In the latest Third Text, Stephen Shapiro reviews Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique: “The reward and challenge for a reader … is the treasure of encountering a critical practice fundamentally motivated by a Left experience of political community and self-critical commentary absent from many who position themselves within the academic field of postcolonial [...]
31 March 2006 | Theory
India’s Frontline interviews V.S. Ramachandran (who recently spoke at the “New Biology of the Mind” symposium): “I said [in The Emerging Mind] OK, here are ten laws of art. And I make it clear that these are not like laws of physics … They are trial balloons. While a majority of scholars were intrigued and [...]
31 March 2006 | Career
“Bill Wilson, 22, of Greenwich, Conn. … will graduate this spring with a degree in art history” from Brown University. Soon thereafter he’ll leave for “Quantico for six months of leadership training. Then, he hopes, on to flight school. He’s excited. His parents are worried. ‘They were real gung ho before, but now that the [...]
30 March 2006 | Renaissance
Leonardo is much in the news, and not just because journalists have boundless enthusiasm for Dan Brown articles. “Art officials in Florence, Italy, have resumed the search for a fresco by Leonardo da Vinci believed to be hidden in a Palazzo Vecchio wall. The fresco called Battle of Anghiari is described as the Holy Grail [...]
30 March 2006 | Museums
“For the first time, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen … has opened up his private art collection. Twenty-eight works, some not seen in public for more than 50 years, will be on display under the same metallic, multihued Frank Gehry-designed roof that holds some of the other cool stuff that Allen has collected. Down the hall [...]
30 March 2006 | Career
It’s tough being a young Italian art-history graduate: ‘Younger Italians, often depicted as pampered “mammas’ boys” who live with their parents well in their 30s … say the proliferation of temporary work contracts penalises them and keeps them in a state of “precarietà” (precariousness) to which they see no end. “It just means you can [...]
29 March 2006 | Contemporary, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from a talk given last night at the New School: “Regarding his apparent obsession with enormous breasts, Currin contended that it’s not simply about sex. ‘It’s a cartoony version of a classical idea of roundness and form. It’s about roundness having a place in contemporary art.’ ‘A lot of my work [...]
29 March 2006 | Ancient, Architecture
The Göbekli Tepe stone temple in southeast Anatolia makes the pyramids and even nearby Çatal Hüyük look rather young, reports archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. It’s now thought to be 12,000 years old. Its massive stone pillars, decorated with enigmatic animal-script ideograms (cranes, foxes, snakes, boars, gazelles) of a hunter-gatherer people, suggest that temples predated settlements in [...]
29 March 2006 | Teaching
Don’t show Susan Sarandon videos: “I fell asleep in my art history class today. We were watching a video on the Mayans, narrated by Susan Sarandon … usually the videos are of horrendously poor quality, everything appears to have been filmed through a neon-yellow filter … not this time. This was watchable; but with the [...]
28 March 2006 | Conferences
Reporting for Artinfo.com, Stephen S. Hall offers another, more optimistic account of the recent “New Biology of the Mind” symposium at Columbia, remarking that “one of the animating ideas behind the proceedings came from [organizer] Louise MacBain, who noted that an understanding of the neurobiology of creativity could have immense educational potential, as a way [...]
28 March 2006 | Teaching
Are you yet used to your students text-messaging during class? In the latest New York Magazine, one student reports, “There was not a lot that compared to the charge I would get when I’d feel my phone vibrate in my pocket during my medieval-art-history lecture and find a message like, just thinking about your fantastic [...]
27 March 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports from last Friday’s star-studded “Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind” at Columbia’s Italian Academy: “As the afternoon session got underway, red and blue 3-D glasses were distributed that Margaret Livingstone then used to demonstrate the neural mechanics of depth perception. She also explained how brain processes create the [...]
27 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In his new, intimately detailed Bernini biography, Arne Karsten evokes the artist’s role in the history of Baroque Rome, writes reviewer Dirk Schümer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. He describes how the Piazza Navona fountain, for instance, symbolized papal world domination (showing the Rio de la Plata, Danube, Nile, and Ganges) just as the Peace of [...]
27 March 2006 | Architecture, Medieval
According to LiveScience, “Computer animation software used in newer Star Wars films to bring the pint-sized Jedi to life has now been modified to investigate the mysteries of cathedral architecture … secrets guarded by stonemason guilds for centuries … How cathedrals were constructed, then, can say a lot about the circumstances of why and by [...]
24 March 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
A new Antonello da Messina exhibition is “offering experts a unique opportunity to view most of his oeuvre together. Of the 45 surviving masterpieces attributed to Antonello da Messina, 37 of them are on show in the Scuderie del Quirinale … Curated by art historian Martin Lucco, it is the first exhibition devoted entirely to [...]
A new thousand-page tome edited by political scientist Klaus von Beyme collects artist letters, journal entries, statements and manifestoes written from 1905 to 1955, an era in which Goethe’s Zappa-esque admonishment (“Bilde, Künstler! Rede nicht! Nur ein Hauch sei dein Gedicht”) was regularly ignored, writes reviewer Christoph Heinrich in Die Zeit. Artists had never been [...]
24 March 2006 | Books
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “art historians and critics appear to be tired of writing for one another and have turned to useful commentary to enlighten the gallery visitor.” They cite recent books by Sidra Stich and Geoffrey Smith as examples of the trend.
23 March 2006 | Books, Contemporary
According to Otto Karl Werckmeister’s new book, Der Medusa-Effekt: Politische Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September 2001, September 11 forced all images to occupy one of two spheres: “a non-public operational sphere in which images circulate around power [or] a public sphere of mere appearance in which only weak images succeed.” He concludes that “in the [...]
23 March 2006 | Journals, Modern
In “The Journal des Dames et des Modes: Fashioning Women in the Arts, c. 1800-1815,” which appears in the latest issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Heather Belnap Jensen asserts that contrary to received opinion “women increasingly engaged in the art world as both producers and consumers during the Napoleonic period … Women’s journals, which often [...]
23 March 2006 | Teaching
Another use for the art-history degree: it could help you become a German citizen. That is, assuming you still remember the answers to questions such as this one: “In one of his most famous paintings, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich depicted a landscape on the Baltic Sea island Rügen. Which motif does the picture [...]
