26 January 2011 | Uncategorized
Recent news: The Art Instinct author Denis Dutton has died. Transnationalism’s all the rage at the MLA. European libraries are digitizing. Art in America has a new editor, journalist Lindsay Pollock. The Haus der Kunst has a new director, Okwui Enwezor. The Carnegie Museums have a new president, John Wetenhall. BBC Radio interviews Anthony Caro, [...]
28 December 2010 | Uncategorized
As Falmouth Art Gallery director, Brian Stewart “proved that small galleries can have a mighty impact,” writes the Guardian: Supported by a dedicated team, he masterminded groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Surrealists On Holiday (2004), inspired by the time spent in Cornwall by Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and others in 1937, and a [...]
21 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Today I stumbled upon a publication by the “Lighting Research Center” – an organization I was utterly unaware of. Part of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, their mission is “to advance the effective use of lighting and thereby to create a positive legacy for society and the environment.” This type of research is obviously of importance to [...]
20 December 2010 | Uncategorized
I’m interested in the phenomenon of art historians who collect. (Anything been written on it?) A handful of wealthy academics have assembled amazing blue-chip collections, but just as interesting are those who’ve put together quirkier caches on a small budget. I recently came across Louisiana Tech professor Saul Zalesch, who collects almanacs, according to student [...]
10 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Two posthumous books by art historian Michael Baxandall reveal him to have been a skilled memoirist and novelist, writes the Prague Post. Teju Cole, who wrote an appreciation of Baxandall in 2008, was (at least at that time) “finishing his Ph.D. in art history at Columbia” in early Netherlandish art. He is also a photographer [...]
2 December 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an amusing article, “To Monitor Office Behavior, Colleges Add Windows to Professors’ Doors. And faculty members, to regain their privacy, hang curtains or tape up paperwork.” Surveillance seems omnipresent today in life and in academic scholarship, and our field is no exception. In the September 2010 Journal of [...]
23 November 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Guardian: Rozsika Parker, who has died aged 64 of cancer, was a woman of diverse achievements as a feminist, art historian, psychotherapist and writer … In 1973 Rosie met Griselda Pollock and they formed [a] feminist art history collective, an informal group composed of artists, art historians and journalists … Rosie and Griselda’s [...]
18 November 2010 | Uncategorized
With a dash of overstatement perhaps, Patricia Cohen writes in The New York Times: A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and [...]
28 October 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal have lately been discussing some unusual proposals emanating from Texas A&M University. According to the WSJ: A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students [...]
8 October 2010 | Uncategorized
This Sunday witnesses the premiere of a new 13-part national public television series Art Through Time: A Global View, “a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG for Annenberg Media.” The entire series can be streamed online, on the show’s website, which also includes images and transcripts and bonus material. What is the show’s approach? [...]
24 September 2010 | Uncategorized
André Gunthert has called my attention to a fascinating new “reverse image search” tool called TinEye. Simply put, you give it an image and it finds similar ones. Gunthert found himself wondering where Le Nouvel Observateur had gotten the photo it used to create a recent cover. TinEye located it easily, despite the additional text [...]
30 August 2010 | Uncategorized
Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education painter Laurie Fendrich asks why it is “that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence”: A lot of people can’t understand how art of any kind conveys meaning … At the same time, many are terribly intimidated by art—especially modern and contemporary art … The [...]
4 August 2010 | Uncategorized
The Los Angeles Times has written an interesting profile of Getty Research Institute director Thomas Gaehtgens. It seems unfortunate to me that they decided to bill this article as a demonstration that Gaehtgens has “quietly gained acclaim” and “gained the admiration of his staff,” when the only proof of this in the piece is two [...]
2 August 2010 | Uncategorized
There are of course other kinds of diversity besides those of academic background. When completing the U.S. government’s “Survey of Earned Doctorates” today, I noticed that it asked about race/ethnicity, and so I went online to see what the latest data was on that for art history. Of the 207 people who received PhDs in [...]
30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop [...]
28 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The Art Newspaper editor Anna Somers Cocks writes: [In 1944 London University agreed to] “maintain and preserve the Warburg Library in perpetuity, provide it with a suitable building near the university centre and keep it adequately equipped and staffed” … So why is the Warburg fighting for its life against London University? … There are [...]
19 July 2010 | Uncategorized
More on the history of American collectors from the L.A. Times: With names like Morgan, Getty and Huntington attached to impressive collections available for public view, the history of art collecting in America has acquired a new level of scholarly scrutiny … Art historians tend to concentrate on connoisseurship and aesthetics. That’s beginning to change. [...]
18 July 2010 | Uncategorized
Recently in the press: The Education of the Virgin (c. 1617), in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, has been reattributed by curator John Marciari to Velázquez. See Marciari’s article in Ars Magazine (full text not online); The Guardian; Los Angeles Times; El Pais. “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” at the [...]
1 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The 63-year-old actor Peter Weller, known best as RoboCop, recently completed Syracuse University’s MA program in Renaissance art (two-thirds of which is conducted in Italy) and he is now at work on a PhD at UCLA. He recently discussed his life in a commencement address at the City University of New York: I was inspired [...]
30 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From SMU: Following an international search, the Department of Art History at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts today announced the appointment of Dr. Roberto Tejada as the new Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History, effective August 1. The new endowed senior position was made possible by a generous anonymous gift of $2 million, intended [...]
