28 February 2006 | Ancient, Museums
From today’s New York Times, Philippe de Montebello on the Euphronios Krater: “How much more would you learn from knowing which particular hole in — supposedly Cerveteri — it came out of? … Everything is on the vase.” On illicit antiquities: “The truth is — unattractive as it may be — the black market, to [...]
27 February 2006 | Renaissance
Johns Hopkins University may soon shutter the Villa Spelman in Florence together with its storied Italian Studies Seminar, even though “the University recently received a gift of $100 million and has raised over $2.1 billion in its ‘Knowledge for the World’ campaign.” The villa eats $500,000 a year and needs repairs. Concerned parties have started [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary, News
Contributor Daniel Belasco reports: “My concluding remarks, on the discussion of international contemporary art at CAA, will necessarily reflect my experience as a panelist here, my first. (Went well, thank you very much, even though my Powerpoint lost a few hi-res images in the translation from PC to Mac … a metaphor for things to [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences
Art historian Rebecca Brown sums up her CAA experience on her blog, including “the peculiarity of having been on the job market every year since 1997: I know half the people at these conferences because they interviewed me and rejected me (or very occasionally I rejected them). this creates the ‘dodge-and-weave’ form of conferencing, where [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences
Blogger Trebor Scholz’s CAA diary comes complete with pictures, including a couple of laptopped attendees huddled around the few power outlets like hobos around a burning barrel. Scholz is most impassioned on the subject of name tags: “Perhaps instead of listing your institution on this social interface tag you could add a few keywords describing [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences
CAA’s blog is finishing lively. Susan Hamburger writes: “No one likes to be asked, nor should they be asked in an interview, ‘how old are you?’ or ‘are you planning to have children?’ You know who you are.” Not to mention the colleagues who were “deployed to stalk the [interviewing] rows to unnerve those who [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences, Modern, News
Contributor Anne Byrd reports: “At Saturday morning’s Minimalism and the Common Culture panel, Anna Chave ground her Rosalind Krauss axe, while younger scholars Mitte Gieskes, Dominic Rahtz, and Nina Murayama offered historical readings of minimalism: Gieskes’s paper was a nuanced (if, as one questioner suggested, somewhat uncritical) discussion of Carl Andre, theories of contingency such [...]
25 February 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports: “Friday’s program offered a feast for Italianists. In a morning session that met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Frederick Ilchman chronicled the hits and misses of Italian acquisitions at the MFA, including an overpainted female portrait, dubiously attributed to Raphael and illicitly exported in a curator’s suitcase. In an afternoon [...]
24 February 2006 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our Ross Finocchio writes: “Talk of Italian festivals warmed the damp chill of Boston on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Celebration in the Arts of Italy’ session took as its theme the Renaissance public processions that transformed their urban setting. The triumph of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1536, for example, was also ‘a triumph of [...]
24 February 2006 | Conferences
Contributor Daniel Belasco writes: “Your correspondent arrived in foggy Boston Thursday afternoon to dance the old academic-conference two-step, which never seems to go out of style. Normal rules of decorum are suspended at such an overwhelming concentration of brains, images, and schmooze unleavened by free-flowing coffee. One has to be shameless about barging through closed [...]
23 February 2006 | Conferences
Artist-blogger Gerard Brown reports from the “Ruins and After: Art in the Age of Global Violence” panel: “When the Q&A started, a number of people in the audience (some of whom admitted they hadn’t been present for all the presentations!) expressed disappointment that the panel wasn’t ‘political’ enough.” This reminded Brown of … teaching. “[S]tudents [...]
23 February 2006 | Modern
According to the AP, Ellen Landau “is convinced that 32 works found by the son of a Pollock friend were created by the artist, despite debate about their origin.” At CAA today she is unveiling “the results of more than a year of her own research.”
23 February 2006 | Conferences
CAA itself is hosting a group blog, written by Susan Hamburger, Kerr Houston, Christopher Howard, Anthony Huberman, Lara Kohl, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Bill Tronzo. Recently, Hamburger expressed disappointment with the painting panel she attended: “there was a lack of energy and passion and it contributed to the attrition rate of the crowd and ultimately a [...]
22 February 2006 | Conferences
Conference blogging, now common, is slowly permeating CAA. We here intend to post a few dispatches this year; if you do as well, let us know. Painter Gerard Brown and art historian Rebecca M. Brown (any relation?) have already begun. Rebecca writes: “my list of to-dos involves … 5. lunch/dinner/drinks with friends, colleagues, potential employers, [...]
21 February 2006 | Conferences
Artnet previews CAA: Keynoting “is Arthur C. Danto, whose talk, ‘The Relevance of Commentary,’ addresses the relationship of art and writing.” Awards will go to Linda Nochlin, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Lester Van Winkle, Carol Mattusch, Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, Cristina Esteras Martin, Mitchell B. Merback, Mark Cheetham, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. The art criticism [...]
21 February 2006 | Books
ARTnews reports that textbook “[p]ublishers and editors, stung by criticism … are literally rewriting art history—more often and more aggressively than ever before.” Nonetheless, persistent dissatisfaction has led CAA to reevaluate “as many as 40 or more textbooks. In a break with tradition, some will be reviewed by a student as well as by a [...]
21 February 2006 | Books, Modern
To her surprise, Aruna D’Souza found much to like in Wayne Andersen’s “madcap” Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine (one of several books on the artist she reviews). Andersen’s idea “that there is an almost evolutionarily conditioned, instinctual ‘beauty constant’ that drives the representation of idealized femininity” allows him to conclude that “certain key images in [...]
20 February 2006 | Books
As the world’s art historians converge on Boston, now seems a good time to contemplate the art-history survey text, the subject we can all disagree on. Larry Silver and David A. Levine review the primary options, finding them all decent but also over-canonical, inattentive to the teaching of method, and boring. They decline to endorse [...]
17 February 2006 | Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Susan Fillin-Yeh, editor of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (2001), and contributor Robert E. Moore cross swords with Christopher Reed over his 2002 review. (Why so late?) Fillin-Yeh: Reed “so misses the point that he does not even recognize the book’s subject for what it is, an expanded definition [...]
17 February 2006 | Contemporary
Historians of kinetic outsider art are taking note of Art Cars, a web resource that has become rich with photographs, details on materials and techniques, biographies, and links to art car makers.
