26 July 2011 | Modern, Museums, Photography, Teaching
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde San Francisco Museum of Modern Art May 21-September 6 Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco May 12-September 6 Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris De Young Museum, San Francisco June 11 – October 9 What is an [...]
11 June 2011 | Renaissance, Teaching, Uncategorized
As a regular teacher of survey courses in Western Art, I find it very satisfying when new scholarship addresses its problems and offers solutions. In the June 2011 Art Bulletin, Margaret A. Sullivan writes: “For artists, whose calling required careful observation of the world around them, this heightened appreciation of the spectator elevated their own [...]
31 December 2010 | Current Events, Museums, Teaching
A post from earlier this month on the Getty’s blog points out some curiosities about how some artworks get viewed online more frequently than others. No surprise that Van Gogh takes first place. However, it is interesting that numbers two (Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime by Pierre Paul Prud’hon, 1805-06) and three (Two Women [...]
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 [...]
14 July 2010 | Teaching
A recent NYT editorial by Brent Staples about the ease of plagiarism in the internet era is one of many recent articles regarding technology and education. The casual attitude portayed in the article is one I encounter regularly, and I wonder if the research paper still retains much value as an educational tool or assessment technique [...]
29 May 2010 | Teaching
As I was listening to this interesting “On the Media” segment recently, I became intrigued when I got the impression that everyone but me had read this article (pdf), “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” by Kathleen Hayles. (In fact, it’s not all that well known.) This is a topic I’ve [...]
28 May 2010 | Teaching
The March-April 2010 issue of Le Débat prints a talk that Pierre Rosenberg gave at a September 2009 colloquium (pdf): My career has been in museums, at the Louvre mostly, where I’ve spent almost 40 years. I love museums, all museums. Alas I didn’t discover them in school, but rather from my parents … Many [...]
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 [...]
24 May 2010 | Teaching
I am one of those art historians who is a digital alien (see L. Rusch’s comment to Jon Lackman’s post of 13 May). But even if I were a digital native, I might still be perplexed by the pedagogical applications of the new technology that will work best in the classroom. I am wondering how [...]
9 February 2010 | Renaissance, Teaching
Connecticut College professor Robert Baldwin has decided to place online a large proportion of everything he’s ever written, 200 essays, lectures, bibliographies, and interdisciplinary syllabi on Western Art with a focus on European art, 1300-1700. This web site is aimed at ABDs and recent PhDs struggling to work up new courses, hunt down primary source [...]
26 October 2009 | Books, Teaching
Also in caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies edited by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas. A collection of essays by authors of diverse academic backgrounds, the book … should prove useful to teachers just starting out as well as to veterans eager to [...]
24 September 2009 | Awards, Teaching
From a Pasadena Community College press release: Art History Professor Sandy Haynes, who developed an online version of Art Fundamentals … is being honored with a top award by the international, learning management company Blackboard … her course was one of only eight submitted by faculty and course designers from around the world that was [...]
17 September 2009 | Architecture, Teaching
From the Yale Daily News: After more than 60 years teaching art history and architecture at Yale, Sterling professor emeritus Vincent Scully is stepping away from the lectern and turning his attention to writing and research. At the age of 89, Scully — a New Haven native who over the years has been called Yale’s [...]
13 May 2009 | Teaching
Smarthistory, created by Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker out of discontent with “the large expensive art history textbook,” now with 157 videos, has won a 2009 Webby award for best education website. The Guggenheim Museum won in the category of “cultural institutions.” Dreamgrove won the “netart” category. Keith Tyson won in “art.”
2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”: “One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about [...]
10 March 2008 | Books, Teaching
Phaidon is not the only book publisher with a new mega-survey out. Thames & Hudson has recently published Mirror of the World: A New History of Art by Julian Bell: I see art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is continually reflected back at us — rather than as [...]
27 February 2008 | Teaching
The White House recently announced an initiative called “Picturing America,” which will “provide K-12 schools and public libraries with 40 images of American art, an illustrated teachers resource book, and a web site containing additional information including lesson plans.” The press conference included the president and the first lady as well as NEH head Bruce [...]
1 February 2008 | Books, Teaching
Artist and writer Morgan Meis reviews the new Phaidon megasurvey 30,000 Years of Art: The story of human creativity across time and space: … [I] imagine a group of art historians sitting around a table with a sixth or seventh bottle of wine giggling to each other like schoolgirls. “Take that, art theorists! We give [...]
9 January 2008 | Teaching
From Libération: “In school, children learn to read but not to see.” In these pages, the day after the presidential election, the painting historian Pierre Rosenberg, former Louvre president, reminded candidate Sarkozy of his promise to introduce art history into the schools. If a report Libération obtained a copy of is to be believed, “starting [...]
12 December 2007 | Teaching
According to this article in Spiegel Online, German students are enrolling in art-history programs in record numbers, spurred on in part by the booming art market. However, students aren’t always finding the jobs of their dreams waiting for them on the other side — some settle for a part-time gig or even an unpaid internship.
