by Jon Lackman | 26 May 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Wall Street Journal:
The Obamas are sending ripples through the art world as they put the call out to museums, galleries and private collectors that they’d like to borrow modern art by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and female artists for the White House. In a sharp departure from the 19th-century still lifes, pastorals and portraits that dominate the White House’s public rooms, they are choosing bold, abstract art works …
Their choices also, inevitably, have political implications, and could serve as a savvy tool to drive the ongoing message of a more inclusive administration. The Clintons received political praise after they selected Simmie Knox, an African-American artist from Alabama, to paint their official portraits. The Bush administration garnered approval for acquiring “The Builders,” a painting by African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, but also some criticism for the picture, which depicts black men doing menial labor …
The National Gallery of Art has loaned the family at least five works this year, including “Numerals, 0 through 9,” a lead relief sculpture by Jasper Johns, “Berkeley No. 52,” a splashy large-scale painting by Richard Diebenkorn, and a blood-red Edward Ruscha canvas featuring the words, “I think maybe I’ll…,” fitting for a president known for lengthy bouts of contemplation.
by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2009 | Museums
In the June 2009 ARTnews, executive editor Robin Cembalest writes that although museum attendance remains good for now, numerous directors are focusing greater energies on luring visitors, be it with esthetic coat checks, Facebook pages, yoga, or belly-dancing demonstrations:
… some have begun reaching out to scientists, futurists, game designers, and other specialists outside the art world. If these leaders succeed, the art museum of the future will offer the customer service of an Apple store, the comforts of a Barnes & Noble, and the dynamism of a town square. It will have areas where visitors can plug in or tune out, where they can immerse themselves in virtual-reality games or speak to live curators in the galleries, and where they can comment on the art they see—or make their own. This trend represents a sea change from a decade ago, when Arnold Lehman was ridiculed by many colleagues for staging dance parties and offering shows like “Hip-Hop Nation” to lure new audiences into the Brooklyn Museum … When the [Walker Art Center's] new installation opens in November, says chief curator Darsie Alexander, curators will hold in-gallery office hours … But for all the talk of accessibility, the cost of admission remains an elephant in the room … [Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry also] adds a cautionary note to the talk of outreach … “Museums should be accessible to all. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to or should enjoy the benefits of a museum. Not everyone enjoys football or Sartre.”
by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical
In caa.reviews, David Wilkins considers Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni, by Pamela M. Jones:
Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its creation and in history. These are big goals, of course, and—as with any such endeavor—there are frustrations. Many of the objects that at first seem to speak the loudest begin to whisper when we start researching or set out to communicate our ideas through teaching and writing. We want evidence to support or challenge our response to and our understanding of each work. What constellation of factors and personalities explain the creation of a work, and how was each work received and interpreted? History can be reticent and, at times, unyielding.
Not, however, for Pamela M. Jones in her brave new book on five Roman altarpieces from the period around 1600. Her goal was to understand how these works were part of “the lived experience of early modern Catholicism” (5; emphasis in original), a promise she fulfills in a most impressive fashion. Rather than exploring the intentionality that has been the focus of most art-historical effort in the early modern period, she shifts her attention to the now-popular question of reception.
by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA executive director Linda Downs writes:
Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn … Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online … The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and white for 2009–10, except where editorial and budget decisions may allow the insertion of color … Two programs in CAA’s grant-making arm will be suspended for 2009–10: the Professional Development Fellowship Program for graduate students and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund.
Also, the next CAA conference will be one day shorter than usual.
by Jon Lackman | 19 May 2009 | Uncategorized
From a recently lauded commencement address given by former Getty director John Walsh:
Make yourself clear. This is risky. To say clearly what you think is to risk being more clearly wrong. To fudge what you think – to qualify it, complicate it, overload it – is usually a defensive move. It’s a strategy for getting partial credit: you figure you may be wrong but at least you’re clever, you’re eloquent… and maybe not that far wrong.
I work in a field – art history – that is rich in adjectives, poor in provable statements, just right for somebody who hides from clarity behind vivid, entertaining language. The best antidote I ever heard prescribed to writers came from the art historian Howard Hibbard, who told us students what to do when we’d written a sentence: “Take your favorite word and strike it out.” Hibbard meant that often we put the word there not for clarity but for vanity …
During the past generation, art history has been preoccupied with questions of art theory and the social and economic and political contexts of art, which can be answered from illustrations in books. This has made the field richer intellectually, but it’s excused faculty members and graduate students from going to real works of art in the original and dealing with them, looking hard and long, trying to grasp their peculiar way of communicating, enjoying their pleasures, appreciating how they elude simple classification and undermine theories.
Hibbard’s advice is of course at least as old as Samuel Johnson’s day:
I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: “Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
by Jon Lackman | 18 May 2009 | Uncategorized
UC-Irvine historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom writes on “The Mythology of Blogs”:
Misconception 3: Blogging is a fad that is bound to go away soon, so we can just ignore the phenomenon and wait the trend out. No one really knows how long any form of communication will stay popular or significant. It seems doubtful, though, that blogging will disappear soon. And lately blogs have become an increasingly unavoidable part of the intellectual as well as political landscape …
Misconception 8: The academics and other intellectuals who turn to blogging are attention-seeking people who have trouble getting published in more traditional venues. Surely this is true at times. But Mary Beard maintains an active blog and also publishes essays and books at a prodigious rate. And in terms of attention-seeking, sometimes one motivation for blogging is to get attention for print publications …
Misconception 9: Academic blogging is an indulgence best reserved for the tenured. There are dangers involved in blogging, especially if you don’t have tenure. You can spend so much time blogging that you fail to do things you should, or you can slip into posting intemperate comments in cyberspace that come back to haunt you at tenure time. Those of us who teach graduate students or mentor junior faculty should point out these risks to those we advise. This said, I don’t think we should necessarily encourage those we advise not to blog. Many sorts of textual exercise, after all, can improve someone’s writing muscles. And, pragmatically, good things sometimes come to those who blog—if they do it well …
by Jon Lackman | 15 May 2009 | Conferences, Theory
Patrick Harrison reports on the recent conference, “On the Idea of Communism,” in n+1:
… Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, [Terry] Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, [Michael] Hardt’s mentor and collaborator … joined Hardt at the conference … [Hardt's] intellectual performance came straight out of the ramshackle, pleasantly inconclusive manner of American literary studies seminars, where discourse proceeds by dialogue, constructive criticism, and synthesis of a diversity of possible “readings” rather than by the militant “line struggle” favored by the Badiouvians with whom he shared the stage …
The premise of “On the Idea of Communism,” which was hosted March 13-15 by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, was to explore the possible positive meanings of the word “communism” for philosophical thinking. The conference would proceed neither by historical analysis of the past failure of “actually existing communism,” nor by speculation on the practicalities of establishing communism in our time, but by a series of philosophical meditations on what Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis,” that is, the hypothesis of an “eternal Idea” of radical egalitarianism that haunts every social order …
Underlying the general good feelings at the conference, however, were uglier traces of elitism and smug passivity. The audience was made up almost entirely of middle class, white academics (or academics-to-be), and if it was well balanced in terms of gender, a certain boys’ club mentality of macho one-upmanship still prevailed … All of the speakers were white European men, with the exceptions of Hardt (white and male but American) and poetry scholar Judith Balso (white and European but female). No history other than that of the French Revolution and Marxist communism was looked to for inspiration in testing “the communist hypothesis” …
Philosophy can’t complete politics, but it can reinvigorate and expand politics, and with this in mind Žižek’s “call to thought” is salutary. For this lesson and for the essential gesture of proposing a single banner under which all those committed to struggling for universal human equality can unite, the Birkbeck conference, for all its sins, represents a step in the right direction.
Someday, if not already, these people will be seen as the equivalent of the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debaters.
The sad part of this is that the project is worthwhile and should be welcomed. It’s the approach (and the nature of the discourse itself) that’s flawed.
I still find it odd that in our time, a time that prides itself on the general equality of the human condition, that philosophy is still dominated by white males. It also seems a little inadequate to have a discussion on communism where the countries that the (ideals more often) apply to are not dominated by white europeans.
by Jon Lackman | 14 May 2009 | Books
In Art in America (which finally went online a couple months ago), Sarah Hromack reviews Manon — a Person:
Part photo essay, [it] presents a comprehensive survey of a career that began during the 1960′s in Zurich, where the Berne-born Rosmarie Küng (her given name) began a modeling stint that soon segued into experiments in fashion, photography, installation, and performance … While the modestly produced book lacks the sensual qualities one might expect given Manon’s own lavish tastes, 134 color plates more than compensate for its physical plainness. (So does Jean-Christophe Ammann’s entry, which consists largely of a long, erotic passage cribbed from a novel by Hansjörg Schertenleib, in which an anonymous submissive details his desires to the dominatrix hired to fulfill them.)
by Jon Lackman | 13 May 2009 | Teaching
Smarthistory, created by Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker out of discontent with “the large expensive art history textbook,” now with 157 videos, has won a 2009 Webby award for best education website. The Guggenheim Museum won in the category of “cultural institutions.” Dreamgrove won the “netart” category. Keith Tyson won in “art.”
by Jon Lackman | 12 May 2009 | Uncategorized
John Armstrong, a philosopher specialising in aesthetics and vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, wrote recently:
The [humanities'] core problem can be expressed in the language of economics: the humanities are geared to supply, particularly to supply research. They ignore demand … Research needs to be redefined to embrace a wider range of cognitive virtues [than just] accuracy of reference and care in drawing conclusions. These are valuable because they counteract our normal sloppy thinking. However, there are many more qualities of thinking: grace, charisma, intimacy, spontaneity, wit, depth, simplicity, grandeur, warmth, openness, drama, intensity and generosity … Intellectual ambitions need to be raised. There is a tendency in research to pursue problems in increasing detail; it is a natural consequence of specialisation … Intellectual ambition has been miscast in terms of the pursuit of ever more detail. It is really the pursuit of ever great value … The humanities have often cast themselves as critics of society. It would be better to be cast as friends. A friend doesn’t have to admire everything you do but they do have your trust. Criticism comes, if it does, from kindness; it aims to help, not to humiliate.
by Jon Lackman | 11 May 2009 | Medieval, Museums, Renaissance
Recently arrived in our inbox:
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA, SUMMER 2009
An incomplete list, compiled by Nick Herman [Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University]
BelgiumCharles the Bold
Groeninge Museum, Bruges, 27 March-21 JulyCanada
From Raphael to Caracci: The Art of Papal Rome
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 29 May-7 September, 2009Paolo Veronese and the Petrobelli Altarpiece
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 29 May-7 September, 2009England
Henry VIII: Man and Monarch
London, The British Library, London, April 23-September 6, 2009.France
L’héritage artistique de Simone Martini / XIVe – XVe siècles
Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, 20 June-31 October, 2009Fabriquer la beauté: cosmétiques et soins du corps à la Renaissance
Écouen, Musée National de la Renaissance, 20 May-21 September, 2009Filippo et Filippino Lippi: la renaissance à Prato
Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 25 March-2 August, 2009Les Primitifs italiens – Splendeurs du Musée d’Altenbourg
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, 11 March-21 June, 2009Les premiers retables (XIIe-début du XVe siècle) – Une mise en scène du sacré
Paris, Musée du Louvre, April 10-July 6, 2009Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551) (Dessins)
Paris, Musée du Louvre, 25 June-2 November, 2009Mantegna, le prédelle de San Zeno de vérone 1457-1459
Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 4 April-22 June, 2009Le beau XVIe siècle, chefs d’œuvre de la sculpture en Champagne
Troyes, Église Saint-Jean-au-marchéLes trésors des icônes bulgares
Vincennes, Château, 13 May-30 August, 2009
GermanyThe Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 20 March-21 June, 2009Michelangelo. Zeichnungen und Zuschreibungen
Frankfurt, Städelmuseum, 6 March-7 June, 2009Fokus auf Andrea Mantegna: Der Evangelist Markus, um 1450
Frankfurt, Städelmuseum, 9 April-6 September, 2009Italy
Benedetto da Maiano a San Gimignano, La Riscoperta di un Crocifisso
San Gimignano, Museo del Conservatorio di Santa Chiara, to 21 June, 2009Pietro Candido, un Pittore del Cinquecento tra Volterra e Monaco
Volterra, Palazzo dei Priori, 31 May-8 November, 2009Giotto e il trecento
Rome, Complesso Vittoriano, 6 March-29 June, 2009Fra Angelico
Rome, Musei Capitolini, 8 April-5 July, 2009Raffaello e Urbino
Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 14 April-12 July, 2009I della Robbia: Il dialogo tra le Arti nel Rinascimento
Arezzo, Museo Statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderno, 21 February-7 June, 2009The Netherlands
Masterly Manuscripts. The Middle Ages in gold and ink
Utrecht, Catharijneconvent,16 May-23 August 2009Scorel’s Glory:
How a Utrecht-based painter brought the Renaissance to the North
Utrecht, Centraalmuseum, 20 March-28 June, 2009
RussiaThe Blue and the Gold of Limoges. The Enamels of the XII – XIV Centuries
Saint-Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, 19 June-20 September, 2009United States
Prayers in Code: Books of Hours and artistic patronage at the court of King Francis I (1494-1547)
Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, 25 April-19 July, 2009Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 15 March-16 August, 2009Art and Love in Renaissance Italy
Forth Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 15 March-14 June, 2009Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David
Los Angeles, Getty Center, June 9–August 16, 2009
Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2–August 23, 2009Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan
New York, The Morgan Library & Museum, June 19-September 13, 2009Heaven on Earth: Manuscript Illuminations from the National Gallery of Art
Washington, National Gallery of Art, March 1-August 2, 2009
I’m a little late to this post, but I just wanted to say that the exhibitions on cosmetics in France sound amazing.
by Jon Lackman | 8 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
From Le Monde:
The second edition of the exhibition, “The Power of Art,” has opened its doors. This triennial event, organized by the minister of culture and communication, the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Réunion des musées nationaux, comprises three sections … Among the 42 “resident” artists, just 7 women are presented … In this exhibition that aims to represent the French artistic scene, women thus constitute 16% … How can “The Power of Art” which pretends to be a “great encounter with creation in France” and “up-to-date with the French scene”, so fully ignore the depth, diversity, professionalism, and engagement of an entire part of that artistic scene? … Recall that today 60% of art-school graduates in France are women …
The Musée national d’art moderne itself takes note of these sad statistics in its preamble to its next exhibition, “Elles@centrepompidou”, with this slogan: “At the Centre Pompidou, women represent 17.7% of the artists in the museum’s collections. This new presentation of the collections is 100% devoted to them.” This new hanging, which will last one year, belongs to a tradition of thematic presentations, “Le mouvement des images” (2006-2007) and “Big Bang” (2005-2006) … and surely has the laudable goal of righting the ship and of (temporarily) re-equilibrating and apologising. But it’s exactly the temporary and apologetic nature of the endeavor that reveals the crucial problem. The exhibition “Elles@centrepompidou”, with its so “typically feminine” sponsor Yves Rocher, “your beauty partner” (because they’re so worth it?), perfectly symbolizes the place assigned to women artists at the highest levels of French institutions — precarious, peripheral, isolated, always in the role of exception; women artists are furthermore systematically referred to the supposed specificity of their gender.
Wow. That is shocking. It’s as if the Guerrila Girls never happened. I’m so angry!
Do you really think the Guerilla girls accomplished any real change? If so, you missed the point of their work… Male supremacy still rules the art world, even when women are in charge.
by Jon Lackman | 7 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Former Met director Thomas Hoving is publishing a memoir serially on Artnet:
Despite my successes, I found that first year [of graduate school] to be exceedingly boring and unfulfilling. I was especially annoyed that all I ever looked at were photographs of originals. No one suggested field trips to the great museums in New York or Philadelphia. And I was particularly vexed with a stray comment the ruling star of art history had muttered in a seminar. The star was Erwin Panofsky … “Pan” had hefted into the seminar room what was called an “Elephant Folio,” a rare book over three-and-a-half-feet tall, with original [Raimondi] engravings.
Towards the end of the session, “Pan” slammed shut the pages of the priceless folio and turned away. I smelled something burning and noticed that the cigarette formerly in the professor’s mouth was gone. I opened the rare folio and extracted a glowing cigarette stub and said nothing about the charred section of the priceless engraving.
It was at the same seminar that Panofsky gave his opinion about original art that so vexed me, “Damn the originals. You can learn so much more about iconography from black and white photographs.”
lol, wow. I never knew Erwin Panofsky was such a jerk.
Panofsky aside, a prudent reader might think twice before taking anything that escapes from Thomas Hoving’s mouth at face value.
by Jon Lackman | 7 May 2009 | Modern, Museums
At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.
by Jon Lackman | 6 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Art is perenially awash in stories of fakes, fakers, and fakery. According to the AFP,
The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin. Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin’s Altes Museum was made at the order of German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt by an artist named Gerardt Marks … on December 6, 1912, the copy was admired as an original work by a German prince and the archaeologist “couldn’t sum up the courage to ridicule” his guest, Stierlin said.
According to Time,
… rumors have swirled for years that many treasured originals by Vietnamese artists like [Nguyen Trong] Niet have been either lost or sold off, and reproductions have taken their place. The copies aren’t exactly forgeries. During the Vietnam War, the museum’s own restoration department was a virtual copy factory — a fact that museum officials past and present freely admit … Ironically, Vietnam’s practice of reproducing noteworthy works was originally carried out to rescue the country’s artistic heritage during wartime … “It was a national imperative to keep the museum open.” So the staff — and in some cases, the artists themselves — started to make copies. The reproductions stayed in Hanoi while the originals were spirited away and hidden in caves. The artworks were supposed to return home after the war. Not all did. Records, if they ever existed, were lost.
A new book by Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans conjectures that Gauguin and Van Gogh may concocted the story of the latter slicing off his own ear, in order to conceal Gauguin’s culpability:
Kaufmann told the Guardian: “Near the brothel, about 300 metres from the Yellow House, there was a final encounter between them: Vincent might have attacked him, Gauguin wanted to defend himself and to get rid of this ‘madman’. He drew his weapon, made some movement in the direction of Vincent and by that cut off his left ear.” Kaufmann said it was not clear if it was an accident or an aimed hit. While curators at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam stand by the theory of self-mutilation, Kaufmann argues that Van Gogh dropped hints in letters to his brother, Theo, once commenting : “Luckily Gauguin … is not yet armed with machine guns and other dangerous war weapons.”
The notion attracted a swift rebuttal from Martin Gayford:
This is not the first time it has been suggested that Gauguin might have been the aggressor in this odd art couple. The psychological motive for the suspicion is, I suspect, that many people don’t like Gauguin, and identify with the suffering Van Gogh … A local newspaper reported that at 11:30 on Dec. 23, 1888, Van Gogh handed in his severed ear at a local brothel; the recipient of the grisly parcel, a certain Rachel, was understandably upset. This story was substantiated by the policeman who investigated the incident. Otherwise, all the first-hand information comes from Gauguin who wasn’t, admittedly, an ideal witness … The evidence, such as it is, points to Vincent. Presenting a severed ear to a local prostitute then scampering off into the night is erratic behavior, to say the least.
The authenticity of the Nefertiti bust has been questioned for a long time, although some have thought it to date from the Hitler era (not 1912). Recently, some CT scans were performed on the bust. Some have argued that these scans prove that the bust is “not a fake.” See here for one such article:
by Jon Lackman | 5 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum attended the press preview for Pictures Generation, “the Metropolitan Museum’s much discussed, uncharacteristically risk-taking theme show.” The preview was convened by Douglas Eklund, the Met’s associate curator for photography, but she found herself more interested in the thoughts of Douglas Crimp, also in attendance, whose 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space “provided the seed from which the Met’s show grew … [with its] display of five artists—Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith.” Crimp tells Rosenbaum, among other things, that
[Eklund] gave a certain amount of attention to the importance of women and I think that has to be really emphasized. In his first wall text, he mentions feminism but then he goes on to define the influence of feminism as something like, “It doesn’t matter what the gender of the artist is.” [The wall text stated that feminism "made it possible for woman artists to define themselves as artists who happened to be women."]
I think that’s NOT the lesson of feminism. The lesson of feminism is in the kind of art that’s being made and the kinds or propositions that were being made through the art—the critique of originality, for example, which is something I already argued for early on with respect to Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. I think that’s a feminist perspective and that is a crucial aspect of this formation of artists. I didn’t recognize that at the time.
I don’t think that the work of Louise Lawler—probably the artist I feel closest to, in relation to my subsequent work—can be understood without taking account of second-wave feminism.
by Jon Lackman | 4 May 2009 | Awards, Books
Sociologist Michèle Lamont’s new book is How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. She “observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length.” She shows how “judging quality isn’t robotically rational; it’s emotional, cognitive, and social too,” particularly when academics serving on multi-disciplinary panels are forced to evaluate proposals outside their own fields. In one section, she notes that
During interviews, multiple examples of how panelists’ idiosyncratic interests shape their votes emerged. A panelist … confesses (without flinching), “The one on dance [I liked a lot]; I’m an avid dance person” … Similarly, an anthropologist explains her support for a proposal on songbirds by noting that she had just come back from Tucson, where she had been charmed by songbirds. An English scholar supports a proposal on the body, tying her interest to the fact that she was an elite tennis player in high school … Yet another panelist ties her opposition to a proposal on Viagra to the fact that she is a lesbian … “I’m so sick of hearing about Viagra.”
Startling New Study Uncovers People Like Stuff They Like.
The motto of my Web site, “Resources in Art History for Graduate Students” (www.efn.org/~acd/resources.html) is “You might as well apply for everything because who gets what is totally arbitrary…” From a pretty famous art historian–not, btw, Erwin Panofsky.
by Jon Lackman | 2 May 2009 | Uncategorized
Laura K. Jones writes in Artnet:
Artnet News can now reveal that the Obama Administration has a definite relationship to the avant-garde Fluxus art movement. Deputy White House Social Secretary Joe Reinstein is married to academic Hannah Higgins, who arrives in D.C. this June from Chicago along with the couple’s daughters Zoe, 13, and Nathalie, nine. Higgins is the daughter of Fluxus movement artists Alison Knowles and the late Dick Higgins, and author of Fluxus Experience, a 2002 history of the ‘60s cultural movement (her latest tome, The Grid Book, is due from MIT Press later this year). She is leaving her job as associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago to teach a course on Black Mountain College (home in the 1950s to innovative artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Robert Motherwell and Willem and Elaine de Kooning) as a fellow at the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art.
by Jon Lackman | 1 May 2009 | Books, Conferences
Due out this month from Yale UP: Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century, proceedings of a 2005 symposium held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday of its Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The center’s dean, Elizabeth Cropper, edited the proceedings. In her introduction, she writes:
The essays were presented in pairs, focusing on an issue, a period, or a crux of scholarship … Authors were encouraged to exchange essays [beforehand] … and to engage in discussion at the symposium, and afterward, with differing results: some authors exchanged essays more than once, whereas others chose to allow the audience to draw connections through simple juxtaposition …
Betsy M. Bryan and Marian H. Feldman, working in the different cultural fields of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, both propose ways to read monuments as interacting with their environments, whether cosmic or terrestrial, rather than as discrete formal entities …
The limited usefulness of the dichotomy of text and image is confronted by Elizabeth Hill Boone in her discussion of graphic communication in preconquest Mexico. Boone also challenges the conventional binary of style and iconography in Mayan studies … [Joanne] Pillsbury, using the terms of linguistic and cultural anthropology, underlines the difficulty of producing an emic view of history and culture in the absence of any texts at all …
Charles Dempsey and C. Jean Campbell are … engaged in a revisionist campaign to change the shape of art historical time. Unlike those who have sought to deconstruct and even destroy the notion of the Italian Renaissance, Dempsey and Campbell, whose essays form a true pair, seek a radical redefinition of the period based on the new vernacular sensibility in the world that flourished from the Trecento on, rather than on the revival of antiquity that began in earnest only a century later …
Joseph Connors and Louise Rice directly acknowledge each other’s work in their approach to the reconstruction of living contexts for fundamentally performative aspects of baroque culture in seventeenth-century Italy …
Both Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Philippe Bordes, focusing on François Boucher and Jacques-Louis David, respectively, concern themselves with a new kind of “self-portrait problem” in eighteenth-century France. Lajer-Burcharth is interested in Boucher’s materialization of self through a commercial diffusion of self-image … Bordes lays out the dialectical problem of seeing [self-images] (and portraiture in general) both in close detail and in social and historical perspective, both as paintings and as images of the soul …
[I]t is to the museum itself that the last pair of essays is devoted … [Hal] Foster touches on several issues raised in the preceding essays: the role of chronology, the value of iconographical themes, the limited validity of medium-specific classification … and especially the cult of the commodity, the “financial fetishes” and “refined capital” … His proposals to present different genealogies of advanced art always begin, however, with a critical articulation of the art itself, rather than with the imposition of a set of abstract terms … Jeffrey Weiss agrees, placing even more emphasis on the needs of individual works of art for appropriate company and sympathetic (not archaeologically reconstructed) viewing conditions, unencumbered by the cacophony of demands from educators, sponsors, and even architects …
In the twenty-first century, the dangers of inattention to both complexity and coherence, dangers to which Foster calls attention, face art historians as much as they face artists, and indeed the culture as a whole. The essays here … may indeed, to paraphrase Foster, help the history of art to “seek out possibilities for the future in possibilities overlooked in the present or lost in the past.”
Other pairings included Finbarr Barry Flood and David J. Roxburgh, Wu Hung and Yukio Lippit, and Svetlana Alpers and Mariët Westermann
“Yve-Alain Bois and Wanda Corn preferred not to publish their essays,” for reasons not enumerated, leaving their partners, Marc Gotlieb and Michael Leja, “in one-sided dialogues on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and American art. They are now paired here to productive effect, given the authors’ shared interests in the rhetoric of elite culture and its search for expression of authentic experience.”
by Jon Lackman | 30 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
Contra Vasari, Perugino and Florence weren’t the sole significant influences on the young Raphael. The artist’s father, Giovanni Santi, as well the Montefeltro court, had a positive impact too; so argues an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. The exhibition presents research partly based on documents from the Santi family bottega newly uncovered in the Urbino state archives, where they had apparently lain undisturbed since 1829.
I love a writer who expresses clarity through vivid, entertaining language.
antidote or anecdote?