by Jon Lackman | 25 June 2010 | Theory
A propos of our recent discussion of Ruskin, I recently discovered a new article on Ruskin’s views of art and morality in the Jan 2010 Modern Language Review (105:1) by Jeremy Tambling. He contrasts Ruskin with Nietzsche:
Ruskin wishes to believe that art reveals morality, or that morality shows itself in art; in other words, he accepts that art in some way can be predicated on the moral sense, and that a morality can be derived from good art. Nietzsche, however, has no such sense of a basis for art. No morality generates art; rather, because there is no morality, no justice at work in life, art becomes the more necessary. Nietzsche is postmodern in not believing in any basis which makes art possible; Ruskin, despite his unconversion of 1858, and consequent refusal of a formal religious basis to life, cannot think of art as being baseless, or rather, he does not wish to think it.
by Kelly Presutti | 24 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA reports on an agreement between the Getty Research Institute and ProQuest, a database service that also publishes ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index, and the International Index to Music Periodicals, to take over indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA, the successor to BHA).
ProQuest will distribute IBA content created by GRI—covering the years 2008 through 2009—and build on it by adding new index records going forward. ProQuest will retain the editorial policies that made IBA a trusted and frequently consulted source in the field, continuing to provide full abstracts and subject indexing for its wide international and multilingual range of periodicals, monographs, and catalogues. Over time, ProQuest intends to expand coverage of art from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, in response to requests from art librarians and researchers.
This answers several of the questions raised in the Getty’s April meetings, including expansion to include non-Western art and continuing to provide full abstracts. Further, the historical data (BHA and RILA) that has been freely available on the Getty’s website will continue to be accessible to researchers.
by Jon Lackman | 23 June 2010 | Books, Theory
According to the Guardian:
Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”. Now that experiment – conducted by Paul Bloom, a Yale academic, and psychologist Susan Gelman – has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. Bloom’s study, How Pleasure Works, which will be out this week, argues that there is no such thing as a pure aesthetic judgment.
The Sunday Times writes:
[Bloom's] most important point is that humans are “born essentialists”. We see everything as possessing “an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly, and it this hidden nature that really matters”.
Bloom discusses his book with Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind author Peter D. Kramer in Slate.
by Travis Nygard | 22 June 2010 | Uncategorized
Sir Adam Roberts of the British Academy has issued a report titled Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities and Social Sciences that is sure to be useful for art historians wishing to bolster the credibility of our discipline. As was discussed in Art History Today, the report emphasizes “public” rather than simply “economic” value to show the innumerable benefits of studying the humanities, including the stimulation of creativity and strengthening of identity. As such, “Sir Adam’s report is extremely timely: a ringing endorsement of the arts and humanities in a society that needs them more than ever to combat the malaise of the banker mentality.” Should you also have tips for demonstrating the non-monetary value of art history, please leave a comment.
by Jon Lackman | 22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes:
“[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone simulacrum attached to the otherly performed gender; not only does it – the strapped-on dildo – visually come before the boy’s own member, but in its always and already state of erection, it precedes his potential pleasure that can only come to imitate its form — on condition that the copy does not simply reduce the original to anxiety or to the entropic comfort of keeping his penis in the presence of the girl’s acquiring hers – that he feels but does not see.
by Ben Lima | 20 June 2010 | Uncategorized
The Economist alerts its readers to the enduring Portuguese tradition of azulejos, “glazed ceramic tiles that were fashioned into narrative scenes.” (more…)
I know that at least one contemporary Brazilian artist, Adriana Varejão, appreciates azulejos for its strong connections with the colonial period in Brazil. Varejão uses the imagery of azulejos to comment on Brazilian colonialism and slavery. If anyone is interested, Varejão’s website is found here: http://www.adrianavarejao.net/site#/
In my opinion, azulejos are also important in history surveys (and upper-level courses) because they can be easily examined through a postcolonial lens. In addition to the Brazilian/Portuguese history of azulejos, such 17th/18th century tiles are closely connected Portuguese trade and the Orient. Azulejos are seen as a prime example of European chinoiserie.
Very cool. Any recommended readings?
Like you mentioned, there aren’t many English sources that discuss azulejos in much depth. There is some discussion of azulejos in this museum catalog by the National Gallery of Art (Washington):
Levenson, Jay A., ed. The Age of the Baroque in Portugal. National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C., 1993.
I am aware of two publications which discuss Adriana Varejão’s art:
Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (This book ties Varejão’s work into postcolonial themes.)
Rina Caravajal, “Travel Chronicles: The Work of Adriana Varejão,” in Lia Gangitano and Steven Nelson, eds., New Histories, Boston: Instutite of Contemporary Art, 1996. (Exhibition catalog)
Super – many thanks.
by Jon Lackman | 18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”:
[T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before … [I]t was certainly time for a long-overdue reassessment of this persistently stereotyped and often maligned powerhouse of modern culture. For example, one lingering popular fixation is the very notion of “Bauhaus architecture,” which has become a misnomer for Modernist building design … Another entrenched fallacy about the Bauhaus is that it was somehow responsible for the lamentable global proliferation of boring corporate Modernist architecture after World War II … What made the Bauhaus such a truly revolutionary undertaking was not so much its departure from prevailing aesthetic norms—specifically its rejection of historical styles—but rather its systematic recasting of the way in which the fine and applied arts were taught.
by Jon Lackman | 17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster:
[M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and programs, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but from most postwar practice as well … Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple effect of the end-of-grand-narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to ‘the market’ and ‘globalization’?
Julia Bryan-Wilson responded:
They have cut off the hot water in the building where I teach. The rumor is that we will soon lose our office phones, as the Women’s Studies department already has. In this underfunded public university [UC-Irvine] … I cannot help but think about the problem of ‘the contemporary’ in relation to the urgencies of the troubled future.
Other respondents: Grant Kester, James Elkins, Miwon Kwon, Joshua Shannon, Richard Meyer, Johanna Burton, Pamela M. Lee, Michelle Kuo, Mark Godfrey, Okwui Enwezor, Anton Vidokle, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Terry Smith, Alexander Alberro, Tim Griffin, Yates McKee, James Meyer, Vered Maimon, T.J. Demos, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk, Blake Stimson, Kelly Baum, Rachel Haidu, Juliane Rebentisch, Jaleh Mansoor, Siona Wilson, Judith Rodenbeck, Helen Molesworth, Suzanne Hudson, Isabelle Graw, Tom McDonough.
When “The” stands first, time to move on.
by Ben Lima | 16 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval
Designboom posts a blurb and excerpt from David Stephenson, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). (See also a review by Marcus Bunyan of the 2009 exhibition at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond, Australia; 2007 show at Julie Saul and Brian Sholis review.)
What appeals to me about this project is 1) seriality as a way of clarifying the logic of a type, and promoting comparative judgments, and 2) the dramatic flattening of the vaults into the photographic frame, in eliminating an entire dimension of information (i.e. verticality), focuses attention on just the secondary details that are unique to each building.
It would be interesting to compare these images with an aerial survey of the same structures. From the ordinary, human’s-eye view, they are quite familiar; the camera eye brings out their striking strangeness.
by Leslie Thompson | 15 June 2010 | Museums
I recently ventured to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to view the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, the first museum retrospective of her drawings. Immediately upon entering the gallery, I felt uncomfortable. What is bothering me about this show? Is it the layout, the work, the theme? Then it dawned on me: it’s the lighting! When exhibiting drawings, museums must use very low lighting. All of the windows and ceilings (which is basically one large skylight) were covered. I am accustomed to the bright, open spaces at the Nasher. In a way, it had felt like life had been eradicated from the galleries.
Environment has such a large impact on how the viewer experiences a work of art. Just as Whiteread uses her drawings to help her “choreograph a space,” a museum uses the gallery space to facilitate one’s reception of an exhibition. Should my appreciation be unwavering? Or do we all succumb to the power of the museum?
“Should my appreciation be unwavering?”
Absolutely not.
“Or do we all succumb to the power of the museum?”
Yes, if we want to see the art.
I love museums. I visit them often.
I’ve once seen the same show at two separate museums and noticed the difference between my experiences with each space. I enjoyed the exhibition at one museum but could do without at the other.
by Jon Lackman | 15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes:
In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism in regard to their existential experience … The term, as I understand it, speaks to a new, morphing identity, fluid enough to encompass a new breed of diasporic, culturally or ethnically mixed Africans who came of age or grew up outside Africa but continues to move in and out of the continent. It speaks of cosmopolitanism and a sense of belonging to the metropolis. At the very least, it foregrounds the Western metropolis as a key site for the expression of African concerns. At the same time, Afropolitan has taken on a life of its own and become part of the language of fashion and advertisement … Yet I wonder whether, by using the term Afropolitan, we restrict ourselves to the middle class and the offspring of well-to-do Africans. Also, how can we distinguish them from their counterparts in older black communities … who were in the Western metropolis before the rise of the Afropolitans? As historian Earl Lewis reminds us, the entire Atlantic world, including the United States, is constituted by “overlapping diasporas” … Exploring the works of contemporary artists continues to afford us a fresh look at the renewed importance and changing practice of exodus. Indeed, their works, as they tie to their constant mobility in and out of Africa, hold out the possibility of circular, rather than only unidirectional movement.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 June 2010 | Architecture
Historians of contemporary architecture (and television) will find interesting this essay by Daniel Harris, “Celebrity Houses, Celebrity Politics,” in the winter 2010 Antioch Review:
Elegance in the eyes of many celebrities is bound up with the concept of hugeness. Size and quantity are the key tenets of their aesthetic. Their houses are not prettier and more comfortable than ours: they are simply twenty – and in some cases, fifty, even one hundred – times larger … [The television show] Cribs provides an inadvertently cruel exposé of the ghetto fabulousness of rappers who fill their pools with sea water imported from the Bahamas … Although they would like us to believe that they embrace and celebrate their impoverished upbringing, virtually nothing in their houses, aside from the almost universal meretriciousness of their décor, suggests that hip hop stars genuinely respect their roots … Their décor is a blank white page suitable for self-invention, which is why the austere modernist cube is so appealing to the rich and famous, allowing them to project onto its featureless walls any image of themselves they care to create. Not surprisingly, their houses have no history, no narrative, no patina of age.
by Jon Lackman | 13 June 2010 | Career
I asked the Getty again if they planned to update “PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later” and heard back this time:
[W]e are not considering any funding in this area at this time.
Please feel free to view information about our current work http://www.getty.edu/foundation/message_director.html .
by Jon Lackman | 8 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA managing editor Christopher Howard reports on the recent art bibliography summit:
With internet research ever increasing, especially among undergraduate students, the popularity-driven results of search engines must be countered with reliable sources of knowledge, said Elizabeth Mansfield of New York University … Since BHA covered only Western art—the founding editor Michael Rinehart noted that H. W. Janson’s survey textbook was the original model—inclusiveness is key to moving forward … Collaboration and sustainability are also necessities, as single organizations like the Getty, CAA, the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), or the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) can no longer host and maintain a bibliographic database on their own … Questions that remain open for discussion ranged from practical issues (“Do we need full abstracts or just subject headings?”) to philosophical inquiries (“Does an art bibliography best facilitate art-historical research, or do other methods need exploring?”) … In the face of the increasing instrumentalization of the humanities in higher education, perhaps the most pressing concern is how to more strongly articulate the need for a comprehensive art bibliography.
In the end, the meeting’s only resolution was to convene more meetings, understandable I suppose given its wide purview and short duration:
After intensive discussion, the task force did not come to consensus on an immediate plan of action. Some members believed that the BHA model should be adhered to and expanded, and others felt a wholly new approach to art bibliographies is needed. Therefore, within the next six months the task force plans to seek funding for two things. First, it will create an international working group, which will include an outside specialist, to scan currently operating art bibliographies, which in addition to BHA include artlibraries.net, arthistoricum.net, the Avery Index, Arcade, and Kubikat, among others. The task force will also examine what can be retooled or repurposed from these sources for improved bibliographic functionality. Second, the task force will establish another group, again with an outside consultant, that will conduct focus groups with librarians, scholars, publishers, and nonprofit and commercial vendors to determine their professional needs. The task force also plans to explore different business models and more clearly identify the technological and financial challenges that can sustain BHA or something like it.
The Getty also issued a short statement (pdf).
by Jon Lackman | 8 June 2010 | Books, Modern
Modern Art Notes is recommending summer reading on art. I’d add to his list Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, which has just been re-issued in paperback. (Published in 2008, the book substantially revised the author’s original 1995 French version.) Writing in the Burlington Magazine in Nov 2008, Caroline Levitt called it “a pleasure to read”:
His characteristically lucid style, combining astutely told anecdotes with careful archival research and profound scholarly observation, paints a vivid and cogent picture … The result is at once erudite and accessible … It remains relevant and fresh, while retaining a sense of authority and makes an important contribution … Essentially a specialist in literature, Read shows himself once again to be an equally engaging and authoritative art historian … Exacting and witty, Read’s book is as multi-faceted, penetrating and truthful as a Cubist painting.
by Jon Lackman | 7 June 2010 | Uncategorized
In a recent issue of the journal of visual culture (8:2), “The Obama Issue,” the editors posed six questions to various contributors: Is Barack Obama the most “visible” U.S. president? What role did visual media play in the 2008 election? Why do commodities with Obama-inspired imagery sell so well? How did racial tropes influence depictions of Obama, and vice versa? What image from the 2008 election “had the most visual, critical, satirical or politically motivating impact, and why?” And why did the media obsess over the physical appearance of Barack Obama (and Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin)?
The 27 respondents include W.J.T. Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who writes, “It is surely his uncanny offhand seriousness that makes his slim beauty so engaging … One of [the] chief arguments [in the 1996 Stathis Gourgouris book Dream Nation] is that there is no nation and therefore we must dream it – the lost object argument. And what better way of empiricizing the lostness of the object than through physical beauty”?
by Leslie Thompson | 4 June 2010 | Contemporary
Last night the Dallas Museum of Art presented a talk with Luc Tuymans. The DMA recently opened the first US retrospective of the artist (organized by the Wexner and SFMOMA). I enjoy how the subdued palette of his work combined with the paintings’ subject matter produces a feeling that lingers, or haunts the viewer (like a memory).
Something from Tuymans’ talk that resonated was in his discussion of referencing the horrors of history in his paintings (whether it be the effects of WWII, post-colonial Congo, the global aftermath of 9/11, etc). As an artist working with these subjects, he paints not as a way to come to terms with the events. One can never come to terms; that’s not the point- he says. The point is not to obliterate these emotional events of history, these inhumanities, from culture. We cannot choose our history.
While Tuymans doesn’t think art should be full of political content (propoganda), his paintings definitely become politically charged (so many examples: Lumumba (2000), The Secretary of State (2005) and Gas Chamber (1986) to name a few).
Tuymans’ views on these historical tragedies seems to reflect my own. I would have enjoyed this event. Sorry I missed it, but thanks for reporting!
by Jon Lackman | 4 June 2010 | Ancient
The Dec. 2009 Antiquity cover bears an unusually alluring set of teasers:
Royal purple found at Qatna, Syria
The Bishops of Whithorn and their diet
Cannibalism in Neolithic Germany
Clubbing and stabbing in Bronze Age Spain
The eventful story of some Chinese trousers
Also in this issue, Bisserka Gaydarska analyzes the Theoretical Archaeology Group and N. James writes on the new Acropolis Museum and Greece’s hopes for recovering the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum:
Much more pressing than the issue of the Elgin Marbles is the scandal of the visitor experience on the Acropolis itself. In more than two decades, there has been no significant improvement [to the bottlenecks and noise created by large crowds] … The [Acropolis] Conservation Committee was right to fret about how much visitors understand the Acropolis. To face that challenge is the most urgent priority. And incidentally, to meet it would further enhance the case for restitution.
Having recently been to the Acropolis, I have to say I agree with the problems the visitor faces in attempting to view the site as, perhaps, they would have imagined it after an art history survey course: a pristine example of mathematical perfection, ideal proportions and beautiful harmony. However, the new Acropolis museum more than makes up for this – and in fact, counteracts the rather limited perception of the hill we tend to have. The museum, of necessity, presents a much broader view of ancient Greece than the strict classicism we are familiar with from the sculptural examples in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, etc. In the museum, the Acropolis is linked to the civilizations at its base, the daily experience of Athens’ citizens, their rituals and beliefs, and the rather violent evolution of the site over time. While the crowds and noise deny an experience of purity and isolation, they are perhaps more exemplary of the reality of the panathenaic festival than we care to acknowledge.
by Jon Lackman | 3 June 2010 | Modern
Classiques Garnier Numérique (formerly known as Éditions Champion Électronique) has released a new online database (subscription required), “Writings on Art from the 18th to the 20th Century“:
It brings together 61,000 pages, going from 1741 to 1927, gathering 72 authors and containing 169 titles. Esthetics, philosophy, art history, texts by painters and writers, but also novels and artists’ journals … The Writings on Art are essentially centred on art criticism, i.e. on the salons and on literary monograph[s] devoted to painters … [from] Father André’s Essay on the Beautiful [to] the first real salon … composed by La Font de Saint Yenne [to] the last volume of Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu.
This searchable database is tremendously useful for anyone studying modern French art, but especially for someone like me studying modern French art criticism. For example, one thing I’m writing about is the use of the words cadavre and sale (dirty) by critics. This database turns up 488 and 258 examples respectively. Long hours of traditional research in the library would have turned up a tenth as much.
The full list of writers included in the database:
Edmond About
Yves-Marie André
Guillaume Apollinaire
Georges Albert Aurier
Honoré de Balzac
Théodore de Banville
Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly
Maurice Barrès
Charles Baudelaire
Léonce Bénédite
Charles Blanc
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Argens
Charles de Brosses
Jules-Antoine Castagnary
Anne Claude Philippe Caylus
Champfleury
François-René de Chateaubriand
Charles-Nicolas Cochin
Abraham Constantin
Eugène Delacroix
Étienne-Jean Delécluze
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Fernand Desnoyers
Denis Diderot
Maxime Du Camp
Alexandre Dumas
Louis Émile Edmond Duranty
Théodore Duret
Étienne Falconet
Eugène Fromentin
Paul Gauguin
Théophile Gautier
Edmond de Goncourt
Jules et Edmond de Goncourt
François Guizot
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Dominique Ingres
Auguste Jal
La Font de Saint Yenne
Jules Laforgue
Alphonse de Lamartine
Marc-Antoine Laugier
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Stéphane Mallarmé
Guy de Maupassant
André Mellério
Prosper Mérimée
Jules Michelet
Octave Mirbeau
Alfred de Musset
Gustave Planche
Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Marcel Proust
Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy
Ernest Renan
Auguste Rodin
George Sand
Victor Segalen
Paul Sérusier
Armand Silvestre
Théophile Silvestre
Stendhal
Hippolyte Taine
Adolphe Thiers
Théophile Thoré
Rodolphe Töpffer
Émile Verhaeren
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
Louis Vitet
Alexandre Weill
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Émile Zola
by Jon Lackman | 2 June 2010 | Uncategorized
British art historians are concerned that proposed changes to the system by which their universities are classified and evaluated could diminish the reputation of art history there. Incidentally, the 2008 evaluations are available online (scroll to page 97). The quality of these rankings and their methodology are of course up for debate. That said, see below for the universities with the highest percentage of their “history of art, architecture and design” research activity judged to be of “world leading” quality:
1. University of East Anglia
2. University of Sussex
2. University of York
2. University of Glasgow
5. Courtauld Institute
5. University of Manchester
7. University of Birmingham
7. School of Oriental and African Studies
7. University College London
Meanwhile, American academics are still waiting for the National Research Council to release its now years-and-years-late report on its now thoroughly outdated (congressionally mandated) ratings of graduate programs.
In its defense, the NRC asserted recently in a powerpoint presentation, “There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. We spent a lot of time trying to get universities to provide comparable data and developing our model. In most fields, and especially now, doctoral faculty change relatively slowly, as do patterns of publication. We would like to update the study in the next two years. Now that we have developed the statistical machinery, it is a data updating task, which could be carried out on-line. But, we will need to obtain funding.”
New “history and history of art” rankings out now from The Guardian.
In a Chronicle column, Michael Ruse offers a defense for those of us in the humanities: “we are a lot cheaper than the sciences.” But he doesn’t think that argument will get us very far. He argues (among other things) that art museums such as Washington’s NGA will need to figure out how to thrill schoolchildren as well as science museums do. The National Gallery is, he says, a mausoleum. “Nary a kid to be seen … all of those little Americans [visiting D.C.] are going to have their minds filled with the excitement of science and technology, and the other side to human learning and experience won’t have had a look in.” (Link via Chris Howard.)