by Jon Lackman | 12 October 2009 | Modern
The Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute have released a new online edition of van Gogh’s letters:
The edition, based on fifteen years of research, was edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker … For each of the 902 letters the edition gives a transcription of the original Dutch or French text, a translation into English, a full (zoomable) facsimile, comprehensive annotation, and illustrations (about 2000 in all) of the works of art discussed in the letters … An accompanying six-volume book edition is published in three languages (Dutch, French and English).
by Jon Lackman | 6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Tonight at the Metropolitan Museum, Salman Rushdie in conversation with curator Carmen Bambach, curator Navina Haidar Haykel, and Harvard professor David Roxburgh:
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence brings together Renaissance Italy, Mughal India, and the cultures that lie between in a tale that has been described as a “sumptuous mixture of history and fable.” The book combines imaginative stories with meticulously researched historical detail, referring widely to works of art of the period. Artists and their creations—from gilded manuscript pages to monumental architecture—form a key to the central themes of the book. In evoking them, Enchantress brings the world of the art historian alive. Rushdie will talk with curators and art historians to explore the aspects of the novel that deal with the visual arts, culture, and historical setting of the period.
by Jon Lackman | 6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From Artinfo.com:
On Wednesday night, at a benefit to help fund upcoming projects, [The] X [Initiative] honored legendary dealer Paula Cooper and Picasso biographer John Richardson … [Richardson] unleashed a devastating attack on art history professor Rosalind Krauss, a vocal Richardson critic, who — Richardson cheerily noted — once suggested that he would “set Picasso studies back 50 years” through his work … “The history of art is usually taught as the history of artists, of movements, of styles,” Emory University art historian James Meyer told the crowd in his panegyric to Paula Cooper. “The dealer is the unsung hero of these narratives. The gallerist supports the artists morally and financially.”
by Jon Lackman | 6 October 2009 | Museums
From the Telegraph:
Lovers of France’s two great symbols of cultural exception – its haute cuisine and fine art – are aghast at plans to open a McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé in the Louvre museum next month … “This is the last straw,” said one art historian working at the Louvre, who declined to be named … There was already an outcry last year when Starbucks opened a café perilously close to the Right bank museum’s entrance. Employees and art aficionados sent management a petition in protest … France has become McDonald’s biggest market in the world outside of the US, according to the chain.
by Jon Lackman | 30 September 2009 | Photography
Thomas Morton recently wrote for Vice:
… Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters … The interest in coverage is legitimate … [but they all] write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.
On The Media‘s Bob Garfield interviewed Morton:
BOB GARFIELD: … At one site in particular, Morton noticed that photographers were essentially cropping out the adjacent prosperity.
THOMAS MORTON: And so, he took us on top of this mound where he had taken one of the pictures that really, really evokes this desolation, but if you tilt the camera even just like a little bit to the right or to the left on one side [LAUGHS] there’s this really well-kept food factory building with a nicely manicured lawn out front, and the other way there’s an office building that when we there everybody was out like eating their lunch; it was bustling. There was all this activity.
BOB GARFIELD: A wider shot would have spoiled the mood, eh?
THOMAS MORTON: That is true. Michigan Grand Central Terminal, which is a huge, dilapidated old train station, it’s been that way since the ’80s and there’s been a lot of pictures of it, but it’s kind of considered like an iconic shot to be matched up with the current stories about the bottom falling out of the automotive industry, and such. But it’s just, it’s disingenuous. It’s like going to the base of Roosevelt Island and taking pictures of the old mental hospital from the ’50s to underscore some point about “Obama Care.”
[...]
THOMAS MORTON: I think when you’re presented with a photo and then a little bit of description of it, the image stands so strongly that it’s almost hard to argue it; you’re throwing what seem like minor quibbles at this shot of utter desolation.
by Jon Lackman | 30 September 2009 | Uncategorized
Artsjournal.com blogger Tyler Green has taken aim at an ongoing contest sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program, a contest being co-directed by Artsjournal.com founder and editor Douglas McLennan (Green hasn’t mentioned the connection):
Several weeks ago, the National Arts Journalism Program launched a contest hoping to find new models for arts journalism. I questioned the exercise but wrote that I was grateful that NAJP had “provided an opportunity for a broader discussion of what art journalism should become.” Not any more … Of the NAJP contest’s five announced presenters (apparently five contest finalists are being held back in secret until Oct. 2), four have little-to-nothing to do with journalism. Three are infotainment projects that more closely resemble a hybrid of iTunes and Access Hollywood than they resemble the investigation, presentation or analysis of events, facts or news … The National Arts Journalism Project’s drift away from journalism is disappointing, but the next problem with the NAJP contest is just as puzzling. It laid down guidelines for entrants [regarding the eligibility of nonprofit projects] — and then admitted that it was disregarding them … Moving the goalposts after the entrants were in strikes at the integrity of the enterprise.
Addenda: Green apparently also weighed in on the journalistic credibility of one of the contest entrants. Worth noting also that fellow Artsjournal.com blogger Lee “Culturegrrl” Rosenbaum entered the contest. [I have included links to Google cache pages, because some original NAJP pages aren't working, at least not at the moment.]
Thanks for the post.
Re: the Rail, if a site isn’t journalism, it can’t have “journalistic credibility.” The mere printing of words doesn’t make something journalism…
Thanks for singling out my CultureGrrl entry. Here’s a better link to what I submitted for the contest: http://najp.org/summit/projects/culturegrrl/. Winners haven’t been announced yet, but, sadly, I was not among them.
Tyler Green has to be one of the grumpiest people on the internet, which is saying something. The combination of bile, pique, outrage, and prolific production seems to have made him the most prominent art blogger around.
by Jon Lackman | 26 September 2009 | Contemporary
From The Prague Post:
Galerie Václav Špála’s current exhibition features seven contemporary Czech artists who were invited to collaborate with other artists – their predecessors as well as their contemporaries – from Czech and Western art history. As a result, art history is not only referred to in this show but is also stolen, changed or recreated. This is only fitting, since the history of art offers endless opportunities for appropriation and reinterpretation …
Ondřej Brody and Marek Meduna are showing Pissoire (2009), a video of the two artists urinating on the grave of the revered Czech art historian and theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký (1910-90). These two were likely inspired by the line from the [show's] manifesto, ‘The artist can use the art to create blasphemies.’ “
by Jon Lackman | 25 September 2009 | Conferences
The Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a conference this Thurs-Fri (Oct 1-2). Participants include Douglas Crimp, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Constance Penley, Kaja Silverman, Janet Wolff, Jonathan Flatley, Julia Bryan Wilson, Darby English, Jennifer Gonzalez, Alex Galloway, Brian Goldfarb, Kimberly Christen, Aaron Glass, and Norman Vorano.
by Jon Lackman | 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 awarded Exemplary Course designation for 2009. Art Fundamentals is an art history course taught not from the traditional linear, chronological-historical perspective, but from the broader view of looking at the universal language of art through the study of theory, terminology, themes, design principles, media and the history of the visual arts across time and diverse cultures, Haynes explained. “A rich variety of assessments and assignments offers students with differing learning styles, the tools to build meaning while acquiring an understanding of the conceptual goals that are reflected in the student learning outcomes established for the course. Through the organization and presentation of course materials, students are constantly prompted to think about the most fundamental of question in relation to art, ‘What is art?’ ” she said.
by Jon Lackman | 23 September 2009 | Conferences, Contemporary
This November brings the 1st Former West Congress in Utrecht, “the first major public program of the long-term, multifaceted international research, education, publishing, and exhibition project” that “is an attempt to rethink the West and its art out of their hegemonic self-narration and to propose another, speculative view of the history of western art after 1989, one evolving around significant social and political changes and in active dialogue with post-communist and postcolonial thought.” Speakers include Charles Esche, Sarat Maharaj, Renata Salecl, Boris Groys, Paul Gilroy, Catherine David, Simon Sheikh, Claire Bishop, Douglas Gordon, Okwui Enwezor, and Tom Holert.
by Jon Lackman | 21 September 2009 | Museums
We belatedly catch up with former Met director Thomas Hoving, who finished serializing his memoir at Artnet over the summer:
If I could do it over what would I do differently? I would not have gotten my Ph.D. in art history and archaeology nor would I have become a museum curator. I would have taken a great dollop of art history, sure, but I would then have gone to a series of schools and apprenticeships for art conservation. That would have satisfied my hunger for the objects themselves, my desire to become an active artist and would have allowed me to help preserve for other generations wondrous works of art. I would have not restricted myself to great paintings, but would have learned the techniques of fixing up and preserving paper, sculpture, leather and anything blessed artists had used over time to create divine things. Conservation would have enabled me to study and reveal fakes in a more professional way. Plus, since conservators are in such demand, I’d always be employed.
But if Hoving had become an art conservator (they are such a mild-mannered breed), how would he have satisfied his lifelong and relentless search for fame and publicity?
by Jon Lackman | 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 greatest lecturer and, by the late architect Philip Johnson, “the most influential architecture teacher ever” — said he does not feel well enough to teach his “Introduction to the History of Art” course … The course will not be offered this fall, and the History of Art Department has not yet decided who will teach the course next year in Scully’s place.
by Jon Lackman | 15 September 2009 | Uncategorized
With this quote from Morelli — “. . . [the] art historian will gradually disappear, no great loss either, you will admit” — the Dictionary of Art Historians injects welcome notes of modesty and humor into what could otherwise come off as a po-faced celebration of largely trivial figures.
We’ve often linked to the Dictionary, but never stopped to remark upon its impressiveness. In the last year alone it’s added 66 new entries to its collection of profiles. It was begun in 1986 as a card file by art librarian and bibliographer Lee Sorensen, who still directs the project and now makes use of a few helpers.
We’ve found it indispensable. As Sorensen notes, “Biographical and methodological information about art historians can be difficult to find. Tucked away in obscure obituaries or foreign-language Festschriften, the basics of where an art historian trained or who his/her major influence was, or even what methodology the scholarship employs are often impossible to discern.”
Amen.
[Tangential question: what would be the best collective noun to designate a group of art historians? A punctum? A vernissage? An intaglio? A carousel? I seem to remember the latter was first suggested by James Elkins in one of his books.]
by Jon Lackman | 10 September 2009 | Museums
In a recent essay for caa.reviews, Carleton College Director of Exhibitions and Curator of the College Art Collection Laurel Bradley considers the fate of the university art museum, a topic on many minds following the recent Rose Art Museum debacle:
Between 1942 and 2008 campus art museums increased dramatically in number … A new funding formula, drawing on private donors in the community, and foundations and government agencies favoring K–12 programs, increasingly replaced the past system that relied wholly on university coffers. New community-based funding solutions to museum budgeting triggered a realignment of mission. As Susan Taylor, then director of the Wellesley College Art Museum, wrote in 1988: “If a college museum seeks outside funding it is critical that its administration recognize the museum’s responsibility to a broad public” … The campus museum began to resemble the civic or independent art museum not only in its professional practices but also in its audience … Students, despite their status as a captive audience, can be hard to find in a college/university art museum … In the shift to the twenty-first century, the tide may be turning back … There are signs that the art museum is being redefined within the university as an active site for teaching and learning for students and faculty not only in the disciplines of studio art and art history but all across the curriculum.
Bradley reviews this new trend at length, then concludes:
Holland Cotter penned a stirring rebuttal to Reinharz’s devaluing of campus museums in the New York Times this past February. With “Why University Museums Matter,” the critic reviewed three exhibitions at various Yale University museum venues. Cotter sees the academic museum as the ideal vehicle to sustain museums and museum practice through hard times … Apparently, campus museums do not need to choose between serving the outside public and internal campus stakeholders. Research-driven exhibitions, inclusive of the questions and experiments at the heart of academic discourse, can also please outside visitors including New York Times critics, and may be essential to the survival of all museums in the twenty-first century.
by Jon Lackman | 9 September 2009 | Modern, Museums
Hamburg is hosting an exhibition on Rosa Schapire, the art historian, feminist and champion of Die Bruecke (she arranged Karl Schmidt-Rottluff‘s first solo show). She battled sexism and anti-Semitism to become a significant scholar and collector, without the help of an inheritance or a rich husband.
by Jon Lackman | 8 September 2009 | Uncategorized
We return from hiatus to continuing controversy over the Muhammad cartoons, this time triggered by the decision Yale University Press made to remove them from Jytte Klausen’s new book, “The Cartoons that Shook the World.”
In other news, Harvard has recently tenured one East Asian art scholar and two American art scholars:
Former Associate Professor of History and Art and Architecture Jennifer L. Roberts was appointed full professor in the department effective July 1, marking the second tenure in just one year of an American art historian within the historically Eurocentric department.
According to the Telegraph, “A newly discovered catalogue of artworks stolen by Nazis compiled for Adolf Hitler could help unravel the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of lost materpieces seized during the Second World War.” And Der Spiegel interviewed art historian Birgit Schwarz “about why Adolf Hitler saw himself as a genius and how his obsession with art affected his political views”:
In my opinion, people have underestimated the notion that Hitler considered himself an artist, in fact, an artistic genius, and that much can be deduced from this self-image, this overheated artist’s ego. However, this has hardly played a role in the research to date. That’s the starting point, from my perspective, because it can help us gain a better understanding of Hitler as a person, as well as his system of power.
According to Reuters, the Musée d’Orsay is closing in November for a year-long renovation and sending its treasures on tour to San Francisco, Nashville, Madrid, Canberra and Tokyo. The renovation is part of a larger overhaul being undertaken by museum president Guy Cogeval:
Cogeval said he was determined to shake up a curatorial torpor that had set in. He dragged works out of storage that had never before been seen, painted walls of certain galleries dramatic shades of purple, red and olive green, and — “the unthinkable!” — began double-hanging paintings.
by Jon Lackman | 1 June 2009 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Tuesday, September 8, 2009.
by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2009 | Books
Thames & Hudson managing director Jamie Camplin writes in The Art Newspaper:
Is there a crisis in art book publishing? … The challenges are real and substantial, but they are only obliquely connected with the economic downturn … The first is the obvious one of reaching consumers. The growth in public interest in art during the past two decades has not been underpinned by an effective retail infrastructure. Many museums now offer a smaller range of books, in preference to non-book merchandise, which is a dereliction of their duty as custodians of cultural education. The dominant book chains around the world ignore the evident public enthusiasm for art and succeed only in proving that if you do not display art books, you do not sell them. The independents suffer from price competition and the dominant power of Amazon in driving prices down to unrealistic levels … There’s a fourth challenge … if the only thing to distinguish “art” from “life” is that you find it in an art gallery, the discourse about it—the articles and books people write—is in trouble. One reaction is to enter a philosophical cul-de-sac, a dead end of theory and obscurantism. Another is to appropriate art for contemporary society’s great mass-market fuel: celebrity. Neither of these help the art-book publisher’s first duty, which is to encourage people to look at art and help them understand it …
Art has a very strong hand to play in the 21st century. In an era in which technology makes most products more uniform but in which printing technology can show art’s strengths as never before, in which fragmenting marketplaces and marketing platforms need all the help they can get, and in which the power of the visual to sway emotions has never been stronger, art’s distinctiveness, creativity and originality give any art-book programme a strong start.
(See also this 2006 report.)
One other factor is that art books, even if they are popular, have the additional burden of higher overhead costs. Even if they sell as well or better than,say,the latest Dan Brown farrago of nonsense, they may not be as protfitable because of the higher overhead
“The growth in public interest in art during the past two decades has not been underpinned by an effective retail infrastructure” — Thames & Hudson managing director Jamie Camplin
Fascinating and honest quote. The fundamental reason is that the “fine art” world should not exist. It only exists through massive government grants that have created a false industry. Americans have no problems in paying for art, i.e., top 40 music and movies.
If the “fine art” world would only embrace themes and styles as found in movies and popular music, then museums would not need massive government subsidies, a retail infra-structure would blossom, and government regulators would line up to collect the taxes.
by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2009 | Books, Contemporary, Photography
In caa.reviews, Matthew Biro considers a new book by Michael Fried:
Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s … Second, Fried puts forward an important reevaluation of his own critical and historical account of modernism, demonstrating its relevance for a time—and a medium—seemingly far removed from his modernist concerns …
For Fried, the importance of contemporary tableau photography—defined as large-scale photographs intended to be hung on walls and viewed as paintings—can only be revealed in light of the development, breakdown, and eventual (modernist) transformation of the antitheatrical tradition in painting. This new type of photograph—which, in comparison to traditional photographs, claimed the viewer’s attention in a new way, and which simultaneously emphasized its artificiality or staged character—revived the absorptive ideal while at the same time acknowledging the various crises with which it had to contend. In addition, it responded to the development of Minimalist and Postminimalist practices as well as the supposed rout of “modernist absorption” (a formulation that Fried does not use in “Art and Objecthood”), i.e., the failure of the values of “presentness” and “instantaneousness” to hold the field in the 1960s and 1970s …
The great importance of Fried’s book lies in the fact that he presents a radically different understanding of the significant characteristics and concerns of art photography than has previously been offered. Not only does he articulate a convincing alternative to the account of the artistic use of the medium developed by postmodern thought, but he also offers an important corrective to the naïve realism that mars certain forms of social-historical photographic analysis. The main flaw in Fried’s study is its lack of concrete non-art-or-photography-related historical analysis, a deficiency that is most strikingly felt in his readings of Wall, Delahaye, Gursky, and Demand, in whose work the social and the political loom so large … Also missing from Fried’s important book is a thorough reflection on how photography still distinguishes itself from painting.
by Jon Lackman | 27 May 2009 | Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Susan Donahue Kuretsky considers Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art:
Wood’s study attempts in part to redress limitations in traditional formulations of the Renaissance (familiarly defined in relationship to Italy) as a myth of rebirth, repetition, and revival of classical antiquity in art following a dark period of disintegration … He argues that Germans did not conceive of Antiquity as distantly separated from their own present by a dark Middle Age, since they saw themselves as the direct imperial continuation, through the Holy Roman Empire, of both the grandeur and technical ingenuity of Rome … Wood’s larger project continues and expands his hypothesis [that] pre-modern productions of all kinds of artifacts, including architecture, were not considered in terms of individual authorship, or the circumstances or historical moment of their actual production, but rather as they related typologically to—and could substitute for—links in a chain of earlier artifacts of a similar sort …
Wood’s study ranges widely over sculpture, architecture, prints, paintings, and various other forms of visual expression, both documentary and aesthetic. His erudition is extraordinary, as is his command of language, though it must be said that he regularly casts the reader into some heavy seas of abstruse and convoluted terminology. (“The possibility of escape from the secularization model is the hypothesis that images and artifacts, to the extent that they made referential claims, worked not by semiosis but by the mechanisms of labeling and through the myth of a replica chain structured on type-token ratios” (83).) This is a study that requires as much re-rereading as reading, but the rewards are many … Wood’s selections of examples often act as springboards for consideration of larger categories of images or artifacts, giving his text application well beyond its focus on a particular place and period. His extensive discussion of the evolution of alphabets and the complex, shifting relationships between the new print typography and earlier calligraphy is in itself worth the price of the book. Interspersed throughout this long, densely written study are startling shafts of verbal elegance and wit that light up the page and carry the reader on, such as: “This sense of woundedness was the precondition for the Italian sense of historical distance from antiquity”
This story is ridiculous. The “Carrousel du Louvre” has been filled with cheap food-court fare for years. Why should a McDonald’s cause such an uproar? They make it sound like it will be in the museum proper– highly misleading.
indeed. there is a starbucks right near the entrance.