by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic:
Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic torsions: an uprush of souls, Satan, arms outstretched like a diva, Cain trying to rip his forehead in two. The symmetry is staggering: the soldiers casting lots for Christ’s cloak with the crucifix behind them like a bolt of lightning, the angels’ wing tips forming the apex of a triangle above the body of Christ, rigid and flat as a tomb.
Shape-shifters, skydivers, ectoplasms, wraiths, their every tendon revealed beneath transparent robes and skin: each figure is a figment of outline and wash that lives only on the page.
See also the Times, El Pais, and previews from the Independent, Times and Telegraph.
by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Books, Theory
A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and “The Gendered Subject” have disappeared. In their place, we find a new section on “Authorship and Identity” and an expanded section on “Globalization and its Discontents” (formerly titled “The Other: Art History and/as Museology”).
Several authors have been added: Vasari, D.N. Rodowick, William Pietz, David Summers, Claire Farago, Stephen Bann, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Jennifer Doyle, Walter Benjamin, Satya P. Mohanty, Marquard Smith, and María Fernández. Several others have been dropped: Margaret Iversen, Louis Marin, Rosalind Krauss, Andreas Huyssen, Nanette Solomon, Lisa Tickner, Paul Smith, Annie E. Coombes, and Nestor García Canclini, as well as Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (Also, new texts have been chosen for Erwin Panofsky, Craig Owens, Amelia Jones, and Mary Kelly.) Incidentally, three of the new texts come from the 2006 volume A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones.
The whole comes with a new introduction and conclusion by Preziosi, in which he writes:
As with the first edition, this is not a ‘history of art history’ nor a historiography of ‘visual culture studies’; rather, it is a critical interrogation of the artifice itself of those histories … Working as a historian, critic, or museologist of artistry in the contemporary world demands increasingly explicit attention to the ethical dimension of one’s practice and its inescapable political and economic resonances … The field’s coy scientism has long been coeval with its coy spiritualism.
by Jon Lackman | 10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline:
Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and New Year’s in a major eastern city. Known in the profession simply as “APA,” it draws about 2,500 attendees each year – 2,200 in this recession year – and serves as the profession’s chief hiring fair …
To be sure, the panel on “Philosophical Perspectives on Female Sexuality” was not your grandpa’s APA. Indiana University’s Elizabeth Lloyd, in her paper on “Analyzing Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Orgasm,” crisply outlined how male assumptions ludicrously distort “Darwinian” explanations of this explosive adaptation.
And the University of South Florida’s Rebecca Kukla – a professor of obstetrics and gynecology as well as philosophy – offered a brilliant analytic comparison, in her “Depression, Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction: The Invisibility of Female Sexuality in Medicine,” of male-directed ads for Viagra and ads aimed at female sexual dysfunction, demonstrating the ongoing belief that female sexuality, unlike male, cannot be located in a specific body part.
At the same time, as at all APAs, major philosophers jousted and expounded. Following a memorial session for Richard Rorty, an American philosopher who broke free of the field into wider public recognition, Princeton’s Cornel West, the noted African American thinker who has done the same, asked how others might do so.
One answer unlikely to satisfy West could be found at the book exhibits, where 40 publishers displayed wares.
Dominating the stand of Open Court, a philosophy press, were volumes in its best-selling, much-imitated series “Popular Culture and Philosophy,” whose constantly appearing new titles include The Matrix and Philosophy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy – all collections of essays by philosophy profs on the import of their pop-cultural subjects.
“Our all-time best seller,” confided David Ramsay Steele, the house’s top editor, “is The Simpsons and Philosophy – more than 500,000 copies sold.”
by Jon Lackman | 9 April 2009 | Awards
Down from six last year, two art historians this year won Guggenheims:
Francesca Fiorani, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia: Leonardo da Vinci’s shadows.
Jaime Lara, Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music: Flying Francis: a new iconography in the Andes.
This year a total of 180 were awarded, down slightly from 190 last year.
by Jon Lackman | 9 April 2009 | Africa, Books
We belatedly take note of a post by Gary Schwartz:
… a research institute in Paris and Houston, Texas, known as The Image of the Black in Western Art … was put in place by the oil millionaire Dominique de Menil (1908-97), a formidable figure in 20th-century patronage of minority politics as well as art. Her own explanation of her motivation she put into words thus:
The decision in 1960 to launch a systematic investigation of the iconography of blacks in Occidental art did not proceed from any clear plan. It was an impulse prompted by an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954. Many works of art contradicted segregation. A sketch by a master could reveal a depth of humanity beyond any social condition, race or color. So why not assemble these art works in an exhibition or a book? With such a naïve approach, a serious enterprise was started.
…By 1984, the enterprise had published or contracted three of the four monumental studies it planned to bring out: 1: From the Pharaohs to the fall of the Roman Empire (1976), 2: From the Early Christian age to the “Age of Discovery” (1979) and 4: From the American Revolution to World War I (1989). But there was a life-size gap where volume 3 should be, covering the not insignificant period from about 1500 to 1800 …
At a small meeting in Amsterdam on June 26th [2008], Jean Michel Massing of the University of Cambridge said that he would be handing in the manuscript of a large book on the subject at the end of the year, a manuscript however that does not really meet the description of vol. 3. A book of studies, I assume, rather than a survey. He added in less concrete terms that the classical vol. 3 was also in the works … being undertaken under the auspices of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, which is intending also to republish also the already-printed volumes. David Bindman, retired professor of art history at University College, London, is acting as general editor.
by Jon Lackman | 8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Thomas W. Gaehtgens notes that Willibald Sauerländer’s 85th birthday was recently celebrated in Munich and Princeton, which held a two-day conference in his honor. Sauerländer recently lectured on David’s painting of Marat.
Oskar Bätschmann remembers art historian Hans A. Lüthy, who died recently. Once the director of the Schweizerischen Instituts für Kunstwissenschaft, Lüthy published on Géricault, Ferdinand Hodler, and other artists.
Horst Bredekamp has won yet another award, the Richard Hamann Prize.
by Jon Lackman | 8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Here at The Art History Newsletter, we’re contemplating making more changes. You asked for the ability to post comments — done. What else would you like to see? What other blogs (academic or otherwise) do you enjoy and wish this one more resembled? And what do you think of these ideas?: We could give anyone the ability to post newsletter items. We could also give people the ability to share their art-historical works-in-progress and receive feedback. Would anyone? Would you?
Some have asked for images on the blog. Alas, we don’t yet see how to do that legally without spending lots of time and money securing permissions. Is there a way? Some have also asked to be notified by email of new posts. We haven’t yet found free or low-cost software that does that well, though you can set up your own free alerts or RSS feed. We could perhaps also send automatic updates to Facebook and/or Twitter.
Let us know what you think by adding your comments to this post. And if you’re interested in becoming a regular or occasional contributor to the Newsletter, email us.
by Jon Lackman | 7 April 2009 | Books
From the recently published book Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, edited by Daniel Esterman:
Barcelona, 21 July 1927
… I know that after 1000 monographs have exhausted a million details, their blurred image will make a fine picture for the few people who are taken by such things. May they be taken by other things.
The professional habit becomes so strong that vanity is reinforced each moment by the simple success of its preoccupations. The humility of unpaid, unsung scholarship is a foolish tale: I am overwhelmed by the libraries of the world which surely contain 10,000,000 monographs—& the books, stores & quais, & the pages rotting in warehouses—which no search for proposed truth or man’s happiness designed, but the professional practice of printing, broadcasting personal details. What businessman has the circulation of a poor thesis? the discussion, the review, the endless citation & recollection of his existence in footnotes & polemics? These may have happy results—give us telephones or a more just view of man’s character. But disinterestedness is not their prime distinction …
by Jon Lackman | 6 April 2009 | Books, Theory
In the March 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Elisa de Halleux reviews Georges Didi-Huberman’s new essay collection L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels:
Didi-Huberman takes representations of the body and the flesh as a means to dwell on the spectator’s intimate relationship with the image, and to describe the nature of that relationship … the image “opens” in the same way that our sensibility, our hearts, our flesh sometimes “expand” in the presence of an image that moves us: “Images open and close like our bodies as we look at them” … Concepts are used, above all, for their ability to make us think above and beyond historical exactitude … Didi-Huberman’s approach to art is not strictly historical, but his thinking is nonetheless fruitful for the discipline of art history … His discussion of the power of Christian art, in a chapter on exegesis and visuality in Christianity, is certainly one of the best in a book which occasionally, it must be said, seems to push abstruseness to its limits. That is not the least of the paradoxes of his work, which, dealing as it does with the theme of incarnation, becomes, through its verbal virtuosity, at times almost disembodied.
by Jon Lackman | 3 April 2009 | Asia, Books
In the March/April ’09 ArtAsiaPacific, Don J. Cohn reviews three recent books:
… Melissa Chiu, museum director at Asia Society in New York, and the author/editor of several catalogs for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art (herein Chicona, AAP’s, not Chiu’s, neologism), has written a brief, intimidatingly titled book that offers an elementary “paint by the numbers” introduction … According to Chiu’s Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know, the 7 things you should know are: 1. Chicona began decades ago; 2. Chicona “is more diverse than you might think”; 3. Museums and galleries in China and abroad have promoted Chicona since the 1990s; Government censorship influences Chinese artists; 5. The Chinese artist diaspora has returned home; 6. Chicona museums in China are on the rise; 7. The world is collecting Chicona. And here, courtesy of ArtAsiaPacific, are 7 things you don’t want to know about Chicona: 1. Much Chicona is overpriced by any standards; 2. Chinese culture tolerates emulation, appropriation and imitation in the arts to a degree unacceptable in the West; 3. It is unacknowledged that most Chicona is indebted to 20th-century Western art (Duchamp, Kaprow, Cage, Paik, Acconci, Beuys, Nauman); 4. Some major Chinese artists are burnt out and copy themselves to meet market demand; 5. Chicona (by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Zhu Yu, Liu Jin) incorporating human fetal corpses and cruelty to animals does not demonstrate freedom of expression in China but rather a barbaric and unscrupulous legal system; 6. China’s arts infrastructure remains immature, arbitrary, bureaucratic, venal; 7. Much of Chicona is 21st-century chinoiserie, valued by buyer and seller alike as an “exotic” Asian culture imitating a “higher” Western civilization. These critical issues, skirted entirely in 7 Things and highly diluted somewhere in the prolixity of [Karen Smith’s] Nine Lives, are discussed in Richard Vine’s New China, New Art, a superb, controlled, survey of a vast, writhing subject … the finest introduction to Chinese avant-garde art since the 1970s.
Check this out: http://www.thenewgrandtour.com – we’re also doing this show below in HK.
JOSE PARLA: READING THROUGH SEEING, NEW WORKS
Ooi Botos Gallery is pleased to announce Reading through Seeing, an exhibition by contemporary artist Jose Parla, on view 14 May through 11 July 2009. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and will showcase new paintings, works on paper, photographs and ceramic works.
The exhibition will take place during Art HK 09 and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by scholars Alexandra Chang of New York University — Asia Pacific Center and critical theorist and art historian Michael Betancourt.
Jose Parla’s new works are inspired by his recent travels in France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Parla’s unique and playful inscriptions and diary-like gestures with his trademark hand–writing recall his personal observations of how the idiosyncratic behavior of anonymous individuals on those distant streets distinctly impact each geographical environment.
The complexity of José Parla’s mixed media paintings is based on the layering of images and paraphernalia collected from his daily encounters at home and his adventures abroad, interpreted through his dynamic gestural process. Interleaved through each work is Parla’s calligraphic script, which infuses each piece with vibrancy, energy and meaning.
Memories, thoughts, ideas, quotes, phrases, conversations and observations scrawled in Parla’s instantly recognizable, flowing script reflect his characteristic fusion of writing and painting, word and image. His brushwork depicts walls in the city, or in rural areas outside of urban centers, while his mélange of imagery and words hint at stories within stories, an evocation of the places that have deeply affected him.
The story-telling nature of Jose Parla’s work is mesmerizing. At first glance, his paintings are reminiscent of an abandoned street alley, but as one’s eyes linger, one realizes the density and complexity of overflowing imagery. Parla’s innate gift of capturing both the chaos and the tranquility of the city has moved countless viewers.
About Jose Parla
Jose Parla is a New-York based artist whose paintings reflect the way in which cities function as palimpsests. Born in Miami, Parla traveled in the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Europe in the 1990s before settling permanently in New York.
His work has been collected and exhibited by Agnes B. Galerie Du Jour in Paris and Takashi Murakami’s Kai Kai Ki Ki gallery in Tokyo. Major recent exhibitions include, The New Grand Tour showing in Hong Kong and Beijing (2007-08), Adaptation / Translation at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London (2008), and Layered Days with Cristina Grajales’ Soho gallery in New York City (2008).
About Ooi Botos Gallery
Ooi Botos is Hong Kong’s leading avant-garde gallery specializing in photography, digital media, video and installation. In fact, the Jose Parla exhibition marks a departure from Ooi Botos’ customary program, with Parla being the only painter represented by the gallery. Ooi Botos is dedicated to exposing the public to art forms rarely seen in Hong Kong to raise the level of discourse about art in Asia.
Ooi Botos is located at 5 Gresson Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Friday 11.30 A.M. – 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. – 8 P.M., Saturday 11 A.M. – 6 P.M.
Tel. +852 2527 9733
by Jon Lackman | 2 April 2009 | Theory
In the Jan/Feb ‘09 Architectural Design, guest editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi writes on and interviews Yves Michaud:
In 2003, Yves Michaud wrote a book that met with considerable success in France. In L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique he claims that it is now almost impossible to identify a demaracation line between the examples of high art on display in museums and supported by large cultural institutions, and the various products with strong aesthetic impacts produced by advertising and fashion … Art leaves its defined domain and extends itself in a gaseous manner or like an aesthetic vapour that colours or tints other domains and other practices: fashion, design, politics, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, the environment … “I don’t say that art is dead, but that a certain form of art, the modern form, is dead … fetishism of works, an avant-garde position of the artist, formal preoccupations in the artist or in the spectator, a great seriousness in the aesthetic attitude. All this has been replaced by other things: hedonism, spectacle, and emotions.”
by Jon Lackman | 1 April 2009 | Books
Also in the February 2009 Burlington Magazine, Richard Ormond reviews Diana Donald’s Picturing Animals in Britain:
Diana Donald has written a challenging and densely argued book … to bring animals “centre stage in historical research,” and establish the boundaries of a new discipline. She is an evangelist of her subject and of the animal kingdom to which she wishes to give a voice. She challenges what she calls the dialectic of “anthropocentrism” and exposes the contradictions and dichotomies that have led animals to be admired and cherished on the one hand, and abused and decimated on the other … Picturing Animals in Britain is a pioneering and polemical book. It presents the case for animal painting, often under-valued or ignored by art historians, and it establishes the intellectual foundations for its study. If occasionally the polemic overtakes the art, it is because of the author’s passion for her subject and for the rights of the animals themselves.
by Jon Lackman | 31 March 2009 | Books
In the February 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck considers recent publications from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Metropolitan Museum on their Dutch collections:
Both catalogues are excellent academic publications … The surprisingly different approaches to the two publications make one wonder what kind of information belongs in a catalogue: simply the facts and an informed opinion about them, or the entire history of what scholars have ever said about a work of art? [Met curator] Walter Liedtke … has clearly chosen the latter option … [whereas the Amsterdam] entries present what has become known about [the paintings], with the effect that one gets the idea that, instead of a host of experts, it is the paintings themselves that are speaking to us … The Metropolitan Museum has done more than its duty, and the art-historical community must be grateful that the most beautiful collection of Dutch paintings in the Western hemisphere has been made fully accessible. But it is the Rijksmuseum catalogue, with its matter-of-fact approach, its splendidly edited text and the visual pleasure it provides, that sets the standard for the future.
by Jon Lackman | 30 March 2009 | Conservation, Renaissance
Milan’s Brera Gallery has completed its restoration of Raphael’s The Wedding of the Virgin, according to Reuters:
The painting’s surface had darkened considerably in the 150 years since the last major restoration. It also underwent small repairs in 1958 after a visitor attacked it with a hammer, injuring the Virgin’s stomach and elbow … The restoration took about a year and also involved non-invasive techniques such as X-ray and radiography, but did not remove any of the painting for testing … Details and updates were posted on the Brera’s website.
by Jon Lackman | 30 March 2009 | Asia
The most recent issue of Artibus Asiae (2008) contains a long, thoughtful appreciation by Helmut Brinker of the recently deceased Asian art scholar Dietrich Seckel. It also contains an obituary of scholar/curator/collector Stuart Cary Welch written by artist/collector Howard Hodgkin:
Stuart Cary Welch was undoubtedly the most important expert in the field of Moghul painting; he was also an old wicked, whose vanity and greed for works of art were almost insatiable. He inspired several generations of scholars and collectors through his teaching … He curated marvellous, eye-opening shows and, if he preferred to borrow from his own collections, hidden under pet family names, well, at least the owner was willing to lend … He was not so much a scholar-gypsy as a scholar-pirate … [Once] I was about to bid [at auction] when one of Cary’s large, pink hands held my right hand down. I was so shocked that I could not use my left hand. Naturally, he bought the painting … He was a great teacher, as I said, but not one to enjoy others’ successes. “Whenever I hear that one of my pupils has published something,” he told me, “I feel that one of my limbs has been cut off.” He could be very generous, however, as several museums can attest … Privately, too, he longed to share his enjoyment of art … [Once he] opened a leather travelling case that had been made to fit an Iznik plate and gave it to me to hold. It was one of the very best in terms of design, drawing, and colour. He had an amazing eye. We shall not see his like again.
by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2009 | Modern
Modern Art Notes interviews TJ Clark, who is presenting this year’s National Gallery of Art Mellon Lectures, focusing on 1920s Picasso as well as Guernica:
These lectures are an attempt to extract Pablo Picasso from a biographic equation: ‘Picture C equals Lover Y,’ and that’s what you need to know … Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that’s intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions. You won’t be surprised to hear that from me, as I’m someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I’m very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That’s under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it’s under threat.) Massively under-threat. One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world.
Nice site and fine content
by Jon Lackman | 27 March 2009 | Uncategorized
For technical reasons we’ve been unable to post for the last few days, but we should be able to resume shortly.
by Jon Lackman | 18 March 2009 | Asia, Books, Museums
In caa.reviews, Donald F. McCallum writes on a recent collaboration by Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit:
The exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan and its accompanying catalogue constitute a landmark in the study of Japanese art. The paintings displayed at the Japan Society Gallery were of both high quality and significance, and the catalogue essays are all of permanent importance and will be required reading for those interested in Japanese art history … especially crucial is their skepticism concerning many of the approaches seen in discussions of the last fifty or sixty years … Lippit’s essay, “Awakenings: The Development of the Zen Figural Pantheon,” is an extraordinarily interesting account of the formation of the Chan/Zen pantheon … [it] displays an exemplary grasp of the major historiographical and doctrinal issues … Lippit’s treatment of the manner in which C/Z masters utilized paintings to gain the support of wealthy and influential patrons is especially insightful … I believe it is reasonable to say that Lippit has achieved a brilliant new synthesis in the way in which he clarifies the functions and significance of the paintings under consideration …
In his probing essay “Two (or More) Truths, Reconsidering Zen Art in the West,” Levine examines various controversies related to the interpretation of Zen art, considering viewpoints ranging from those of practitioners who maintain that only the spiritually enlightened can truly understand the essence of Zen art to the work of art historians who subject these artworks to what they see as highly objective, scholarly analyses. While he is clearly striving for a balanced account, not surprisingly, given his institutional and disciplinary affiliations, Levine tends to come down on the art-historical side of the fence … In addition to catalogue entries by Lippit and Levine, there are others by Yoshiaki Shimizu, Barbara Brennan Ford, Eva Havlicova, Xiaojin Wu, and Ann Yonemura … This sort of division of labor results in greater variety than might result from a single scholar treating all examples of a specific group of paintings, thereby enhancing the overall value of the catalogue.
An excessive degree of popularization and what I have often thought of as the “mysteries of the East” approach that have for too long dominated the discourse on Zen art are entirely absent from this book, the only exception being some bibliographical citations to a few of the more egregious offenders. In that sense, this project can be seen as realigning the study of one of the most important and attractive areas of East Asian art, and Lippit, Levine, and their colleagues are to be congratulated for this achievement.
by Jon Lackman | 14 March 2009 | Uncategorized
The 67-year-old conceptual artist apparently died of lymphoma. Obituaries in Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Rundschau, the Tagesspiegel, Die Welt, and Der Standard.
This is just coming out too
Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880-1983
http://mitpress.mit.edu/9781846380501
The talk at CAA was v. interesting.
She was one of a not very large number of her German peers to come to NYC in the 1960s and drink in the atmosphere there — though she seemed more preoccupied with the weight of history than were New Yorkers of a more “serial” attitude.
p.s. this must be her well-known “namhaften Hamburger Kaufmannsfamilie” that one of the obituaries mentions – makers of the famous “stomach friendly” IDEE coffee.
check this out!
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by Jon Lackman | 13 March 2009 | Conferences
We’d like to take note of one other post to the official CAA conference blog, one by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker:
… the core of the conference – the Program Sessions — follow a model that has remained virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century. Papers are prepared in advance, read, and if the session is well structured, there might be an active question and answer period afterward, perhaps with a discussant leading the way. It seems that for most sessions, the vast majority of time is taken up with the reading of carefully prepared papers with significantly less time allotted to either a discussant or active Q&A.
They suggest experimenting with new technologies such as Commentpress or Voicethread.
Does their blog post have a comments section? I couldn’t find it. If it doesn’t, that strikes me as a funny example of what’s wrong with ArtHist conferences. We say we’d like feedback, but we really don’t. We want you to be quiet and listen and maybe say something nice at the end.
I do realize I could just be missing the comments field. So, a potential apology in advance.
That said, I also find it strange that they suggest we tinker with new technology beforehand in order to innovate the ArtHist conference model. In the sciences (or, at least, Stats and Econ, in which my husband is a prof), people don’t read aloud from papers; they talk and engage with their audience. Shouldn’t we just try that first?
Indeed, for some mysterious reason the decision was made to have comments turned off on the blog…
However, that particular post was republished here with comments open:
http://smarthistory.org/blog/308/what-we-blogged-for-caa-rethinking-the-conference/
My gratitude to AHN for this discussion. I wanted to respond to ArtHist’s comment just to add that when Beth and I wrote the original post for the CAA conference blog we felt very much as you do and ended with the following statement:
The conversation about how best to do this might have taken place here on this blog, unfortunately at some point (and we just found this out), the comment function was intentionally disabled. This means that the format of this blog mirrors the principle format of the sessions themselves – something rather one-way, when it seems to us the point of us being is together is rather different…
Yes — many thanks for continuing the discussion — we repeated the CAA post on our blog (www.smarthistory.org/blog in the hope of continuing the discussion there — but here is good too! Our technology suggestions were not meant to be specific, we meant that we can use technology for even simple things like distributing the papers ahead of time with pdfs, etc. — in case that’s a model we want to continue…
Thank you for your responses. Beth, I agree that the use of new technologies would be a good way to facilitate a more open kind of ArtHist conference. And I do like the idea of distributing images or papers ahead of time. Maybe that might even encourage people to go off-the-cuff IRL: it might indicate that the speaker *has* does the legwork beforehand and written a full paper and is now ready to enter a discussion about it.
I honestly believe that the only way the model will change is if CAA (or another forum) holds a few experimental sessions in which speakers are prohibited from reading aloud. They must submit a written paper to the session chairs ahead of time, but then must speak with a Powerpoint presentation as their only aid. I would love to attend a session like that–preferably one that featured people who were capable of extemporizing well.
Am I the only one who likes the current system?
I have been asked to submit a talk in writing but have to present it without reading. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I appreciate that you mention the sources for your quotes, but I would prefer more specifics – can you make footnotes or include the page references when you cite a book or an article? I would love to turn right to the source that you mention in your posts. In my own art history blog (www.albertis-window.blogspot.com), I have found footnotes to be a great academic resource.
Could you be a little more critical or engage more with what you quote? I like the site but I would like to see you guys take up positions with respect to the things you post. This might elicit more comments as well. It would be great to read more opinions.
this is just a suggestion about aesthetics but it would be nice if Art History Newsletter used space more liberally. there’s more dead space than content (again, just visually)which is wasteful. a blog focused on art should be more visually stimulating.
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