the debate, Elizabeth Harney questions

Whether a “field” of contemporary African art history exists. What, indeed, is the rush to name this field? Above and beyond the professional questions of who we build our careers … [there’s] wariness about closing down the capacious and extremely diverse set of conversations … [That said] canonization is inevitable [and] perhaps it has already come to pass.

Okwui Enwezor hints at an intriguing development to come:

[W]hat I believe in passionately, as far as contemporary African art goes, is institution and capacity building … Without these the field will not grow. Stay tuned for the launch of a new institute dedicated to this very idea … [C]oming from Nigeria, I will not subscribe willy-nilly to messy, chaotic, unruly, and other qualifiers as attractive ways to theorize this difficult problem. We have seen what all of those qualifiers connote when applied to Africa.

And then later elaborates:

[A]t the invitation of a foundation here in the United States we are developing a model of a mobile summer art academy, in collaboration with African institutions … We are working on a five-year pilot program and have designated five African countries among which the project will rotate. Concurrently, we are developing an online academy … Our attention is to bridge the gap, not to create false dichotomies of “African-based” curators … and non-African-based scholars … In our project, we see knowledge transfer as part of a new politics of countering NGOism, as a specific critique of the development models that have deracinated institutional capacities and created a culture of dependency and sympathy in Africa. But this venture in itself is not a solution, only a strategy to create a robust global African public sphere of knowledge production.

Sidney Kasfir chimes in near the end of the exchange:

Initial impression: what a lot of verbiage! Quite a few of us in the roundtable seem to equate intellectual integrity with using as many words as possible … [My PhD advisor] advised me to avoid too much clarity and conciseness … I’d also like to say a bit about the terminologies that we use to talk about African art. I steer clear of the traditional-contemporary frmework because it creates a nice distinction that does not exist in reality. The older genres, like masquerades, continue to thrive and are in a real sense also contemporary … The last of these conceptual frameworks is postcoloniality, which for me is steadily losing its explanatory power. Whether construed as “after” or “against” the colonial … [the concept] began to flatten out in the 1990s and now is simply taken as an all-purpose descriptor … [T]he keywords are uncertainty, ambivalence, and contingency [but] they are very, very capacious and could also be used to describe the experience of being a colonized subject … [T]he postcolonial has pretty much been edged out by globalism-related discourse on diaspora and migration.

Critical race art history, as [Francis] defines it, requires comparative study of racial identities and their constructions. She says the primary goal of this approach is not to “diversify” the canons of American art, modernism, or any movement or style. “Instead, critical race art history is a discursive analysis of the ways visual representation produces knowledge of and about race – as a framework of social and cultural assignation and belonging.”

Sharron Patton writes on the keynote address by Okwui Enwezor and his recent book Contemporary African Art Since 1980, co-written by Chike Okeke-Agulu:

[The book] ignites an intellectually intense discussion … Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu eschew continuous histories, conventional geopolitical terrains and compendia of artistic movements, traditions and styles. Rather [they] scrutinize Western methodologies, critical theory and philosophy about Africans and their art. Artists represented in this book are transnational, multicultural, cosmopolitan and pan-African in their perceptions of themselves and their art and global in the reception of it by collectors, curators, galleries and museums … By examining the works of artists of various African backgrounds and sensibilities – e.g., those who reside in Africa, those who migrate or have migrated permanently or semi-permanently to locales outside Africa, those who deploy a “strategy of combative ambivalence” and whose works display an aesthetic that casts doubt on “what qualities embody authentic contemporary African art” – we recognize new artistic models, aesthetic incongruities, different artistic principles and affiliations … In his talk at the Porter Colloquium, Enwezor admitted that … he likes “work that wages a productive resistance” to the visual culture industry and its “politics of form” … [responses] to what Enwezor calls Afro-pessimism – the West’s dim regard of Africa: “We’re presented a place that is always in the midst of disintegration and chaos, almost at the edge of disappearing.”

In the October Art in America, Steven C. Dubin credits Contemporary African Art Since 1980 as “provocative, timely, and insightful,” “transcending past biases,” but also finds it sorely wanting:

Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu open with nearly 40 cowritten pages of densely theoretical argument, unpunctuated by images, and organized thematically … Almost 300 pages of plates follow, with works arranged by date from 1980 to 2009 yet captioned with only the most basic identifying data … [Their] strategem of strictly segregating their ideas from any images of works under discussion creates a confounding disconnect … [T]hey generally remain at a far remove from specific works of art … The result is a book that is intellectually challenging but annoyingly remote, as though the authors, entranced by their own grand theorizations, could not be bothered with particular facts and clear formal analyses.

Over the last two decades there has been a significant change in the scholarship. Related disciplines like sociology, anthropology and material culture studies are now central to design history … Subdisciplines like the history of fashion, film studies, and psychoanlaysis that had only a tangential relationship to our activities in the 1990s really now are central, and we would like West 86th to place these new disciplines right at the heart of our publication. The core of the journal will continue be scholarly articles, and I envisage carrying 3, 4, or 5 in every issue … Book reviews likewise … There will be several new features: Exhibition reviews … We’re also planning more polemical, perhaps longer reviews which will hold up a whole area of scholarship to examination … We’re planning a section called Translated Texts and Primary Sources … [There will be a] print version and an online version for subscribers … We also want to introduce a third platform, a complementary website in which a lot of new digital material will be made available … Open-access … it will carry exhibition reviews, digital projects and a range of other activity that can only be expressed or distributed properly in a digital form. West 86th will be published twice yearly, with the first issue slated to appear in the spring of 2011 … We would like to move up to quarterly.