8 September 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
In the Yale Alumni Magazine curator John Marciari “tells how it feels to discover a masterpiece”: I cannot say that I knew what it was at first glance, but I knew that it was worth puzzling out. In the parlance of curators and art dealers, the work was by someone; it was attributable. Not only [...]
7 September 2010 | Museums
According to The Indian Express, The National Museum of India, the nation’s largest and most prestigious — and described on its web site as ‘The Pride of India’ — has been without a leader for the past three years. No one wants the job, it seems — and even a relaxation of eligibility criteria has [...]
4 September 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Museums, Photography
Recently in the papers: “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE) Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB) Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian) Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at [...]
2 September 2010 | Modern, Museums
One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”: He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification [...]
20 August 2010 | Books, Museums
In Artnet sculptor James Croak hypothesizes that Thomas McEvilley’s review of the 1982 MoMA exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art “generally broadened the entire museological approach to both contemporary art and global culture,” making possible such shows as the recent MoMA blockbuster retrospective devoted to Marina Abramovic: His irreverent review, published in Artforum and titled “Doctor, [...]
18 August 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Modern, Museums
Press clippings: Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews Ćurčić and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog) “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously [...]
5 August 2010 | Museums, Renaissance, Teaching, Theory
A show at the Yale University Art Museum points to an issues that many graduate programs seems to be addressing in one way or another. Laurence Kanter says: “Original works of art have been forgotten. They’re being used as data, without any sense of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.” He added: “No one wants [...]
5 August 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Last February, a conference convened to discuss the “Art History of Games.” This February, a CAA session will address “Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga.” And now on view in Paris is “MuseoGames: Une Histoire à Rejouer” (“MuseoGames: A Story to be Replayed”), as ARTINFO reports: This multimedia exhibition chronicles three [...]
23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice: As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best [...]
20 July 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums
Tolu Ogunlesi’s review of Art Basel alerted me to a recent provocative essay by professor and Aachron Editions publisher Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker (A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art),” which he recently presented at a UC-Santa Cruz conference The Task of [...]
8 July 2010 | Architecture, Contemporary, Museums
The Winter 2010 issue of Critical Inquiry is gripping, and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention. Editor W.J.T. Mitchell gives the background in his introduction: In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Respected art historian Daniele Di Castro … died last Friday following a long battle with cancer. Born in Rome in 1958, Di Castro revamped the Jewish community’s museum in the mid-2000s and turned it into the city’s leading Jewish cultural institution.” According to a bio, Di Castro taught at [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
Richard John Boileau Walker died May 6, aged 93. From The Independent: After school at Harrow came Magdalene College, Cambridge, and thence, prompted by the Dean, to the Courtauld Institute, where, taught by TR Boase and Anthony Blunt … As Curator of the Palace of Westminster he compiled the five-volume catalogue of its pictures, published [...]
30 June 2010 | Museums
ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest writes: When the Association of Art Museum Directors assembled in Indianapolis for its semi-annual conference … which was attended by 117 of the AAMD’s current 198 members … [it adopted] two major policy changes designed to transform the AAMD in terms of both perception and reality. One plan, sure to spark [...]
30 June 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
A few weeks ago, Gary Schwartz wrote: Until 27 June a small exhibition of irresistible charm and interest is being held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after a run at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp: Willem van Haecht: room for art in 17th-century Antwerp … Van Haecht was the subject of a dissertation that I [...]
28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video). He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript: 1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the [...]
18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”: [T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and [...]
15 June 2010 | Museums
I recently ventured to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to view the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, the first museum retrospective of her drawings. Immediately upon entering the gallery, I felt uncomfortable. What is bothering me about this show? Is it the layout, the work, the theme? Then it dawned on me: it’s the lighting! When [...]
1 June 2010 | Museums, Pre-Columbian
Art Daily has just announced that nearly 100 prehispanic objects deposited by the Mexica (often called the Aztecs) in the ceremonial precinct of in their capital of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) will be on display in Mexico City. The exhibition will open in the later part of June 2010. The objects, which include wooden masks and [...]
27 May 2010 | Museums, Teaching
Walking through the Birth of Impressionism exhibition at the De Young Museum, I realized that Kenneth Baker got basically one thing right in his sparse review: it builds anticipation for coming Fall exhibit. What I noticed about this well-executed exhibition was its genuine interest in teaching us something about the relationships between mid 19th-century painting and [...]
