by Jon Lackman | 9 November 2009 | Islamic
Oleg Grabar writes in The New Republic:
Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though of course the argument can be made that a possible danger to people may compel restrictions in the expression of opinions and of facts. I am not persuaded by this argument about this book. And the deletion of the images is also–a far more important criticism in this instance–a gratuitous betrayal of scholarship, since many other books (including at least four published by Yale, two of them by me) do show images of the Prophet … In the past, and still today, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad have been produced, and are still produced, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons … there can be no doubt that, especially from the thirteenth century onward, the Muslim world accepted the existence of representations of the Prophet. This iconography was not common, and was usually restricted to the accompaniment of a narrative text, or to serve as pious reminders of an exemplary life … To the extent that the argument against the so-called cartoons has centered on the legal propriety or impropriety of representing the Prophet Muhammad, it has been a pointless argument. Of course it is possible to question the Danish caricatures on grounds of taste, or social or political intent; but the lack of taste is not a legal category, and mischievous or even evil intent is difficult to discern in the absence of clearly stated moral and philosophical principles. The only certain lesson to draw from the sad story of the Danish cartoons is the almost universal prevalence of ignorance and incompetence–and that everyone, from writers and pundits to the leaders of mobs, should learn more before making a judgment or starting a riot.
by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2009 | Islamic
From The Baltimore Sun:
In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project has put the Baltimore museum at the vanguard of a movement that is transforming the study of ancient texts. Working with a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters is placing its entire collection of Qurans and other Islamic pieces online, where high-resolution images of the roughly 230 often richly illuminated or illustrated pieces may be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection …
“It’s very important to remember that Islamic art is a very nascent field,” [Walters curator Amy Landau] says. “It’s not like Renaissance art history that’s very well developed. We’re just really beginning. People are now trained in the languages. There’s more material documented. So there’s still so much more to do in the field, and it’s digitization projects such as this that make that possible. It’s going to be a huge push forward.” Persis Berlekamp, an art historian at the University of Chicago, says the still-nascent movement has transformed the field. As recently as the early 2000s, when she was pursuing her doctorate at Harvard, research could be a hit-or-miss affair, involving expensive and time-consuming travel that might not yield useful results.
by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2009 | Uncategorized
From the AP:
Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100 … During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964).
More to follow.
by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2009 | Museums
Former Northwestern University dean Rudolph H. Weingartner and Princeton University Art Museum director James Christen Steward duel in the pages of Inside Higher Ed over the Rose Art Museum.
… I said to myself “good for them” when reports first surfaced last winter that Brandeis intended to sell its collection of modern art, so that the considerable (envisaged) proceeds could support functions closer to the central goals of the university … I see a significant role for art museums on higher education campuses. But, with quite special exceptions, I see a very small pedagogic function for colleges and universities to own works of art, especially given the current cost and value of so many of them. I’d rather those museums were reclassified as galleries. To be sure, the provisions of deeds of gift must be scrupulously observed; but assuming that to be the case, let them sell their works of art if the funds thus gained will better serve the institutions’ educational mission … This month’s article in Inside Higher Ed quotes a task force formed by arts groups to figure out ways to avoid the next Brandeis as saying that campus museums should be regarded as “essential to the academic experience and to the entire educational enterprise.” But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded?
… And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition … Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are a “public good,” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose — often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing by their parent institutions in the perpetual fight against the perception that art represents a “luxury” in the logo-and data-centric university — is to be regretted.
Now seems as good a time as any to also belatedly catch up with Robert Storr’s April 2009 Frieze article on the matter:
… Word has it that Madoff’s chicanery cost several of Brandeis’s patrons a bundle, but the Rose costs the university nothing – much of its collection was bought for a song but is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars due to the market bubble Madoff helped to inflate. It is separately endowed, in the main self-supporting and even contributes to the larger institution’s budget. So what drove the trustees to make this catastrophic decision was not their inability to maintain the Rose; it was sheer opportunism. With the same money crisis confronting them that stares all colleges and universities down – but without any respect whatsoever for their predecessors who had created a model museum of contemporary art that put Brandeis on the cultural map nationally and internationally – the current stewards of its long-standing, now grievously compromised excellence looked at the Rose’s art holdings and saw a quick fix. In essence it would seem that the collection shimmered in the cash-strapped trustees’ eyes like grandmother’s bejeweled necklace; an expensive bauble that would be easy to liquidate. And so, while she slept, they euthanized Rose.
by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA has posted online the paper titles for the Chicago conference (Feb 10-13). A few piqued our interest:
by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2009 | Conservation
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles conservator Joyce Hill Stoner:
An art conservator who set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies’ artifacts … In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) … With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011 … Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one. Her goal? “To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say ‘Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,’ I’ll have done well.”
by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Lopez reviews the new book “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” by Nicholas Fox Weber:
Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Weber’s text … offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s … Weber’s tendency to stint the political circumstances surrounding the history of the Bauhaus leaves his narrative, at times, lacking a sense of real-world context. Nonetheless, this book provides an excellent introduction …
(Lopez might have mentioned that Weber is director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.)
by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2009 | Renaissance
Didier Rykner reads the Italian newspapers and wonders how it could be true that
Giorgio Vasari’s archives, held in his native city of Arezzo and belonging to the Museo Casa Vasari, a private museum whose owner, Count Giovanni Festari, passed away a few days ago, could have been sold for the extravagant sum of 150 million euros to a Russian firm which has not disclosed what it plans to do with them … Vittorio Sgarbi, the famous art historian and former Minister of Italian Culture, known for his numerous antics and for his bluntness, asserts that … this is all a huge prank meant to twist the government’s arm into becoming interested in and acquiring the archives.
by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2009 | Contemporary, Photography
From The New York Times:
Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89. His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who wrote frequently about his work. Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography, in part because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”
See also The Los Angeles Times.
by Jon Lackman | 28 October 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
From The New York Observer:
Ever since he got his start in the art world as an editor at the influential bimonthly magazine Flash Art in Milan, [Massimiliano] Gioni has enjoyed an extraordinarily swift rise as a curator … Some of the more outlandish stunts Mr. Gioni has overseen … include sending a 90-foot helium balloon of a naked man flying through the skies, installing a house made of bread by [Urs] Fischer in a church, and hanging three puppet children made by the satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan from the oldest tree in Milan … In his current capacity at the New Museum, Mr. Gioni says he is devoted to promoting radical art, and to putting on shows that people love even though they can’t understand them … For me not getting it is part of the excitement” … “In a society and a culture in which everything has a message and everything has a meaning and everything has a purpose,” he said, “I think we should cherish things that are obscure, that are directionless, that are useless, that are complicated beyond reasonable levels. That’s the greatness of art– even in New York, where everything has a price” … he began making his name as a critic … But writing and editing “was just a way to be involved with art,” Mr. Gioni explained. “Eventually I started knowing artists more and more, and I realized that there were different ways to be engaged with them, besides writing about their work.” One of the more unusual ways Mr. Gioni did this was by collaborating with the artist Maurizio Cattelan, whom he served for three years starting around 1998 as a Cyrano de Bergerac-style press guru, pretending to be him while giving interviews and delivering lectures. “People would phone me thinking it was him, and I would give these interviews in his place, and I would make up things,” Mr. Gioni said. “It was sort of first a game, but it became a profession.”
(via Artinfo.com)
by Jon Lackman | 27 October 2009 | Photography
Two recent posts by French photo historian André Gunthert have generated considerable discussion. In one post, Gunthert discusses elites who protest that one of their own is being “lynched,” an expression whose power lies in part in its ability to evoke a potent image, an expression that is also too easily abused. In the other post, Gunthert addresses the question of what photographs of varying and sometimes uncertain vintage can tell us about Roman Polanski’s culpability. He quotes one commentator arguing that “there was no rape,” “you’ve seen the photos, she looked 25.”
by Jon Lackman | 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 update their courses or otherwise come to grips with the technological changes occurring around them … In “The Slide Library: A Posthumous Assessment for our Digital Future,” art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker … rue the loss of the communal space around the light table, the art historians’ “public square” where meaningful interactions among colleagues and students traditionally have taken place … Other injuries to the teaching of art history brought about by the new technology bear mentioning in this context … Until projection systems improve significantly, surface values, always difficult to bring to the attention of students, will likely receive even less consideration in our classrooms than previously. Another matter of concern is the fate of the one-to-one comparison as a pedagogical device.
by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2009 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terry Smith considers David Carrier’s 2008 book A World Art History and Its Objects:
“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” … [Carrier] sets out to ask if such a world history is possible, decides that it is, and proposes a structure for it. The feeling that the history of art as a discipline should encompass all the visual arts of the world has been coming back into focus for a decade or more … Carrier aims to “demonstrate what art historians can learn from historians and from analytic philosophers” … [Carrier creates a] “basic structure for a world art history”. It consists of four parallel lines indicating the evolution of the art of Europe, China, India, and the Islamic World as occurring in parallel, with diagonal arrows indicating points of major contact … About these, Carrier believes, art historians should write “parallel stories,” thus producing “a “multicultural art history” … The problem is that a pile-up of parallels would bring his account perilously close to the essentialist generalities of the “the clash of civilizations” thesis … Carrier concludes that a multicultural history of world art will not become possible until Chinese, Indian, and Muslim art historians write their own narrative histories … Although he claims to offer a “political” analysis, the implications of postcolonial critique, now three decades deep, are not grasped … A worldly art history would, surely … devote considerable energy to tracing the trafficking in artifacts, the exchanging of artistic ideas, the differentiation and fusion that have occurred for millennia as cultures come into and go out of contact. The interaction between these regional and global flows and local art traditions and inventions is the core “object” of any world art history worth its name. An approach akin to this is identified as “intercultural” in what is probably the most useful publication to date on these questions, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008) … The journal World Art, currently being prepared for its launch by the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, will channel these and other approaches.
by Jon Lackman | 20 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Artist Nancy Spero has died. As has longtime Architectural Design (AD) editor Monica Pidgeon.
Theorist Peter Weibel and art historian Hans Belting have won prizes.
According to ARTINFO, “a fire destroyed 90 percent of the estate of Brazilian neoconcretist Helio Oiticica.”
And according to NPR, “The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal” to the notion that Greece has nowhere to put the Elgin Marbles.
by Jon Lackman | 16 October 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to Christiane Tauber, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer‘s new biography of Caravaggio successfully portrays the artist as more strategic and professional, and less scandalous and out-of-control, than previously thought.
by Jon Lackman | 15 October 2009 | Theory
We belatedly take note of a new online journal, Republics of Letters, a “peer-reviewed, open-access publication [that] is dedicated to the study of knowledge, politics, and the arts, from Antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the early modern period … sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) of Stanford University.” In its inaugural issue, co-founder Dan Edelstein asks, “Is Theory Dead?“:
… The fact that these two incompatible perspectives on the state of Theory – it’s totally passé, good riddance, vs. have you read the late Derrida? – can nonetheless coexist does not bode well for the future of the field. Indeed, it is beginning to look increasingly as though Theory will not go softly into that dark night, but rather that the humanities will become engaged in the methodological trench warfare that already defines anthropology and philosophy … There are deep problems with the way Theory has been taught and caught up in academic politics. There is no going back to the ‘80s. At the same time … it is worth recognizing the genuine intellectual thrill that studying Theory can trigger. This means taking a frank look at how and why Theory failed to live up to its promise, and how it could be recast. … the fundamental problem with Theory is that it stopped being theory. Derrida, or Lacan, or Deleuze, were not invoked to question, but to answer … The great theorists of the ‘60s and ‘70s produced works of dizzying interdisciplinarity … While there is no reason that humanities scholars must march in lockstep with the vanguard of other disciplines, intellectual integrity demands that we consider the challenges and debates in those fields. Healthy interdisciplinarity requires regular check ups … Must Althusser or Agamben have the last word on political thought? There is an entire discipline of political theory waiting to be tapped and queried (as Josiah Ober points out in his piece in our inaugural issue). Symbolic thought is a fascinating topic, but wouldn’t it be worth considering, say, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics instead of just Saussure’s? … Why else do we end up telling the same story over and over again? A story of resistance to power, in which the oppressed are once again endowed with agency, and struggle to overthrow the selfish political and economic structures of class and race … It is time we told some new stories.
Though I haven’t made my way through it, the September issue of Frieze magazine also tackles the “Whatever happened to theory” question.
[...] this week, the Art History Newsletter noted the premier of a new online journal, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of [...]
by Jon Lackman | 14 October 2009 | Ancient
In a public announcement, NYU Institute of Fine Arts director Patricia Rubin states:
The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University notes with deep sadness the death yesterday of our valued colleague, Dietrich von Bothmer, Distinguished Research Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to his long curatorial career, Dietrich von Bothmer was on the faculty of the Institute between 1965 and 2006.
According to the Dictionary of Art Historians:
Born to an aristocratic Hanover family, Bothmer worked as a youth for the German-Expressionist artist and sculptor Erich Heckel … In Oxford he met J. D. Beazley with whom he would study … [During WWII] Bothmer joined the U. S. army though not a citizen, and was assigned to the south Pacific theatre … In 1959 Bothmer advanced to Curator. The same year he was elected President of the American committee for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which he held until 1983. In this capacity, he author two fascicules in the CVA, one for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and another for the Metropolitan … he was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities at Oxford, Trier and Emory, named a Chavalier de la Legion d’Honneur and a member of both the Académie française and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) … Bothmer’s career at the Metropolitan was often controversial … Bothmer was also accused that his eagerness to secure excellent pieces for the Museum resulted in rewarding unscrupulous dealers and thieves.
by Jon Lackman | 13 October 2009 | Renaissance
A small portrait, the object of considerable controversy over recent years, is increasingly attributed to Leonardo, reports the Guardian:
The small picture of a young woman in profile was previously believed to be a German work from the early 19th century and has changed hands in recent years for around £12,000. But a growing number of leading Leonardo scholars agree the work is almost certainly by the Renaissance figurehead because it appears to have his fingerprint on it. Carbon dating and infrared analysis of Leonardo’s techniques back up the theory. If the scholars are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified for 100 years and will be worth tens of millions of pounds. Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the history of art at Oxford University, is so convinced the portrait is a Leonardo that he has written an as yet unpublished 200-page book about it.
For more, see this article from the Antiques Trade Gazette.
Not long ago Martin Kemp dismissed a fingerprint in a similar situation. What makes this case SO different?
by Jon Lackman | 13 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times:
Robert M. Murdock, an art historian and curator of 20th-century and contemporary art who organized some notable exhibitions, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 67 … his exhibitions included the first one-person museum show of Richard Tuttle’s work (1971); “Poets of the City: New York and San Francisco” (1974); and “Jess: Translations Salvages Paste-Ups” and “Berlin/Hanover: The 1920s” (both 1977) … exhibitions devoted to the work of Siah Armajani, Helen Frankenthaler and Inge Morath … a retrospective of the Dutch Conceptualist Jan Dibbets … “Theater in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design, 1913-1935” (1992) and “Two Lives: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz” (1993).
by Jon Lackman | 12 October 2009 | Books, Modern
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) and Yve-Alain Bois’s Painting as Model (1991) have just received Portuguese translations. A reviewer for the Brazilian newspaper Estadao takes them to be representative of two opposing views of American modernism.
What the myopic masses seem to observe in the case of Yale’s alleged “gratuitous betrayal of scholarship” and “free speech” is that the choice not to print the images means that this book will likely find a much more receptive audience in the Muslim world. The images are obviously easily available via the internet for those who wish to see them, and now this scholar’s work will also be available to thinkers who exist outside our Eurocentric scope of vision.