6 October 2006 | Ancient, Architecture, Journals
The June 2006 Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology features an article by Yuval Yekutieli entitled, “Is Somebody Watching You? Ancient Surveillance Systems in the Southern Judean Desert”: “The Panoptic model of surveillance, which enables a small number of observers to control large numbers of people, is usually considered a modern (18th century AD) invention and a [...]
5 October 2006 | Journals
The August 2006 Journal of Visual Culture is themed “Disability-Visuality” and explores “the extent to which visuality is both determined by and determining of our understanding of disability. And how disability can bend our existing conceptions of visuality out of shape.” Fiona Candlin examines historical attitudes towards the sense of touch, particularly the ways in [...]
2 October 2006 | Journals, Medieval, Modern
A recent issue of Perspective (2006-1) featured a debate on “Meyer Schapiro and Roman Sculpture, Questions of Non-Reception in France” that covered diverse terrain. Enrico Castelnuovo, Roland Recht and Robert A. Maxwell tried to articulate his legacy for medieval art history, the relationship between his medieval and modern writings, and the reasons for his poor [...]
29 September 2006 | Contemporary, Journals
The May-July 2006 Third Text is themed “The Conflict and Contemporary Visual Culture in Palestine and Israel.” Its introduction reads: “The issue of visual arts and their role in both the Palestinian and Israeli projects of identity creation has not been treated before in a substantial and comprehensive manner … Over forty Palestinian and Israeli [...]
19 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the September 2006 Art Bulletin, Robert Williams and Christopher S. Wood contribute a mock Platonic dialogue. They write in their introduction, “Its value as a point of departure — as a tool with which to anatomize the challenges now confronting us — rests on the figure of Protagoras, who, as a Sophist, can be [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the Summer 2006 October, comparative literature scholar Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses “the concept of the perception of the fact of perception, the ‘sense,’ as Aristotle wrote in the De Anima, ‘that I am seeing and hearing.’” Poetic, difficult to summarize, his article concludes: “Sensation, in this way, outlasts its own activity. At the limit, there [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the summer 2006 Representations, English professor Mark Canuel writes: “It would be both right and wrong to say that aesthetics has returned as a subject of urgent scholarly inquiry within the past five years … Renewed commitments to defining and defending aesthetic pleasure center mainly on … a certain restricted type of pleasure — [...]
15 September 2006 | Journals
In a recent Oxford Art Journal (29.2), Harry Mount writes: “In 1728 Ephraim Chambers noted the recent appearance in English of a new word, ‘connoisseur’, which he defined as meaning ‘a Critick, or a Person who is a thorow Judge, or Master in any way; in Matters of Painting, &c.’ For many historians, the rise [...]
13 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the Summer 2006 Critical Inquiry, Jas’ Elsner writes, in the conclusion to his article on Riegl: “There is much value in treating art-historical discourse in general as ekphrasis. This is to say, it is rhetorical, with the aim of persuading an audience of a point or an argument; it is directed not towards some [...]
14 July 2006 | Journals, Modern
The latest Yale French Studies considers the affection of the surrealists for the “many ‘others’ outside of the official group with whom they shared their passions: Marxists, visual artists, filmmakers, psychiatrists and ethnographers.” In his essay, Jonathan P. Eburne considers “the ties between surrealism’s politics and the problem of terrorist violence,” jumping off from an [...]
5 July 2006 | Journals
As Brian Sholis notes in his excellent “In Search of the Miraculous” blog, “The Spring 2006 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, contains a strong, readable essay on the development of art history in America by Thomas Crow.” It begins at the beginning and “runs up to Clement [...]
21 June 2006 | Journals
Leo Steinberg’s notable 2002 CAA talk has been reprinted in the Brooklyn Rail: “… back to that walking seminar in Rome, 1957 … I remember [Wolfgang Lotz] as a marvelous teacher, with one welcome flaw in his nature: a touch of laziness, which made him reluctant to read student papers during a summer jaunt. To [...]
24 May 2006 | Journals
New York cleans up: CUNY, NYU and Columbia take three of the top five spots in the list of universities responsible for the greatest number of the 5,250 art and architecture papers published between 2001 and 2005 and indexed by Thomson Scientific. Of course, art-historical activity is too widely dispersed for any one city to [...]
8 May 2006 | Journals
The inaugural issue of November arrived at our offices. From the Lukacs G.C. Hechnoh article: “…How can we conceptualize this reappearance [of pre-WWII avant-garde aesthetics in contemporary IKEA productions] theoretically? Will it ever be possible for me to stop being nostalgic about the 1920s? And does my own Freudian-like repetition of the same basic argument [...]
28 April 2006 | Journals, Theory
From Artnet: “Is the influential October magazine, the flagship journal of art theory, a spent force? The editors of the newly released November certainly seem to think so. The 46-page inaugural issue of the parody mag offers a savage send-up of the widely copied, jargon-heavy style of October, via, among other things, contributions from ‘Lukács [...]
25 April 2006 | Journals
The second number of Images Re-vues, out last month, collects articles on damaged images. Issue editor Dominique Donadieu-Rigaut thanks anthropology for pioneering the study of how images provoke action. Contributor Sophie Moiroux applies Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art and action to Mary Richardson’s 1914 slashing of the Rokeby Venus (done to protest the arrest [...]
21 April 2006 | Ancient, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of Antiquity, R. Alexander Bentley writes: “There is now a proliferation of new journals on almost every conceivable topic (e.g. Journal of Happiness Studies, Queueing Systems, Wear, World Pumps, with titles for archaeologists such as Anthropoetics, Archaeological Dialogues and Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News), so that an author can publish almost any [...]
7 April 2006 | Architecture, Journals
In the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, twelve academics from outside the field of the history of architecture explain “what they have learned” from it and what directions they’d like to see it go in. Editor Nancy Stieber notes: “We are accused of looking at buildings too closely, [...]
6 April 2006 | Journals, Renaissance
In the latest issue of The Burlington Magazine, a controversial drawing is attributed to Holbein on the basis of new technical examination, while another article argues that certain Figino drawings offer us a secondhand glimpse of lost Leonardo anatomy studies.
4 April 2006 | Journals
The latest issue of World Archaeology is entirely given over to “race, racism and archaeology”: “race and racism have been subjects of much discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, but archaeology has not participated in these discussions as fully as it might. This volume aims to aid as a spur to further discussion. Considerable [...]
