by Jon Lackman | 2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”:
“One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about a kind of dialogue with itself and its past and more about a dialogue with the outside world,” she says. Hence the titles of the 16 chapters in her book: Art and Popular Culture, Art and Politics, Art and Time, Art and Technology, Art and Propaganda, and so on … Heartney’s insights are thought-provoking, even if they provoke disagreement. A shorthand summary of a few points goes thus: contemporary artists are more like novelists whose narratives tend not to lead anywhere. Art is no longer reassuring. The feminist art movement is important and does tend to have a narrative, and women artists brought the body back into art …
One might venture to ask why so few South American artists (fewer than a dozen) found their way into the book. Or Germans (fewer than 50), or British (about 45) or Chinese artists (5). Almost half of the 400 featured artists are Americans, while four Australians are listed: Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini, Natalie Jeremijenko and Tracey Moffatt. I suggest to Heartney that the Western art world is yet to overcome its egocentricity, treating other cultural spheres as fertile hunting grounds rather than places where contemporary art with distinctively Islamic, Oriental, Latin American or even Eastern European roots is being produced. “I think American culture has been hugely impacted by the rise of China, of India, of Asia generally,” responds Heartney, perhaps inadvertently proving my point.
by Jon Lackman | 30 January 2009 | Modern
The Times of London writes on the re-attribution of The Colossus:
“After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants … the Prado started an investigation last year [upon] the discovery of the initials A. J. in one corner of the canvas … Goya experts have been split for years over the authenticity of the painting. In 2001 Juliet Bareau-Wilson, a British art historian, claimed that The Colossus and another work, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, had been created by others … The Prado denied the claims at the time and many experts believe the quality of the work means that Goya must have been involved. Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work.
by Jon Lackman | 29 January 2009 | Books, Modern
In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber:
Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly visual, something he had in common with a number of other famous and successful scientists. However, this quality makes it even more striking how little interest he seems to have had in the visual arts. Although this volume devotes three essays to Einstein’s influence on the visual arts, each of the essayists (Lynda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones and Matthew Ritchie) is ready to admit that there does not appear to be any causal connection between Einstein and artistic modernism. This finding provides a salutary antidote to the claims that cubism and other artistic movements of the 20th century owed their existence, in some part, to Einstein’s work on relativity and early quantum physics.
The truth is that, insofar as artists may have been influenced by advances in non-Euclidean geometry and talk of time as a fourth dimension of space, these vague ideas were in the air before Einstein made any contributions to their realization in science. And where science influences art, the influence is often of so decidedly nontechnical and nonspecific a nature as to make any proper citation impossible. One may say, for instance, that 20th-century artists have been, at times, focused on the notion of how to treat or portray time in a traditionally static medium. But it is impossible to decide whether they have been influenced by physicists’ evolving understanding of time, much less estimate the influence of one physicist in particular.
(via 3 Quarks Daily)
by Jon Lackman | 28 January 2009 | Books, Theory
“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud:
Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and interpretation according to a depth/surface dialectic where meaning resides and must be coaxed into visibility. The image, according to this model, can be interpreted as a beautiful symptom. The model offers a historical and anthropological challenge to art history, thus throwing a gauntlet first to art-historical scholarship. In recent years, the Warburg approach has been explicitly reclaimed by an argument in favor of a cultural history of the image as part of a continuing critique (Warburg’s critique) of the formalism of art history and in a newer dissatisfaction with the surface-to-surface limitations of semiotically based visual studies. Insofar as the image itself can be extended metonymically into the semiotic surface of the contemporary moment, then the cultural analysis or cultural history of the image becomes a depth analysis of the present, or indeed a depth analysis of the past/present dialectic in any image or any moment at the point of its production. In at least one context, the Warburgian history/analysis of the image has produced a veritable institution; I refer to the Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History) at the University of Leeds. Warburg’s presence is less explicit but just as present in the institution on which the Centre-CATH is modeled, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. In recent years as well, scholarly attention to Warburg’s method and to Warburg himself has increased, though these two agendas are not easy to combine. Anthropology and art history have not yet produced the fusion for which one might hope.
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Museums
From the Boston Globe:
Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries … “This is not a happy day in the history of Brandeis,” President Jehuda Reinharz said tonight. “The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it’s a hidden jewel. It does not have great foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are just not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.” Brandeis said the museum would be closed late this summer. It was founded in 1961; a new wing designed by celebrated architect Graham Gund was added in 2001 … [T]here is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature.
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Career
For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice:
Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.
“Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year’s market didn’t look as bad as this year’s,” says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. “I’m wondering how many of these positions I’m applying for are actually real.”
Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She’s seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.
“I do sense a permanent change,” she says. “I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system” …
[The] odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She’s thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration—universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she’d like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.
“For Ph.D.’s in the humanities market, it’s almost like we really shouldn’t make any more, because there’s such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don’t have the jobs,” she says. “The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?”
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Uncategorized
According to Michele D. Marincola, interim director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts:
It is with real sadness that I report the death of Olga Raggio, former Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor at the IFA from 1965-1998. Miss Raggio passed away on Saturday, January 24th. She was 82.
Miss Raggio came to the US in 1950 from Rome, and joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum, where she remained her entire professional career. Her expertise was in European sculpture from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. She was a valued teacher and mentor to a number of students at the Institute, many of whom now hold leading positions in the museum world and academia.
There will be a funeral mass for Miss Raggio on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10 A.M. at Holy Innocents Roman Catholic Church in Pleasantville, NY.
Raggio co-wrote the two-volume The Gubbio Studiolo and Its Conservation, which won the 2001 Salimbeni Prize for Art History and Critics (awarded to books on Italian topics).
by Jon Lackman | 26 January 2009 | Books
In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”:
Hobby Horse is an exuberant book – exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, Gombrich passionately reveals that history, politics, philosophy can be condensed into the most ordinary artefacts … The book that truly gave me my “Eureka!” moment was Mythologies by Roland Barthes – in a bookshop in Washington, DC in 1972. I was writing my study of the Virgin Mary, which would appear four years later, and was fumbling towards understanding her cult. Here, in Barthes’s essays about the relations of myth and ideology, and especially in the closing, extended essay, “Myth Today”, he was expressing the ideas I was trying to shape for myself. I reeled and my pulse raced as, standing up in the shop, I began reading it.
To my mind now, Barthes is too swingeing, too implacable, too much of the French revolutionary pur et dur in his denunciation of myth’s collusion with power. But the book did clear the horizon for me then in an utterly elating way. However, I could never have grasped his arguments or even recognised what he was saying without the ground laid by the iconographical decoding work that I’d encountered before, through Wind and, far more importantly, through Gombrich, from whom I learned that there is no stroke of the pen or brush that can be innocent of meanings reaching out into the world.
So here is the chance to get yourself free webcams . com account and u can watch naked girls
or boys if u want.
http://free-lifetime-account-for-webcams-com.blogspot.com/
by Jon Lackman | 23 January 2009 | Career
Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog:
In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things … healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have [already] largely vanished … In “two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce” … “the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability” … have now triumphed … and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”
by Jon Lackman | 22 January 2009 | Books, Theory
Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of this year’s CAA award for lifetime achievement in art writing) has just published a new book, Quand les images prennent position. André Gunthert writes:
In a world where images are proliferating in every way, and where their use-values so often leave us disoriented — [shuttling] between the most vulgar propaganda and the most inaccessible esotericism, between a screen function and the possibility of even destroying this screen — it seems necessary to revisit certain practices where the image’s act has truly accorded with critical activity and the work of the mind. In sum, one would like to consider the conditions for a possible politics of the imagination. This essay, the first in a series titled “L’Oeil de l’histoire,” attempts to analyze the concrete procedures and theoretical choices inherent in the reflections of Bertolt Brecht on war …
by Jon Lackman | 21 January 2009 | Conferences, Modern
Last Friday marked the 100th birthday of Clement Greenberg. You hadn’t heard? Almost no one marked the occasion. In Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt wrote a wistful reminiscence. This April, Harvard will host a two-day symposium, “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art”:
Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: avant-garde and “kitsch,” distinctions between high and low culture, “decoration,” the Partisan Review, medium specificity, abstraction versus figuration, multiple modernisms, and modernism’s self-reflexivity. Papers may address Greenberg’s critical engagement with abstract expressionism, color field painting, post-painterly abstraction, or his disengagement with “non-art” or postmodernism.
by Jon Lackman | 21 January 2009 | Awards
Via Artnet:
The College Art Association has announced the winners of its annual awards, in advance of the organization’s 2009 conference in Los Angeles, Feb. 25-28, 2009. Winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism is Boris Groys, the Berlin-born NYU prof whose most recent book is Art Power (MIT, 2008). In one of his more glib pronouncements, Groys likened Osama bin Laden to a video artist.
Other award winners are Mary Heilmann (distinguished body of work), Chris Burden (artist award for lifetime achievement), Guerrilla Girls (distinguished feminist award, a new honor), Georges Didi-Huberman (lifetime achievement for writing on art), Roland Reiss (teaching of art), Charles W. Haxthausen (teaching of art history) and Carol Stringari (scholarship and conservation).
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award goes to Anthony J. Barbieri-Low for Artisans in Early Imperial China (University of Washington). The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award goes to Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (Yale). Another new prize, the Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries and Collections, goes to Phillip Earenfight, ed., A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion (University of Washington).
The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for an article in Art Bulletin goes to Marnin Young for “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers.” And the Art Journal Award for an article in that publication goes to Richard Meyer for “Artists sometimes have feelings,” a personal essay on working with living artists (in Meyer’s case, Paul McCarthy and Anita Steckel).
by Jon Lackman | 19 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated statistics that do not give an overview of the field. That changed this month, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveiled the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators project.
Combing the report, we came across a couple interesting (if outdated) art-history-related statistics:
“Art History” (presumably “Intro to Art History”) was the 17th most popular college course among students who graduated high school in 1992. Seventeen percent of these students took the course, down from 23% of students who graduated high school in 1972.
Fifteen percent of art-history PhDs were employed as curators, versus 56% as college teachers/professors, as of 1995.
by Jon Lackman | 16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes:
What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look:
Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection
… Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of a committee assembled to study and restore the work, many experts had regarded this painting as a “near-Vermeer”—an imitation by a less gifted artist. A new book by Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, theorizes that it (along with six other generally accepted Vermeers) was painted by the master’s eldest daughter—a hypothesis that Martin Bailey, in his review (not online) for this month’s Art Newspaper of five recent books on Dutch old masters, derided as a “wild assumption based on limited information.”
Although Walter Liedtke, the Met’s curator specializing in Dutch 17th-century art, now accepts the painting as a Vermeer (and includes it in his new monograph on the artist’s oeuvre), he balks at the yellow shawl.
According to the Met’s label … “another hand may have painted the yellow shawl, under which are traces of less voluminous attire.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 January 2009 | Photography
André Gunthert discusses Gaza images on his blog:
Scandalized by the Jan. 7 issue of L’Humanité, Alain Korkos, columnist for Arrêt sur images, published an “Open Letter to Pierre Laurent“, in which he condemned the usage of this “unbearable photo,” which shows a dead child buried in rubble in the Gaza Strip (taken by Fadi Adwan of the Associated Press). Comparing this image with Frank Fournier’s photograph of the young Omayra Sanchez published in Paris-Match in 1985, Korkos accuses L’Humanité of imitating “the logic of Paris-Match,” of having sought to shock in order to “sell an idea and, secondarily, a paper (or vice versa)” … [His comparative] method here shows its limits … Is it pertinent to associate an image of Omayra Sanchez, a victim of a natural catastrophe, with that of the young Kaukab Al Dayah, a civilian victim of war acts? … To glimpse a connection between these two images is only possible if one perceives the Israeli invasion of Gaza (and its inevitable “collateral damage”) as a tragedy for whom no one, except fate, is responsible.
by Jon Lackman | 12 January 2009 | Museums
In an article on the Rijksmuseum’s recent dalliance with Damien Hirst, art historian Gary Schwartz writes:
If Hirst exploits violence and Koons sex, Lucas Cranach went after them both in combination. Cranach has gotten into the best collections and museums in the world with paintings of the suicide of the rape victim Lucretia. He wasn’t the only one to paint that subject, of course, but Cranach went for the most sensual effect he could achieve. As it seems to me, Cranach was expecting male viewers to be turned on not only by the vulnerable beauty of his half-naked Lucretias, but also by the anticipated plunge of the dagger into their bodies. You do not have to be a feminist to be revolted by Cranach’s idea of Lucretia as a coquette to the death. The question is: where do you draw the line? Is there a point beyond which love of art brings you to betray yourself?
by Jon Lackman | 9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more:
Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In his view, not even the king was above perspective. The king was subjected to a higher power, the constructive power of space and that of the artist who represents space. For an absolute ruler that was not the usual. In addition, the gaze reached into the long invisible worlds of outer space and the microscopic. In the 17th-century, pictures began assuming their dominant position …
The 1990s lived the philosophically vulgar delusion that there’s no more reality; everything rather played out in a symbiosis of floating image-worlds abstracted from reality. The simulation theory generated a culture of the Neobaroque. The film version of the theory, The Matrix, won four Oscars in 2000. That’s less than ten years ago, but it appears to us today like another epoch.
Also see, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a profile of art historian / museum director Uwe M. Schneede.
by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2009 | Renaissance
Amid all the talk of the UK’s national galleries buying Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, The Art Newspaper “has delved into the untold story of the 1916 Titian negotiations, combining material from archives in London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles”:
The two Titians of Diana, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, both 1556-59, were nearly sold at the height of World War One, when the National Gallery in London and American collector Henry Clay Frick competed to buy them. Joseph Duveen, the key intermediary, told Frick that the Titians were the greatest paintings in the world. The price asked for the pair was £420,000, an enormous sum at the time.
Most astonishing is what occurred at the National Gallery—and the extraordinary lengths it was prepared to go to in order to acquire them. Lord Curzon, the trustee who then effectively ran the museum, proposed buying both Diana paintings. Diana and Actaeon was to be kept, but Diana and Callisto would be sold on at a large profit, passing to a secret “syndicate” of the four leading Anglo-American dealers—Agnew, Colnaghi, Duveen and Knoedler …
In 1916 Frick was 66, but he was still a voracious collector … he wrote to Lord Ellesmere’s family … asking if they would sell the two Titians of Diana. “I have space in my gallery which would accommodate them nicely,” he explained.
by Jon Lackman | 5 January 2009 | Contemporary
From Artinfo:
Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S.1 contemporary art center, is retiring from her position as the center’s director, the New York Press reports. Heiss founded P.S.1 in 1976 as a space for large-scale visual and performing artworks by established and emerging artists; the center merged with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. In 2009, Heiss plans to launch Art International Radio (AIR), which will feature artistic, musical, and performance programs, as well as conversations with artists, curators, and academics. A search committee will be formed next year to find a replacement director for P.S.1.
by Jon Lackman | 2 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From The Telegraph:
Sir Michael Levey, who died on Sunday aged 81, was a distinguished art historian who rose through the ranks of the National Gallery to become its director. Levey joined the National Gallery in 1951, aged 24, as an assistant keeper. His academic career had ended abruptly when he left and lost his unfinished BLitt thesis in a café in Oxford … Levey worked immediately alongside the eminent art historians Cecil Gould and Martin Davies, the latter of whom would be Levey’s immediate predecessor as director. He also worked closely with Anthony Blunt … Levey published numerous books, notably Painting in 18th Century Venice (1959) and Giambattista Tiepolo (1986), which has been regarded as one of the finest monographs on any individual artist. He was delighted when the Ateneo Veneto, the leading Venetian learned society, created a category of Foreign Fellows and he was among the first to be elected. He also surprised contemporaries when he published The World of Ottoman Art (1976), which succeeded in stimulating even experts despite its being well outside Levey’s main field of interest.
Regardless of Dutton’s insights, the notion that preliterate societies that have developed in isolation from the West “reflect those of our ancient ancestors” is an extremely old notion. Anthropologists like Taylor were talking about it a century ago (in fact it was the prevailing ideology within emergent anthropological discourse at the end of the 19th century). It is an idea which has been rigorously attacked and dismantled by scores of thinkers since then.