by Jon Lackman | 9 March 2009 | Conferences
CAA is over. The most heavily blogged CAA ever, it produced more coverage than we can cover here. A selection:
“Frenchy but Chic” wrote:
A strange phenomenon has occurred this week in downtown Los Angeles. Hordes upon hordes of pallid, humorless and bespectacled killjoys, dressed in drab, unseasonal clothing, sporting strange unfashionable facial hair or absence of hair on top, regardless of gender, have assaulted the Convention Center … The problem with CAA, in all fairness, doesn’t reside with the organization itself, but in the fact that art history in America hasn’t exactly advanced as a discipline in general for a couple of decades now. IMHO it has remained stagnant for many of the same reasons that make “America The Concept” unpalatable to foreign populations: insularity. It’s all very well to go all anti-Western and to try to advance the cause of minorities within the art discourse, or to brandish political art as the only type worth studying, etc. but the problem it creates is a tiny, micro-sectioned view of art: take a small slice of the sample, hold it under the microscope, and use that tiny sample to draw conclusions … Meanwhile, there’s a partial loss of general knowledge about art history … It pains me to see people discoursing about Public Art without having any idea of what Alois Riegl has published about monuments. In 1903. Or that art historians would use the word “wunderkammer” without having read Julius von Schlosser … I’m happy the Getty (the GRI) went out of its way to publish Aby Warburg’s complete writings (the essay on International Astrology is a personal favorite) but I think they should provide the US art historians with a complete series panning the corpus of the discipline, so Pliny the Elder and Philostratus and Vitruvius and Vasari and Winckelmann, etc. would be readily available. Aside from the discipline ancestors, there are loads of foreign art historians (German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) who are only partially translated or not translated at all in English, and sometimes British historians whose publications are not available here … it would do the US practitioners of art history a lot of good to have this general corpus available, and it would help everybody to get out of the post-Greenberg-post-October-post-Critical-studies miasma we’ve been collectively immersed in for too long (I also think a hefty dose of sociology and anthropology would do everybody tons of good). In addition, and this is for all art historians on the planet, not only the CAA attendees: I strongly advise you hang out with real artists, even if your specialty is 17th century Dutch or Precolumbian or whatever. It will give you a better understanding of the challenges of actually making art, which in turn could help you understand the how and why of the way art looks. So you can talk about it without having to resort to the tired clichés and/or the theoretical crutches you’ve been forced-fed in graduate school.
Judith Baumann wrote:
The CAA conference was noticeably poorly attended. Armies of empty seats in vast lecture halls made the few participants seem insignificant. Talking with one of the interview hall organizers, I was told that there was a 40% decline of particpating institutions interviewing for advertised positions compared to last year, which was already slim pickings. Apprently, since December, over 50% of positions advertised on the CAA website dried up. Only 70 schools were interviewing for positions. I think that CAA is going to have to reinvent its annual conference as it’s certainly no longer a viable resource for newly minted MFA holders or “emerging professionals” to find a job.
Irene Borngraeber wrote:
I came back, loaded with books, but disappointed. The College Art Association … had very little to say when it came to actual contemporary production … Panelists on “Historicizing the Present…” and “What is Contemporary Art History” seemed to be more interested in talking about their own work than proposing solutions for the philosophical dilemmas involved in studying contemporary art–or answering the main question posed … Instead of re-hashing the classics, why aren’t art historians studying living artists, or taking risks writing about talented individuals who haven’t been “made” yet? … I want to hear statements worth defending and historians really thinking about what it means to be a modern academic studying events that aren’t yet–and may never be–historic.
Representatives of Hol Art Books attended and blogged:
The morning started with not books, but a panel on John Cage where-in every utterance, every little sound seemed as if it were part of an orchestral procession: the clearing of a throat, the melody from a cell phone, shifts in chairs, the swish of pants rubbing together, the cry of a woman during Q&A: “He wasn’t in the closet! Your scholarship is putting him in there!” And for the final note: the lights mysteriously went out and an audience member exclaimed, “Hi John!”
And:
CAA 2009 opened with much anticipation for the success of panels, job interviews, and books in a year of economic anxiety. The crowd seems smaller this year; yet, CAA never fails to disappoint as the single largest gathering of mismatched black separates possible … Thursdays’ biggest session and the buzz of the hallways was certainly the launching panel of the newly formed Association of Contemporary Art Historians – with easily 250 – 300 audience members packed in with little standing room to spare figures from Pamela Lee and Miwon Kwon to Richard Meyer and Grant Kester took on the disciplinary dilemma “What is Contemporary Art History?”
CAA’s official blog was also at its liveliest ever this year. Benjamin Lima also wrote on the panel “What is Contemporary Art History?” Among the provocative questions raised there: When does a stack of press releases become a reception history? Should projects in Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese contemporary art be grouped with “contemporary” or national programs, both, or neither? Can you convince a roomful of kids born in 1990 that the 1940s are a part of the present?
Ed Schad celebrated a talk by Samuel Edgerton on Renaissance perspective:
The best talk I’ve been to so far, it laid out the history of perspective as born of theological and medieval concerns and rooted in a sort of divine rather than secular geometry … This was an amazing talk, the kind of thing that makes wandering around this building in a morning haze a wonderous thing.
Katie Anania’s favorite however was “Queering Craft”:
I’m kicking myself this morning for walking into yesterday’s “Queering Craft” session late, as the Q & A was one of the most spirited, funny, and collegial that I’ve seen all week. Predictably, most of the panel participants were under 30, and most moved beyond the footsore discussions of authenticity that bog down similar panels
Final question: Will Olu Oguibe ever make to CAA? As in 2007, he was scheduled to attend this year but ultimately did not.
by Jon Lackman | 1 March 2009 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Monday, March 9th.
by Jon Lackman | 1 March 2009 | Conferences
From CAA, Allyson Drucker writes:
There was a noticeable decrease in attendance today at the third and final day of CAA, but some of the remaining few were treated to a series of neat papers at “The Northern Court Artist, 1400-1600.” The session was off to a great start with Carol Krinsky’s talk entitled “What Court Artists Did (and Sometimes Did Not Do)” in which she focused on Jan van Eyck in his role as varlet de chambre in the court of Philip the Good. She suggested that the artist may have been principally engaged in the designing of luxury objects and automata being produced at court in the 1420s, and that such designs exhibit the illusionistic ingenuity for which van Eyck’s later, painted work is known. Krinsky’s thoughtful evaluation of the role of the varlet de chambre was nicely complemented by Sarah Lawrence’s presentation on Jacopo Strada, court antiquarian at the Hapsburg court of the late 16th century. Together, the papers showed that the role of the court “artist” was an expansive one that required, or furthered, a dexterity in various media and ideas. As the conference drew to a close, there was a general sense of pleasant fatigue among the attendees – their own interests in various media and ideas likely furthered and temporarily sated by three days of papers and collegial conversation.
A very interesting website. I plan to access it again when I get home and have more time. There is much I need to look into here.
by Jon Lackman | 28 February 2009 | Conferences, Medieval, Modern, Renaissance
Allyson Drucker reports from CAA:
You would have been hard-pressed to find the geographic and temporal boundaries that academics have traditionally abided by in two of this morning’s sessions where, instead, panelists focused on the points of intersection among art and artists hailing from different milieux. At “The International Contribution to Renaissance and Baroque Art” session, the Italian peninsula of the 15th – 17th centuries was shown to be an exciting arena of cultural exchange. The understanding of Italian hegemony during the period has been undergoing revision in recent years and the speakers at today’s panel furthered a more nuanced view of the reciprocal ways in which foreign-born artists such as Alonso Berruguete participated in the artistic community while in Italy. At the “Altars, Relics and Ascetics: The Invention of Religion in Contemporary Art” session, panelists showed that religious themes have a place in contemporary art and art criticism. One of the highlights of the session was Alexander Nagel’s talk which compared the work of Robert Smithson with medieval chapels. The masterful comparison between the art and art theory of vastly different spheres of consciousness generated a lot of buzz that spilled into the Convention Center’s hallways once the morning session came to a close.
Thank you so much for sharing. My research focus in art history was border theory. It is good to see border (boundary) being applied allowing us to move away from linear histories.
by Jon Lackman | 27 February 2009 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our contributor Allyson Drucker writes:
The topic of this morning’s session “Renaissance and/or Early Modern: Naming and/or Knowing the Past” promised to travel some well-rehearsed territory for scholars of the field who remain dissatisfied with the term early modern as a substitute for “renaissance” and its troubling connotations. And while the session as a whole made good on this promise, each panelist offered new insights on nomenclature and the artwork of the period itself. The well-attended session started off light-heartedly with Marvin Trachtenberg citing statistics about the usage of the term “renaissance” in contemporary popular culture and ended with a lively discussion among all the panelists spurred by questions from an engaged audience. In between, the papers given by Samuel Edgerton, Jeffrey Chipps Smith and David Cast included some defense of the term “renaissance” while acknowledging its shortcomings as a signifier. Nothing so ground-breaking as a solution was reached, but the need for names, distinctions and awareness of their consequences was acknowledged. Particularly interesting were the connections drawn between literary developments, scientific discoveries and new ways of thinking about art forms, their genesis and contemporary reception. Edgerton, for example, in discussing linear perspective, showed how advances in science were a boon to artistic progress and carried theological significance as well.
Meanwhile, down the hall, revivalism and revisionism were being discussed within a much different framework at the “Eighteenth-Century Art, Decorative Arts, and Architecture: Shattering the Nineteenth-Century Image of the Eighteenth Century” session. Here, independent scholar Beverly Jacoby showed how the aims of French eighteenth-century artists were misunderstood almost immediately in the following century as they were perceived through the eyes of an audience influenced by political upheaval and eventually nationalistic pride. J. Nicholas Napoli discussed how the advances of the Industrial Revolution spurred developments in ornament and taste. Although their subject matter could not have been more different, both Napoli and Edgerton demonstrated the power of science and technology to affect change in form and the vocabulary used to describe it.
by Jon Lackman | 25 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Two of the contributors to the CAA blog this year are Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. They are academics and the creators of smarthistory.org, where they also maintain a blog. In one recent entry, they contrast Stanley Fish’s recent obit for the humanities with the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which is “a project of the Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA” and includes statements such as
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.
The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity …
Copyright and IP standards must, accordingly, be freed from the stranglehold of Capital. Pirate and pervert Disney materials on such a massive scale that Disney will have to sue… your entire neighborhood, school, or country. Practice digital anarchy by creatively undermining copyright and mashing up media …
Large-scale complexity: need for teamwork as new model for the production and reproduction of humanistic knowledge. Teams sometimes fail because they take risks. This is the heart of digital humanities: Risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation …
Big Humanities: whereas the revolution of the post-WWII era has consisted in the proliferation of every smaller and more rigorous areas of expertise and subexpertise, and the consequent emergence of private languages, the Digital humanities revolution is about integration: the building of bigger pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge. It is not about the emergence of a new general culture, Renaissance humanism/humanities, or universal literacy, but, on the contrary, promotes collaboration across domains of expertise …
The Humanities are contingent formations that have become stabilized and made culturally redundant at the university: As if we have always had The Department of X, which has produced knowledge about X, and therefore we can’t possibly imagine anything otherwise …
Harris and Zucker write:
… we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! … Fish, writing as curmudgeon of the academy, nostalgically laments the death of an idealized humanities education of yore—an education he imagines nobly separated from practical application and that he sees defiled by for-profit institutions and the rise of a permanent adjunct class … Clearly, the humanities are changing and the university is being challenged to its core; but maybe what will be lost is its insular elitism … Here is the definition of “digital humanities”:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
And here are our favorite parts of the manifesto:
Paragraph 11: Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.
Paragraph 13: Redefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.
We’ve written earlier about a new model of education where teachers are more accountable to students (no more boring lectures?). With Smarthistory, we’ve tried to be entertaining AND enlightening – using conversation as our tool. We’ve also tried to eschew an authoritative voice in favor of personal, opinionated voices. But we’ve also struggled with how to engage a broader public. We’ve “distributed” smarthistory to dipity, flickr, youtube and vimeo… and we’re working on Facebook now too (with Juliana Kreinik’s help).
Recently, someone emailed them to point out an error in one of their podcasts, “a great reminder that expertise is broadly distributed. I love our networked world! The Liberal Arts at an end!? We hardly think so…”
this is good. but the webcasts sometimes don’t load on my computer. could you provide a trancript as well?
by Jon Lackman | 24 February 2009 | Conferences
So, the big show begins tomorrow — The College Art Association annual conference, this year in Los Angeles. CAA is again hosting a conference blog; we’ll also try to do some posting of our own as well as link to other bloggers. If you’d like to share your observations, contact us about becoming a contributor, or simply add comments to our posts.
by Jon Lackman | 20 February 2009 | Journals
Always on the look-out for blogging art historians, we recently discovered Daniel A. Siedell, assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, whose “work as an art historian, critic, and curator operates on the margins of cultural criticism, theology, and philosophy and is motivated by the conviction that Christian thought and practice as it is embodied in the seven ecumenical councils can nourish a deeper and more expansive understanding of contemporary artistic practice.” In a recent post, he discusses The Curse of the “Special Arts Issue.” Journal editors, he writes, often
feel obliged to publish my work only in the context of a “special arts issue,” in which a number of “similar” essays are compiled together in some thematic format … These well-meaning editors ghettoize art; they marginalize it. The message they send to me as well as to their readership is that art is somehow not quite capable of playing with the big boys of thought, like philosophy, cultural criticism, political science, history, and the like … This is, sadly, something that some art writers themselves buy into, claiming how “distinctive” art is from other forms of cultural practice … Apparently, looking at art (and reading about art) is akin to sitting in a comfortable chair sipping a martini … My writing is a shot of espresso in the morning … I write to put my reader on edge … [Also] those “special arts issues” seem to appear once every five years. (That doesn’t seem to be much of a celebration if you ask me.)
by Jon Lackman | 19 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Tate Britain is marking the 40th anniversary of the book and television series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s “epic survey of one thousand five hundred years of western culture,” with a series of debates. Debate participant and Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones writes:
Reading Clark is like drinking champagne compared with the small beer of most art history. In the 20th century, art history became less eloquent and more academic than it had ever been before. Victorians had Ruskin and Pater and Burckhardt but by the 1950s, people were banging their heads against the iconographic school of art history whose greatest exemplars – Panofsky, Warburg, Gombrich – are still worth studying but only after you have already got a very good sense of the basics. In other words, art historians in Clark’s lifetime became specialists. Nowadays they’re even more obscurantist, having discovered “theory.”
Lawrence Weschler’s work is also enjoying a revisiting. The University of California Press is re-issuing Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, his 1982 book of interviews with artist Robert Irwin, and publishing True to Life, a book of interviews with David Hockney.
Responding to the question “What’s the last great book about art – not by you – that you’ve read?” Weschler tells the San Francisco Chronicle:
It turns out that English lit professors write great books about art that don’t get read by art historians. Edward Snow’s book about Vermeer is a great book. His book about Brueghel is even better – 15 years of looking at one painting. It is so smart. And then Richard Halpern wrote a book on Norman Rockwell that takes Rockwell seriously, claiming that Rockwell’s much more sophisticated than he’s given credit for. I did a whole conference around the book at NYU, which was called “Shocked! Shocked! Just How Many Times Can This Country Lose Its Innocence?” It turned out to be about Abu Ghraib.
I concur that art history has gotten increasingly academic and laden with theory, making it more inaccessible – and thus less interesting – to the general public. I’m all ears for proposed solutions!
by Jon Lackman | 18 February 2009 | Journals, Medieval
A new online-only periodical Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, has been launched, with Rachel Dressler of the University at Albany as editor. Virginia Blanton, Richard Emmerson, Corine Schleif, Linda Seidel, Debra Higgs Strickland, and Christine Verzar round out the editorial board. It is an
open-access, peer-reviewed annual, devoted to progressive scholarship on medieval art. Different Visions seeks to fill a significant gap in current publishing venues by featuring articles employing contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical frameworks to examine medieval visual culture. Authors are encouraged to explore the application of such approaches as feminist and gender analysis, historiography, semiotics, post colonialism and queer theory to works produced during the period from the fourth through the fifteenth century. The journal will also consider essays on medieval visual culture that emerge from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Different Visions offers a central publication to serve authors and readers interested in the full gamut of medieval objects and in contemporary critical theory. The journal covers the entire range of visual culture—architecture, manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, and portable arts—and accepts articles about Byzantine and Islamic cultures as well as central, eastern and western Europe. Its electronic format provides a low-cost delivery, allowing Different Visions to avoid a subscription charge and permits more illustrations at less expense than standard print media. It also offers new opportunities for such innovative features as audio clips and virtual tours of monuments.
Dressler says she was inspired to start the journal by Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, who founded the online scholarly journal Peregrinations devoted to pilgrimage art and architecture of the late Middle Ages.
“Postmodern and poststructuralist” – uh-oh.
Why uh-oh? Hopefully this will spur more medievalists to expand their investigations to incorporate contemporary theoretical discourse in the humanities. Certainly, when this is done poorly, it’s pretty painful, but when it’s done well (ala Michael Camille) it can produce some extremely thought-provoking work.
by Jon Lackman | 17 February 2009 | Books, Theory
It’s the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and numerous authors are publishing books that review and extend his work, including philosopher Denis Dutton, who has written The Art Instinct. In Bookforum historian Rochelle Gurstein writes:
Denis Dutton is a man with a mission: Against cultural anthropologists, art historians, critics, and aestheticians who have advanced the idea that taste is relative and socially constructed, he wants to demonstrate that there is an “instinct” for beauty, skill, and pleasure. As proof of the universality of this instinct, he offers descriptions of its “spontaneous” emergence in children, along with ethnographic reports of its existence in “preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes that survived into the twentieth century, since their ways of life reflect those of our ancient ancestors.” The second part of that sentence—“since their ways of life reflect those of our ancient ancestors”—signals both the novelty and the burden of Dutton’s book, The Art Instinct, for its central claim is that the art instinct can be found in the “prehistory” of “our nomadic human and proto-human ancestors in the Pleistocene.”
Dutton grounds his argument in the neo-Darwinian field of evolutionary psychology, but much of his case is necessarily the product of speculation … All too often, I felt that Dutton was drawing me into the resolutely unscientific realm of faith or . . . academic burlesque. And all too often, I found myself thinking that even if one could prove the existence of an art instinct or, simply for the sake of argument, one were to grant all of Dutton’s premises, what difference would it make? For Dutton, “what sexual selection in evolution does is give us an explanation of why so much human energy has been exhausted on objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity.” This is all well and good if you care about such Darwinian conundrums—but the expenditure of energy has never been a pressing question for people who care about the arts. They have instead been preoccupied with questions about beauty, sublimity, taste, genius, invention, originality, aesthetic autonomy, form, and composition … lazy theorizing (“if along the way”; “then so much the better”) and glib inventory taking serve to remind us that Dutton is far more preoccupied with the Darwinian thrust of his argument than with its implications for the understanding of art … when Dutton tries to come up with a definition of the arts from a Darwinian standpoint, things grow more banal still, as he offers the familiar romantic view that the arts produce a communion of souls, that they serve as “windows into the mind of another human being” … Only someone who has not taken the time to immerse himself in the enormous—indeed, overwhelming—historical record would be so presumptuous as to offer the following definition of “greatness in the arts”: the effort “to create works of aesthetic pleasure that are saturated with emotion, specifically expressing distinct emotions that are perceived as yours” … Dutton’s book is particularly baffling because he clearly esteems the arts … In this enterprise, Dutton has not made a convincing case that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, trapped as they were in the struggle for sheer survival, have anything to offer.
On his personal webpage, Dutton responds:
Darwin deniers! Creationists don’t like Darwin, me, or my book ’cause they think God created us and our aesthetic tastes. Social constructionsists, such as Rochelle Gurstein, don’t like my book because they hold that history and culture determine tastes. I argue that art is produced by culture, individuals, and their evolution in a complex interaction. Still, Ms. Gurstein, who writes in Bookforum, does not seem to think I’ve written a stupid book, even if she appears to disagree with every word in it (including “and” and “the.”). I don’t regard her review as stupid, either.
Art historian Martin Kemp writes in his New Scientist review:
In his new book, he has bravely proposed a coherent notion of the “art instinct” as a product of evolution in the strictly biological sense. It is a substantial contribution to the debate we ought to be having.
Historian Michael S. Roth writes in his review in the L.A. Times:
Denis Dutton seems to have great ambitions in “The Art Instinct” as well as a willingness to court controversy. He wants to explain how art arises out of biological impulses that are universal. He also wants to develop a theory of art that shows that our practice of and judgments about the arts ought to be informed by an understanding of their innate, instinctual base … Dutton, a philosopher who curates the popular, useful website Arts & Letters Daily, tackles his assignment with wit, clarity and a basic reasonableness. He winds up overstating his case, but in doing so he raises important issues concerning biology and culture … The Art Instinct is an important book that raises questions often avoided in contemporary aesthetics and art criticism. Dutton’s familiarity with art practices and objects from New Guinea complement his enthusiastic embrace of a variety of canonical European art forms and artists. His arguments against major figures in the philosophy and anthropology of the arts are often devastating — and amusing. Although I don’t think he has quite made the case for the important biological grounds of our attraction to authenticity, he has woven a powerful plea for the notion that art expresses a longing to see through the performance or object to another human personality.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, philosopher Carlin Romano writes:
In short, he combines a magisterial command of the history of aesthetics back to Plato and Aristotle, a total commitment to clarity and verve in writing, and an up-to-the-minute grasp of almost every trend on the contemporary cultural scene. Result? A philosophy of art for the ages. Dutton argues that evolutionary psychology – the school of thought with which cognitive scientists such as Steven Pinker have helped us understand the Darwinian dimensions of much social life – also explains the ubiquity of artistic activity across cultures and eons. If you care about art writ large as a miraculous bounty for the world, or only for your own selfish sake, The Art Instinct should impress you as the most shrewd, precisely written and provocative study you’ll find on its topic’s place in human nature.
In the IHT, philosopher Anthony Gottlieb writes:
Although he endorses the popular form of evolutionary psychology in principle, his practice is more nuanced. His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is insightful and penetrating, and I doubt whether much of it really depends on the ideas of evolutionary psychology … Dutton’s eloquent account sheds light on the role art plays in our lives, whatever its ultimate origins.
The Australian profiles Dutton:
Born in 1944, Dutton was raised in the liberal atmosphere of North Hollywood, California, by parents who met at Paramount film studios. They later established a large independent bookshop, and books became the default family profession. He studied philosophy at the University of Santa Barbara, eventually combining it with a love of art to specialise in aesthetics.
“I have a longstanding interest in cross-cultural universals and variations,” he says. “The question is whether radically different cultures can understand each other. I have grown up through an epoch in which it was fashionable to imagine that cultures can’t significantly speak to each other. My own experience militates against that idea.”
As a young man, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in India. He later took a leave of absence from academe to live for a while in New Guinea, studying Sepik culture in order to make informed cross-cultural connections.
He came to the politically incorrect conclusion that the Other is indeed knowable and that connoisseurs from very different cultures — a curator of Sepik art in a Western museum, for example, and a carver who has never left his highland village — will choose the same exemplars of local art form.
by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2009 | Theory
Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 and Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922, kicks off the latest Art Bulletin “intervention,” “Decentering Modernism,” in the December 2008 issue, with another critique of the four-year-old Foster/Krauss/Bois/Buchloh survey, Art Since 1900:
… the last two decades have witnessed serious soul-searching among art historians about the future of the discipline. This is strikingly expressed by Hans Belting … However, his fear that the canon looks increasingly vulnerable may be somewhat premature. Take, for instance, Art since 1900, the magisterial volume on the avant-garde published in 2004 … The four authors display intellectual sophistication, an exemplary attention to detail, and a masterly grasp of the broader picture of Western avant-garde art in the twentieth century … which brings into question the triumphalist discourse of modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century … Nonetheless, perhaps because my own work has dealt with artists in the periphery, I would have liked to have seen the authors filling more of the gaps in our knowledge of world art. The book contains few references to notable artists living outside Europe and the United States who have made significant contributions to the global processes of modernity … the canon is not significantly enlarged. Rather, the non-Western artists are brought in primarily on account of their compatibility with the avant-garde discourse in the West … since the authors aim to deal with “art” as a universal category, readers will inevitably demand much of these scholars … none of the issues raised here would be problematic if the title of the book were, for instance, Western Avant-Garde Art since 1900 or Western Art since 1900.
The book’s wider global ambitions nonetheless offer me a starting point to situate its “universalist” canon within an epistemological framework that goes back to the Enlightenment. The book follows a well-trodden path that equates Western norms with global values, having the unintended consequence of excluding the art of the periphery … Despite its serious intentions, the “universalist” project of art history remains trapped within the constraints of Western epistemology, which cannot be remedied simply by a culturally determined self-reflexivity. The wide acceptance of the Western modernist canon as self-evidently universal (even in non-Western regions, I must add) does not give sufficient weight to the role of convention in artistic production.” In the social sciences, this use of the universal for the specific is described as an unmarked case. Modernism in this sense is an “unmarked case” that implicitly stands for “Western” modernism. By this token, a qualifying epithet becomes necessary to speak of any other: East European modernism, Chinese modernism, Indian modernism, and so on. It is perhaps no accident that following Immanuel Kant’s a priori view of aesthetics, the concept “art” is often regarded as neutral and disinterested, which systematically ignores the implications of race, gender, sexual orientation, and even class (by the latter I mean all forms of folk and popular art that are excluded from the master narrative). The universal canon of art subsumes either the classical canon or the modernist canon that supplanted it in the twentieth century.
Alastair Wright, Rebecca M Brown, Saloni Mathur, and Ajay Sinha respond, then Mitter concludes:
With “Decentering Modernism,” I hoped to provoke a debate on “modernism and its discontents,” which is possibly one of the central art historical concerns of our day. In the process, I proposed a more critical and open-ended global art history for the twenty-first century, one that challenges Hegelian teleology and allows different trajectories to flourish. I feel vindicated that the respondents in general share my objective of “decentering” the discourse of modernism, although it is quite natural that their interpretations would express different inflections from mine … It is perhaps a reflection of the fact that all the respondents belong to the younger generation of art historians. Unsurprisingly, there are no “dyed-in-the-wool” modernists among them who are prepared to uphold the universal values of modernism to their dying breath. Is there a danger of flogging a dead horse, or one that is about to expire? Perhaps we are witnessing the dissolution of the heroic modernism that prevailed during much of the twentieth century?
“since the authors aim to deal with “art” as a universal category…”
Did Mitter bother reading Art Since 1900 before making this critique? It’s a deeply flawed book, but not one of its authors would even think about positing works of art as at all “universal.” Which, exactly, is the author committing the fallacy of copping to Kant’s universalism? Please. The book’s coverage of non-canon work is regrettable, but accusing those particular writers of universalism seems awfully misguided.
xuiPi9 comment5 ,
by Jon Lackman | 14 February 2009 | Architecture, Asia
From The National of Abu Dhabi:
“Basically, I am an art historian,” he says by way of introduction, but this is a typically modest description. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the world’s leading forces behind the renaissance of traditional Islamic and Indian craftsmanship, arguing continually for their protection and that of those who practise them. He and his team have worked on mammoth projects such as the Federal Territory Mosque in Kuala Lumpur and the Al Masjid al Haram mosque in Mecca … “What I try to do is bring back Indian and classical art to the level of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal,” he says. That is exactly what he and his team aimed to do with their work on the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque in 2005 … This contract was a huge undertaking: 232 craftsmen worked for 14 months on the 1,050 columns for the entrance and side arcades. In the end, the project used a total of 1,136,212 semi-precious stones for the floral inlay of the columns: lapis lazuli, amethyst, bloodstone, agate and red onyx among them …
At first glance, a life steeped in Indian and Islamic design and architecture seems an unlikely path for someone who was born on the banks of the Mississippi and is a direct descendant of Jesse James. How, exactly, did this intense interest in art begin? “Well, actually I’m part American-Indian, and my grandfather was an amateur archaeologist who used to dig around us for arrowheads when I was a kid. But really, when I was 14 and living in Missouri, a friend came back from India, and that was my first exposure to someone who’d been abroad. “I went to the University of Chicago to study ancient Indian history and then went to India in 1966 to do my thesis in New Delhi. And that was it. I fell in love.”
[...] Art History Newsletter : Profile: Mitchell Abdul Karim Crites [...]
by Jon Lackman | 11 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Art historian Franz-Joachim Verspohl of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena died last week. Some excerpts from a (alas machine-translated) remembrance:
He was instrumental in the founding of the Art History Department in Jena … Additionally, he initiated lively exhibitions … notably of Paul Klee (1999) and Frank Stella (2001) … After his dissertation on the history of stadium construction, which he completed in 1974 in Marburg under Martin Warnke, he specialized mainly in Michelangelo’s sculpture and the Renaissance in Hungary. His second great passion was, however, the art of the present. Here he wrote, inter alia, studies on Wols and Joseph Beuys.
by Jon Lackman | 10 February 2009 | Theory
In caa.reviews, Charles G. Salas reviews Victor I. Stoichita’s The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock:
Stoichita shows that simulacra are not quite the alien threat some think they are. It turns out that we have been living with them all along, albeit without attending to them much … The framework of this book would not be so frustrating if the content were not so fascinating … at every stop the remarkable erudition of the author is evident. The works themselves—be they sculptures, paintings, poems, photographs, or film—receive insightful analysis that alone justifies the reader’s effort, and the illustrations are gorgeous. The originality and scope of Stoichita’s thought is sensed in seeming asides, such as his pointing out that later reaction to the Romance of the Rose is unthinkable without the earlier work of van Eyck, or in his comparison of the film Vertigo (1958) to both the multiples of Andy Warhol and the Barbie doll. Historically minded readers may wish for more attention to social and cultural context and for more evidence that earlier works made a difference to later ones, but it is always the relationship of the work to the theme(s) that comes first here. Between stops, however, the trip is a bit of blur. The author jumps from work to work as in a video game, soaring over the abyss on winds of attractive but amorphous concepts impossible to find footing in such as “creativity” and “desire” … Originality and subtlety are expected of Stoichita, and his efforts in The Pygmalion Effect do not disappoint. Whether the book as a whole will satisfy more traditionally historically minded readers is another matter.
by Jon Lackman | 9 February 2009 | Career
Let’s crunch the numbers a bit more. Large departments naturally win more jobs, so let’s see who performed best over the last couple years relative to how many people they graduate. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton win out, each winning a number of top jobs each year roughly equal in size to one-third of an annual graduating class. (This is ignoring departments that only a generate a few graduates per year.)
Now, which subfield gives you the best chance of landing a top teaching job?
We examined the subfields of our 205 assistant professors, and then we compared that with the number of people graduating each year in those subfields (which we calculated using the lists of “dissertations completed” compiled by CAA for 2007, 2006, and 2005).
From best subfield to be in to the worst:
1. African Art
2. Asian
2. Medieval/Byzantine
2. Ancient
3. Renaissance/Baroque
3. Modern
by Jon Lackman | 6 February 2009 | Uncategorized
On several occasions, we’ve gotten valuable tips from the CultureGrrl blog, and so if you have the means to do so, we encourage you to consider helping to keep it afloat. There, veteran cultural journalist Lee Rosenbaum frequently reports on art-world controversies from deaccessioning to culture ministers in a timely and tenacious fashion. She is intelligent and blessedly opinionated and we’d hate to see her go.
Thanks so much, AHN. And the same back at you: My blog and I have been enriched by many valuable insights and ideas that I’ve gotten from you. If CultureGrrl dies an impecunious death, I would want your much appreciated praise to be its epitaph!
by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2009 | Career
Two years ago, we wrote
Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs?
In subsequent posts, we wrote on which departments landed the most top jobs per graduate, on how the hiring data breaks down by subfield, on the advisors who produce the most job-getters, and on gender equity.
Over the past couple weeks, we reviewed the fate of those 137 individuals and catalogued new members of the assistant-professor club. Here’s what we found:
Of the 137 assistant professors that we originally catalogued, 86 haven’t changed status in the last two years.
Of the 51 who have changed in status, 36 have been promoted to associate professor, while 15 have left their institution. Of the latter 15, five now have new assistant-professor jobs at other top departments.
Sixty-eight new assistant-professor hires have been made at the institutions we study. Seven of the new hires are Yale grads, seven from Harvard, six Columbia, six Princeton, five NYU, four Chicago, three Berkeley, three UCLA, two Northwestern, two Penn, two MIT, two Johns Hopkins, two University of Munich. There’s one grad each from Brown, Bryn Mawr, CUNY, Duke, Emory, IUAV(Venezia)/Sorbonne [joint PhD], London, Oxford, Politecnico di Torino, Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, Stanford (Anthropology Dept), Texas, Toronto, UMASS (Dartmouth), University of East Anglia, and University of Sydney.
Of the 68 new hires, 22 specialize in modern or contemporary topics, ten in Asian art, eight in American and/or Latin American and/or Native American, eight in ancient, six in renaissance or baroque, five in medieval/byzantine, four in African and/or African diaspora. two in Islamic, two in pre-Columbian.
More analysis to come. As always, we invite all suggestions on how to improve our method, which is outlined in the original post.
by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2009 | Uncategorized
When we started the Art History Newsletter three years ago to “synopsize news and opinion of interest to art historians and provide original reporting on conferences, lectures, and other special events,” we hoped to also provide a forum for discussion and so we invited readers to comment on our posts. Alas, spam robots added all kinds of irrelevant comments to the blog, we soon tired of deleting said comments, and so finally we just turned off the option to add comments. Well, art historians still need an online discussion forum, now more than ever perhaps, so we’ve decided to give it another try. Comment away.
This is great, thanks so much. I rely on this blog for my art history news summary, and I’m sure it will be that much greater with increased participation.
Thank the gods!
Heureux de pouvoir envoyer enfin mes saluts, de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique! Bravo pour ce blog et sa sélection d’informations précieuses.
I visit you blog often and hope you get less spam that I had initially. However, there are programs to help out in this respect. Once in place, they save many headaches. Best of luck from the Flying Fox.
Excellent news!
by Jon Lackman | 4 February 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune‘s Didier Rykner writes:
… a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. This publication offers many new findings on the artist’s life as well as his work. This is one of Arthéna’s best volumes, thus continuing an editorial policy which can never be praised enough …
Along with Valentin de Boulogne, Régnier was one of the main adepts of the Manfrediana Methodus, a term which designates a Caravaggism reinterpreted through the prism of Bartolomeo Manfredi’s style. Régnier quickly oriented his manner towards a pursuit of refinement and gracefulness, which Annick Lemoine calls “a poetics of seduction” or “a Caravaggism of seduction” …
Régnier’s half-brother was Michele Desubleo. The book does not question a rather strange fact: these two artists from the same family, both born in Maubeuge then living in Rome, are considered as having different nationalities, one French, the other Italian … Régnier’s activities as an art dealer and expert are also studied by Annick Lemoine with one amusing anecdote which recounts how the painter commissioned fake paintings from his son-in-law Pietro della Vecchia … Were these pieces sold as copies or were they part of a veritable counterfeiting business? Annick Lemoine does not say either way but seems to favor the second hypothesis …
Thanks to this publication Régnier definitely appears as a major 17th century artist and we feel he deserves to have an exhibition organized in his honor … Since the pioneering exhibition in 1974, the French Caravaggesque have become better known: Valentin has had a monograph devoted to him in Italian, Tournier had an exhibition in Toulouse in 2001 and the Roman Vouet is currently being exhibited at the Musée de Nantes (see article). Annick Lemoine’s book, which benefits from extensive research in Italian archives, is a superb example of the trend to rediscover this school.
CAA is a disaster of an organization, a thrilling mediocrity of a conference. Fewer panels with better papers would improve things slightly, but the whole organization seems to be blithely unaware of or unwilling to deal with the truly monstrous problems facing the discipline–the need for massive curtailment of graduate programs, support of young professionals beyond the “emerging professionals” claptrap, ethical use of adjuncts, etc. Instead: a packed panel session on Contemporary Art where one would be surprised to learn that art before 1945 exists. The whole ordeal is an intellectual cesspool, and meanwhile the organization has failed to serve as a means of steering the discipline as a whole. It’s a macabre dance, though maybe the MLA and AHA are just as bad.
Though I hardly think the problem is that we need MORE Riegl studies…
american education is insular and the problem lies in that it does not teach the importance of learning foreign languages. i had several interviewers that were astonished i could speak four languages. also, why should a press publish something that has no demand?? believe me, i would love annotated reprints of all the scholars i am interested in, but the demand for these scholars’ writings is probably low even in their own countries. it is up to us to read them in their original languages or to get photocopies of earlier translations.
also i am not sure how becoming friends with a contemporary artist will help our knowledge of dutch or mayan art. i really don’t. their notions of who created art and the function of their art was so different that this is not a valid recommendation, especially in the general terms in which it is stated. contemporary production might shape how i see the art of the past but the challenges contemporary artists face are not as illuminating.
and about studying yet to be discovered artists?? are you kidding me? this whole career is a crap shoot and i should dedicate my dissertation, or article to someone who might or might not be important, therefore relegating my own career to obscurity? given the dearth of teaching jobs, i can’t see a better way to remain unemployed.
it is possible that emerging talent is best covered by art critics, and i know that a lot of scholars are, in fact, reconsidering obscure figures that have been slighted by the canon.
so are you asking us to study passing fads? fascinating.
Also here:
http://artforum.com/diary/id=22217