by Linnea Wren | 1 June 2010 | Museums, Pre-Columbian
Art Daily has just announced that nearly 100 prehispanic objects deposited by the Mexica (often called the Aztecs) in the ceremonial precinct of in their capital of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) will be on display in Mexico City. The exhibition will open in the later part of June 2010. The objects, which include wooden masks and scepters, flint knives, golden ornaments and the remains of marine animals, were placed as offerings to the deity Tlaltecuhtli at the foot of the Templo Mayor.
by Ben Lima | 30 May 2010 | Uncategorized
Can art history be published, reported on, or otherwise communicated through the medium of the podcast? In logging many hours of commuting time, I have had reason to ponder this question. (more…)
by Jon Lackman | 29 May 2010 | Teaching
As I was listening to this interesting “On the Media” segment recently, I became intrigued when I got the impression that everyone but me had read this article (pdf), “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” by Kathleen Hayles. (In fact, it’s not all that well known.)
This is a topic I’ve thought some about, while teaching. I admire Hayles’s willingness to sidestep the bias among academics against “ADD generation” habits and examine it afresh. Too many academics seek only to create students in their own image, a point that Ken Robinson made eloquently in a 2006 talk:
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement … If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
Now, here is what Hayles has to say about “deep attention” and “hyper attention”:
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom … Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem.
Hayles goes on to argue that, like it or not, college students are increasingly drawn to hyper attention. What are the consequences of this for teaching?
… educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment, or change the environment to fit the students … How can the considerable benefits of deep attention be cultivated in a generation of students who prefer high levels of stimulation and have low thresholds for boredom? … [In an] interactive classroom at the University of Southern California … Fourteen large screens span the walls, providing display space for input controlled by wireless laptop computers scattered around a large conference table. One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”; while a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the Web for appropriate content to display on the screens, for example web sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the material being presented … [Or] Imagine a course that begins by studying strategies of self-presentation at the wildly popular Facebook.com, including naiveté, deception, ironic juxtaposition, competition, cooperation, betrayal, and compelling narrative. This provides a rich context in which the sly and subversive self-presentations in The Education of Henry Adams can be analyzed, including an assignment that asks students to compose Facebook entries for the book’s ironic persona.
Hayles writes that these experiments have so far produced mixed results, but I found them inspiring nonetheless. After all, trying to respond creatively to the new wave of students seems much more interesting than simply trying to bludgeon them with the old, decreasingly effective methods, at ever higher volumes, which, I’ll admit, has been my instinct in the past.
Fascinating study. I’m proud to say that the institution where I teach practices Learner-Centered education. I agree with Hayles that both hyper and deep attention have their merits, and should be cultivated. It’s true that most of our students seem to be fairly adept at hyper-attention while struggling with deep attention (with exceptions of course). One of my goals as an instructor is help students realize the value of deep attention, which many regard with great suspicion. If I can produce a moment for a student which reads something like “I really can learn and understand more by studying a work of art in great detail, and I like it!”, I feel I’ve done my work well.
by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2010 | Teaching
The March-April 2010 issue of Le Débat prints a talk that Pierre Rosenberg gave at a September 2009 colloquium (pdf):
My career has been in museums, at the Louvre mostly, where I’ve spent almost 40 years. I love museums, all museums. Alas I didn’t discover them in school, but rather from my parents … Many don’t get that opportunity, that privilege … [Our educational] system, I say with regret, is antidemocratic, profoundly unjust, profoundly antiegalitarian, and perfectly elitist in the worst sense of the term.
Isn’t it to remedy this grave injustice that art historians have long fought for art history to be a required course in high school and college? … School teaches us to read and to write, but it doesn’t teach us to see … Art history is nothing other than learning to see. Art is not transparent …
Art history has had its great figures, from Aby Warburg to Erwin Panofsky, from Bernard Berenson to Roberto Longhi, from Anthony Blunt to John Pope-Hennessy, from Robert Rosenblum to Michael Baxandall, not to mention our compatriots who made 19th-century France one of the two great countries for art history alongside Germany and our more recent Henri Focillon, Émile Mâle, Élie Faure, Louis Grodecki, Antoine Schnapper, Daniel Arasse. My list is not exhaustive …
[Yet it is] a misunderstood discipline. The sentence that has enraged art historians, here it is. You can read it in the 2008 Bulletin Officiel of the national education ministry: “A teacher of French literature [can also] teach the arts … To do so, he has no need for specialized education.”
“He has no need for specialized education.” The jaw drops.
I confess I knew next to nothing about Antoine Schnapper and Daniel Arasse until Rosenberg inspired me to look them up. And I study French art! As of this writing, Arasse doesn’t even have a Dictionary of Art Historians page.
by Jeremy Miller | 27 May 2010 | Museums, Teaching
Walking through the Birth of Impressionism exhibition at the De Young Museum, I realized that Kenneth Baker got basically one thing right in his sparse review: it builds anticipation for coming Fall exhibit.
What I noticed about this well-executed exhibition was its genuine interest in teaching us something about the relationships between mid 19th-century painting and French socio-political developments, and that its narrative seems to be drawn largely from Ross King’s book on the topic. I also realized that my students would almost certainly learn more about this topic by spending two hours here than in any series of lectures I could offer them.
by David Packwood | 27 May 2010 | Renaissance
Plants in renaissance paintings usually have religious associations, but seldom if ever connections with mind-expanding drugs. Now, David Bellamy of Sotheby’s has decided that a plant held by a satyr in Botticelli’s canonical ‘Venus and Mars’ has hallucinogenic properties.
After consulting with horticultural experts at Kew Gardens, Bellamy maintains that it is Datura stramonium – sometimes known as devil’s trumpet. According to the Telegraph, the drug makes you “hot and disinhibited”, which may be why Mars has stripped off his clothes. The famous clothed Venus could, if we accept the drug theory, represent a warning against such intoxicated abandonment.
I’ve taught courses on pictures and reception theory in which I’ve pointed out that something in the painting is being offered to the viewer, but if Bellamy is right, the viewer of the picture is being offered Datura, sometimes known as ‘poor man’s acid’.
Can a picture get you high in this sense? I’m thinking that if this is true, it’s going to be a case of move over Panofsky and Wind to make way for Timothy Leary.
Sorry, it should be David Bellingham. I confused him with David Bellamy, the famous TV botanist!
Same vein as Caravaggio’s Bacchus offering wine.
I wonder if Botticelli or other artists of the period had some first-hand knowledge of the substance. There was an excellent book published a few years back, “The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs,” but I know of no similar volume for artists.
Three Pipe Problem has a great article on this, with a reproduction of the hallucinogenic plant Datura.
http://threepipeproblem.blogspot.com/2010/05/misrepresenting-botticelli-for-modern.html
Fascinating article! I wonder if the nicknames for the plant (“thorn apple” and “Devil’s trumpet”) exist in Italian, and if those names were extant in in the 15th century. It certainly would support the Tree of Knowledge theory that is suggested in the article.
Datura Trombo Del Diavolo is the common Italian term for this plant. Indeed, upon Monica’s suggestion, further research suggests that the term ‘Thorn Apple’ is an English one.
I wanted to point out one puzzling thing about the link that Hasan included above. The link mentions that the plant was introduced in Italy after 1500 (and Botticelli’s Venus and Mars was painted c. 1483). That’s a discrepancy of about 17 years. I wonder if the post-1500 introductory date for the plant is inaccurate, or really a rough estimate? Or, perhaps humanists like Botticelli were aware of the plant before it was actually introduced into the country (since its hallucinogenic effects were recorded by ancient Greeks). On the other hand, perhaps Venus and Mars could be seen as visual evidence that the plant existed in Italy before 1500?
Perhaps I’ll need to contact David Bellingham to hear his opinion (and get more answers!)
(David Packwood – I’m pretty sure that you meant to credit David Bellingham of Sotheby’s, not David Bellamy.) Cheers!
Wow. Off on a tangent: reviews of Botticelli books by Dombrowki, Bredekamp, Rehm, on the 500th anniversary of SB’s death
Dioscorides famous 1st century text Materia Medica contained a description of stramonium datura. We know Cosimo de Medici acquired Materia Medica well before Botticelli executed Mars and Venus in the 1480s.
What have I started!?
Much has happened since those entries in May! With the help of some Botanical friends, we’ve crossed out the Daturas and found a enchanting new candidate for the plant in the painting. See the images and decide for yourself:
by Jon Lackman | 26 May 2010 | Film
At Artnet, David D’Arcy reviews the recent International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal:
The fest featured no less than six films on Picasso, including Arne Glimcher’s unlikely Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies [which argues] that Cubism was inspired by early movies … Views on Vermeer – 12 Short Stories … weighs Johannes Vermeer’s influence on contemporary artists, writers and others … The “Vermeer effect,” it turns out, is rather widespread today … Oeke Hoogendij’s The New Rijksmuseum provides an inside look at what apparently was a dispute-plagued renovation of Holland’s venerable art repository. Who would have thought that the sensible Dutch, in their effort to make the famous museum “more than a labyrinth” would produce a Tower of Babel, as the museum’s director asks before he quits in frustration.
More on Glimcher’s movie from The Wall Street Journal.
by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2010 | Books
Want to get the finger? I reviewed a new book on its role in art, literature and history by Yale Center for British Art senior curator Angus Trumble.
By the way, Trumble blogs.
by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2010 | Books, Modern
In a recent issue of History of Photography (34:1), Jonathan P. Eburne reviews several recent books on surrealism and dada. He’s most taken with George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris:
Baker’s mannered yet often luminous [book] represents a major contribution to the study of avant-garde art … the project harbours ambitions that lie beyond the monographic … [It] unfolds around a central problematic first voiced by the poet Apollinaire, the project of ‘artists who want to become inhuman’ … What is ultimately most impressive about Baker’s book, in spite of its occasional excess, is its consistent pursuit of the conceptual work of the Dada movement … It is for this reason that Baker’s book will be of interest as much to scholars of photography as to theorists and specialists in other media … Baker unfolds what comes close to a unified field theory of Dada art.
by Jon Lackman | 24 May 2010 | Books
Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher has founded Artifex Press, “the first publishing company dedicated to the creation of comprehensive, publicly accessible, online catalogues raisonnés”:
Artifex Press has been named publisher of the digital catalogues raisonnés of the estates of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin along with contemporary artists Chuck Close, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The catalogues of twenty-five other artists and estates are slated to follow … Artifex Press ensures that each catalogue raisonné will be regularly maintained and, therefore, accurate and current … In addition, Artifex Press will make issues integral to artist intent – including the understanding, exhibition, installation, site-specificity, and conservation of contemporary works of art – a central focus of its digital catalogues raisonnés.
Its first catalogue is due out this fall. You can view online two symposia it sponsored: “Best of Intentions: Artists Speak on Preserving Artists’ Intent” and “Can History Repeat Itself? Reenactments and the Preservation of Performance Art.”
By the way, Artifex is hiring an assistant editor, who “will work on researching and compiling information for a few specific catalogue projects, as well as various activities pertaining to the startup publisher, from organizing public symposiums to performing administrative tasks.” Apply to [email protected], subject line: Artifex Press.
Please let me know when the catalog of Sol Lewitt is available. Will it be available free on the web?
According to the New York Times, “The public will at a later date be able to access each catalogue raisonné for a fee. ‘I don’t know what it will cost,” Mr. Glimcher said. “Probably a few hundred dollars a year.’ ”
by Linnea Wren | 24 May 2010 | Teaching
I am one of those art historians who is a digital alien (see L. Rusch’s comment to Jon Lackman’s post of 13 May). But even if I were a digital native, I might still be perplexed by the pedagogical applications of the new technology that will work best in the classroom. I am wondering how I can move beyond what I currently do — having my students utilize PowerPoint in classroom presentations. I would like to pose some questions:
And does the group collaboration possible through these techniques help students to learn? Can these media help create a model for art history research and writing that is dynamic and relevant?
If any of you have used these techniques, I would love to hear your experiences. Please comment below.
The Art Historians At Work blog was good while it lasted — and it’s still interesting to read if you’ve never seen it before.
Hello :)
There are myriad tools beyond powerpoint and flow charts, which are wonderful ways to bore humans of any age to death!!
I remember with physical dismay my art history lecturers heaping us with photocopied notes with tiny black and white images of an exquisite Bottcelli, Durer, Tintoretto etc… How can a lecturer expect to inspire a student with THAT!
Some tools:
*Google wave has just gone public – its like a message board and email and collaboration tool all in one. I have been using it with tute groups since to wonderful effect.
As for visual presentations, augmented reality(AR) browsing is steadily becoming widespread and will revolutionise the way art images can be presented and info supplemented.
The Getty museum has completed some AR displays, to wonderful effect:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/north_pavilion/cabinet/index.html
Also, dont forget smarthistory.org, which essentially aims to be an online art history textbook.
Feel free to contact me if you would like more detail on this and how I use it with my students.
Art is one of those subjects where VISUAL stimuli is vital to making it interesting. Becoming digitally versed will benefit student and demonstrator alike and can make the process of learning an enjoyable and inspiring one.
Cheers
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
I’m a student in a well-respected purely online program in museum studies. A major part of my “discussion” work is done online through message boards. I find that this does improve my writing and analytical skills, as I am forced to answer questions clearly and thoughtfully through my writing.
I have used all of the above technologies and others as both a graduate student and instructor. While fascinating, and potentially useful for engaging otherwise unengaged students, none of them seems to me as effective at developing analytical and methodological skills as a good group discussion. It’s that “good” part that can be tricky. I’m also concerned about how much we might cater to students cultural ADD (as opposed to pathological ADD, which we should cater to).
by Jon Lackman | 24 May 2010 | Modern
Kline was born May 23, 1910. As far as I know, no exhibition was held or publication released to mark his centennial. Nor does he yet have a catalogue raisonné, apparently.
Good question: Why isn’t this artist’s 100th birthday being celebrated with an exhibition, installations and so on?
MOCA LA does have five Kline paintings on view in the Permanent Collection.
by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2010 | Journals, Modern
The CAA’s Art Journal has a new editor, Katy Siegel. I haven’t had a chance yet to look at her first issue, which is now out and apparently focuses on artists’ projects. Siegel has said, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”
This got me curious about the original intent and early life of Art Journal, which has in recent years seemed to me to lack a coherent mission. I went and had a look at the journal’s first few issues. Its first issue appeared in November, 1941. It was then called College Art Journal. A year’s subscription cost $1, the equivalent of about $15 today. Its founding editor was CAA vice-president Myrtilla Avery. CAA President Sumner McKnight Crosby wrote the issue’s foreword and stressed its potential as a venue for discussing pedagogical innovation.
In the inaugural issue, Elizabeth Wilder (Weismann) plumped for more study and teaching of Latin America: “There is literally no book at present available in English on Latin American art in general”. Harry D.M. Grier published “Television: A New Means of Art Education”: “The combination of aural and visual material in television has the advantage of provoking in the audience a concentration of attention closely parallel to that of an actual gallery visit.”
The most influential contribution to the inaugural issue was “Modern Art Makes History, Too,” by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., which ignited a debate that then preoccupied the early issues of Art Journal. In his essay, Barr urged the university to let modern art past its gates:
[When] I was a student between fifteen and twenty years ago … I heard all told three professors in three leading college art departments lecture to undergraduates on modern art. One was querulously resentful, a second wittily condescending, the third dismissed painting from Cézanne to 1925 with a glib retelling of the donkey’s tail legend. All three knew several times as much about Sano di Pietro as Picasso. About the art of the previous fifty years they were either complacently superficial or profoundly ignorant … Up to a decade ago, so far as I can recall, the learned magazines such as The Art Bulletin and Art Studies published between them only one article on modern art and that was hostile … I can’t help but feeling that college art historians are not even now generally and deeply interested in modern art. Isn’t far more tiem given in their undergraduate courses to the early fifteenth or seventeenth centuries than to the early twentieth? … Even more obvious and urgent is the need for graduate work in modern art. The field is wide open and crying for scholarly research but how many candidates for Ph.D. or M.F.A. are doing these in twentieth-century art? Or even in the late nineteenth century? … I intend not a rebuke, but a challenge—and a cry for help.
Barr’s exasperation now seems quaint, considering the vogue today for contemporary art history. But the present trend may be helpfully illuminated by an examination of its origins in the controversy Barr generated.
W.M. Ivins, Jr. of the Metropolitian Museum promptly protested Barr’s suggestion in the following issue in a letter to the editor. And Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., responded at length:
I have much sympathy with my friend Alfred H. Barr’s opinion … It is a suggestion that has earlier been made by Dr. Lionello Venturi. Yet there are reasons for confining our study of human values generally to those values that are established, hence really teachable … In short, in any balanced curriculum of liberal studies the present must always have a standing rather marginal than central … [As for graduate research on modern art] Does Mr. Barr think that his imaginary graduate student is likely to provide from this endeavor anything but documentation of a somewhat dubious sort? … I simply shudder at the results even our best graduate students are likely to gain from pumping, say, Marin, Benton, or Dali.
In the following issue, Laurence Schmeckebier agreed with both sides, though rather more than Barr, noting that a dose of modern art might help re-engage undergraduates with the humanities at a time when, he lamented, they were becoming increasingly pre-professional in their outlook. James Thrall Soby and Robert. J. Goldwater defended Barr strenuously. And MoMA’s Beaumont Newhall made a related argument for “Photography [Studies] as a Branch of Art History.” (MoMA film curator Iris Barry recommended “Motion Pictures as a Field of Research” soon thereafter.)
(I wonder by the way where Venturi made his suggestion – Mather doesn’t say. Parnassus perhaps? The magazine was cited in a later report by Goldwater as the other major venue for this debate.)
Barr would return to Art Journal in the May 1945 issue, to advocate for more attention to be paid to American art, noting that since 1918 the Art Bulletin had published just one article on American painting and that one professor had asked him “half seriously whether after all there was any American art worth studying.”
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
From Las Vegas Weekly:
They were adored, fawned over, hated, respected, energizing and revered. They brought hope, insulted the city and loved the city. They were negative, positive, cherished and polarizing. And now they are leaving. Love or hate them, there is no arguing that Dave Hickey, famous art critic and genius-grant recipient, and Libby Lumpkin, art historian and curator, will go down in Las Vegas history. There was Hickey’s controversial stint in UNLV’s art department, where he nurtured talented artists and aggravated colleagues. There was Lumpkin’s role in the first fine-art gallery on the Strip — Steve Wynn’s collection at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art — which helped expand the perception of what could be a tourist attraction. There was her leadership of the Las Vegas Art Museum, bringing it national attention with important contemporary exhibits — suddenly, major collectors and museums were sharing their work with Las Vegas … Now they’re off to New Mexico; Lumpkin has been made a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico. Hickey will teach art there.
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
On the lighter side, the Santa Barbara Independent reports that a recent debate at UCSB asked
the audience to imagine that a zombie outbreak has taken society to the brink of extinction and UCSB, the only remaining safe house, has room to admit only one more member. Seven professors [from the departments of Education, Philosophy, Film and Media, Art History, Mechanical Engineering, Geography, and Mathematics] were then required to argue that their discipline is the most valuable to society, making them best equipped to rebuild civilization and earn them that coveted last spot … An audience vote determined the winner …
Art historian [Laurie] Monham argued for the importance of the visual. “There is no purpose in using language to talk about something that makes no sense,” she said. “The irrational needs a place here.” She went on to say that an art historian is needed to provide avant garde stratagems to work through problems and to “tell us what we’ve done and what we haven’t tried…because the education system is working hard to make us all zombies” …
In the end, the philosopher won.
The art historian didn’t even make the top three.
Great This American Life story about a similar debate at Montevallo University in Alabama:
by Jeremy Miller | 20 May 2010 | Modern, Museums
From the Guggenheim:
Kenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute
May 21–June 20, 2010A key figure of postwar abstract painting, Kenneth Noland explored the essential qualities of color and surface throughout a career that spanned six decades. Noland was born on April 10, 1924, in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended the nearby Black Mountain College on the GI Bill from 1946 to 1948 before leaving for Paris, where he studied with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine and was introduced to the work of Henri Matisse. During his studies at Black Mountain in the late 1940s, and again in the summer of 1950, Noland was affected by the teachings of former Bauhaus master Josef Albers, who was the driving force at the school and who had brought with him from Germany an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century European art. However, Noland’s commitment to pure abstraction derived primarily from his studies with painter Ilya Bolotowsky.
It follows hot on the heels of “The Geometry of Kandinsky and Malevich” last fall. I sense a strong “teaching mandate” from the exhibition programmers. Makes me wish I lived in NYC, almost.
I too am looking forward to this exhibition, for the art and because I’m fascinated by all things related to Black Mountain College. It’s amazing how vibrant and influential a small place can become if the chemistry clicks, despite the barriers posed by low funds and a “provincial” location. By the by, I wouldn’t be surprised if we also see a Noland biography in the next few years. Five marriages, after all. Come to think of it, Robert Colescott and Saul Bellow had the same, all of them falling just one short of Norman Mailer’s six. Of course, writers and artists pale next to entertainers — Gloria Swanson, Larry King, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lana Turner all had even more. All that said, here’s hoping the Noland biography of the future will be mostly about the art!
by Jon Lackman | 19 May 2010 | Awards, Museums
The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) has announced its annual awards:
Category: Catalogue Based on a Permanent Collection
Michael R. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnésCategory: Exhibition Catalogue
“Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” (MoMA)Category: Exhibition in the Eastern Time Zone (Tie)
“Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” (MoMA)
“Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice” (MFA Boston)Category: Exhibition in the Central Time Zone
“Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth” (Art Institute of Chicago)Category: Exhibition in the Pacific Time Zone
“Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures” (LACMA)Category: Article, Essay or Extended Catalogue Entry
Nancy Mowll Mathews, “Prendergast in Italy”
In other news, Tyler Green reports that “the Association of Art Museum Directors has selected a new president in advance of its next meeting, which will take place June 7-8 in Indianapolis. AAMD’s next president will be Kaywin Feldman, the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She will succeed Clark Art Institute director Michael Conforti.”
by Jon Lackman | 19 May 2010 | Career
Last week I emailed the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education to ask if they had any plans to update their study PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later. I got a response today:
We are delighted about your interest in our study. We would love to undertake another study, should their be interest and funding. Please let us know whether interest and funding exist.
I can’t imagine that the study’s original sponsor, The Getty, is planning on ponying up that funding any time soon, but I’ll email them to ask.
by Travis Nygard | 19 May 2010 | Americas, Architecture, Awards, Books, Modern, Museums, News
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced that it awarded the annual Eldredge Prize to Kirk Savage for his book Monument Wars. I should disclose that I am far from impartial on this topic–Savage was my advisor in graduate school. That said, I think that his book is notable as a model for future scholarship.
Rather than framing the official monuments, architecture, and gardens of Washington DC as only reflecting agendas of powerful people, Savage shows that they were the result of ongoing public debates. By privileging controversies he wrote a story that is filled with human drama and included the voices of marginalized peoples. We learn, for example, about the struggle for an African American and Native American presence on the Mall. We find out that changes to the Mall resulted in personal loss–a fact that humanizes the geography. We empathize with the people who lived in “Murder Bay”—a neighborhood demolished to expand the public space.
In light of this approach to studying the past, what other places do you think deserve another look? Do you know of other scholarship that has engaged in interesting ways with official public art and architecture? Please comment below.
The Mall is a great topic in the study of public art. It is, in a way, triply public: in a public space, constructed with public funds, and intended to symbolize the public. I look forward to having a look at Monument Wars. I so enjoyed studying nineteenth-century France for my dissertation largely because the art and public spheres were so entwined. And I’ve been fascinated by the recent restoration of the Paris Pantheon’s monumental clock by the underground group UX. The group has also staged clandestine midnight theater performances inside the monument. They have decided, in effect, that the Pantheon belongs to the public and that therefore the public (themselves included) should get to bend the building to its purposes and desires. Within limits of course: I doubt they’d sanction a freelance demolition of the building.
by Jon Lackman | 18 May 2010 | Uncategorized
A recent issue of Master Drawings (XLVII: 4) notes the passing of Carlos van Hasselt:
Carlos van Hasselt died on 19 July 2009 in Paris … [He retired] as director of the Fondation Custodia in 1994 [after] twenty-four years. Carlos was born on 7 April 1929 in Bergen-op-Zoom in Brabant, The Netherlands … [and studied] art history under I.Q. van Regteren Altena … His most important work [was] the groundbreaking two-volume catalogue for the exhibition Dessins de paysagistes hollandais du XVIIe siècle, for which he received the Karel van Mander prize … His knowledge, wide interests, gift of friendship with both young and old—together with his excellent sense of humor—contributed to the esteem and affection with which Carlos was held … The last years of his career were marred by health problems, exacerbated by this hypochondriacal nature … When a half-paralyzing stroke prevented him from verbally expressing himself, communication was achieved by means of images … It was, until the very end, “une vie dédié à l’art et l’amitié,” as Andrzej Nieweglowski, his partner of forty-five years, wrote on the mourning card.
It’s hard to read on the go! Were it not for podcasts and audiobook version of media I would never have got through as much as I did over the last 2 years.
Librivox.org is an audiobook repository that produces free audiobook versions of public domain works. I love it! Currently listening to The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini when I go hiking!
The Smarthistory podcasts can be subscribed also via RSS, for those that dislike iTunes ;)
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
Incidentally, Rosalind Krauss called T.J. Clark’s National Gallery lectures “the greatest intellectual stimulation and the most superb rhetorical skill I experienced in 2009.”
Partway through the first lecture (I was wrong, they are on iTunes), I completely agree about “rhetorical skill.”
(In my opinion, reviewers in the field do not always sufficiently distinguish between 1) said skill, 2) logical coherence, and 3) correspondence with objective reality.)