28 April 2006 | Journals, Theory
From Artnet: “Is the influential October magazine, the flagship journal of art theory, a spent force? The editors of the newly released November certainly seem to think so. The 46-page inaugural issue of the parody mag offers a savage send-up of the widely copied, jargon-heavy style of October, via, among other things, contributions from ‘Lukács [...]
28 April 2006 | Awards
“The American Academy of Arts and Sciences today announced the election of 175 new Fellows and 20 new Foreign Honorary Members,” including Keith Christiansen, Anne Poulet, and Henri Loyrette.
28 April 2006 | Books
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble. Nothing unusual about that. But it wasn’t that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it. [...]
27 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the Guardian (via Arts Journal), we read that “Stockholm’s Moderna Museet recently asked the government for 50m kronor (£3.7m) to buy new works, exclusively by female artists, to redress the gender imbalance in its collection. ‘When it comes to masterpieces,’ Lars Nittve, the museum’s director, argued in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter last week, [...]
In Frieze, Kodwo Eshun reviews Cosmopolitan Modernisms, edited by Kobena Mercer, “the first volume in a new series titled ‘Annotating Art’s Histories’. In his acutely incisive introduction Mercer notes the unintended consequences of visual culture’s ‘tendency to roam across the cultural sphere at large’. Such swaggering interdisciplinarity, he points out, inadvertently ends up reinforcing existing [...]
27 April 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
More art-historically informed comment on the Mohammed cartoons controversy: In the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Damian Dombrowski writes that the roots of modern caricature can be found in Bernini’s drawings, a cultural achievement that shouldn’t be confused with a blanket license to injure.
26 April 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Professor Vicky Clark and Warhol Museum director Tom Sokolowski led a discussion on artistic censorship last Friday at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “An instance Clark used was when she was working on a book, ‘Comic Release,’ in which artists were using well-known cartoon characters for their own interpretative art pieces. It soon became an [...]
26 April 2006 | Books
Buttressing the idea that creative types are often utopianists, a new book edited by Ulrich Raulff considers seven instances in which they idealistically attempted political change, usually via their patrons. Goethe held several government positions in his lifetime, advancing the ideal of the poet-prince as a reconciliation of the two roles. Reviewer Christine Tauber is [...]
26 April 2006 | Modern
From the Jerusalem Post: “For decades now, ever since an international revival of interest in the paintings and life of Mexico’s Frida Kahlo, art historians and critics, including this writer, have been writing that Frida’s photographer father was Jewish, possibly of Hungarian origin. A new book devoted to Guillermo Kahlo and his photography reveals that [...]
25 April 2006 | Journals
The second number of Images Re-vues, out last month, collects articles on damaged images. Issue editor Dominique Donadieu-Rigaut thanks anthropology for pioneering the study of how images provoke action. Contributor applies Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art and action to Mary Richardson’s 1914 slashing of the Rokeby Venus (done to protest the arrest of Emmeline [...]
25 April 2006 | Books
Despite Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous call for an art history without names, authors continue to crank out biographies of artists. In a new book, Karin Hellwig reviews developments in the genre from Vasari onwards, and comes out in favor of a scientific approach .
25 April 2006 | Books
Following a five-year, €3,000,000 effort, the 20,000-page, 175,000-entry, 14-volume, Bénézit Dictionary of Artists is now available in English. €980 for pre-orders, €1,190 beginning June 1.
24 April 2006 | Books, Renaissance
There’s no consensus yet on whether the original German version of Frank Zöllner’s Botticelli book is as dry as the English translation seems to be. In reviewer Martin Warnke’s comparison with Pater (“What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which [Botticelli's] work has the property of exciting in us, and [...]
24 April 2006 | Books
Marta Braun reviews L’Utopie Photographique, published on the 150th anniversary of the second oldest photographic society in the world, the Société française de photographie. Not only does it tell the institution’s story for the first time, it forms “an important contribution to a neglected history of that fragile moment when art and science came together [...]
24 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
“The most feline artist in in the history of art,” Toulouse-Lautrec’s lesser-known Montmartre contemporary Théophile Steinlen gets a 120-work show in Madrid which argues for the importance of his immersion in the voyeuristic and proletarian currents of modernity. The catalog includes a translation of Werner Hofmann’s classic article “Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso” (see College [...]
21 April 2006 | Ancient, Journals, Theory
In the latest issue of Antiquity, R. Alexander Bentley writes: “There is now a proliferation of new journals on almost every conceivable topic (e.g. Journal of Happiness Studies, Queueing Systems, Wear, World Pumps, with titles for archaeologists such as Anthropoetics, Archaeological Dialogues and Archaeoastronomy & Ethnoastronomy News), so that an author can publish almost any [...]
The project on Franco-German art relations led by Thomas Gaehtgens continues to bear fruit. First, Alexandre Kostka and François Lucberts edited a volume covering 1870-1945 that reached two surprising conclusions: that textual discourse played the most important role in shaping the reception of art during this period (Marc Schalenberg, H-Arthist), and that the German art [...]
21 April 2006 | Uncategorized
Blogger CoconutCain writes: “At various times in my life, I have wanted to be a gymnast, an astronaut, Swiss cheese, a veterinarian, a justice on the Supreme Court, a jockey, a fighter pilot in the Navy, an art historian (an area of study much better suited to a hobby, admittedly), a lawyer, a psychologist, a [...]
20 April 2006 | Conferences
“Jesus tits, you’d think the College Art Association had never run a goddamn conference before! First I tripped over a microphone cord, which caused a roomful of people to, like, laugh at me, and then there was all this awful feedback that sounded like somebody applying a baby to a cheese grater, and then William [...]
20 April 2006 | Asia, Books, Teaching
Leeds University lecturer Ashley Thompson reviews Helen Ibbitson Jessup’s Art & Architecture of Cambodia in the April issue of Orientations: “a thorough and nuanced presentation … an invaluable contribution to the field of Khmer studies in particular, as well as to the broader study of Asian art … the first of its kind in the [...]
