29 September 2006 | Contemporary, Journals
The May-July 2006 Third Text is themed “The Conflict and Contemporary Visual Culture in Palestine and Israel.” Its introduction reads: “The issue of visual arts and their role in both the Palestinian and Israeli projects of identity creation has not been treated before in a substantial and comprehensive manner … Over forty Palestinian and Israeli [...]
29 September 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
Giambologna, a star of Viennese collections, gets a thorough look-in at the Bargello (“Giambologna: Gods and Heroes”) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (“Giambologna: Triumph of the Body”; see Markus Mittringer, Der Standard). In the catalog, Claudia Kryza-Gersch argues that you can reduce Italian Renaissance sculpture to three names: Donatello, Michelangelo, and Giambologna.
29 September 2006 | Modern
Hubert Damisch is “lightfooted and refreshingly sharp-tongued” in his study of Delacroix’s “intimate diary,” in which Damisch asks how painters perceived the arrival of photography, writes Christine Tauber (German edition; French edition). The painter was interested in how sense impressions could be properly remembered, given the inadequacy of verbal expression to communicate them. Could photography [...]
28 September 2006 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Over 100 artists have incorporated Disney imagery into their work. Why? Holly Crawford considers several possible motivations in her new book, “Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art” (she was kind enough to send us a complimentary copy), which aims to be “the first art history analyzing use of Disney imagery.” Among them: Disney [...]
28 September 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
In La Stampa, Marco Vallora weighs in on the Gentile show in Fabriano (previously discussed here).
28 September 2006 | Museums
From the Turkish Daily News: “British art historian and curator David Elliot has been appointed director of the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, museum officials announced on Thursday, and will take over the post in January 2007, reported the Anatolia news agency … Elliot, who is among the founders of the Tokyo Mori Art Museum, was [...]
27 September 2006 | Asia
Dietrich Seckel is “The Nestor of East Asian art history,” writes I. Schaarschmidt-Richter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Seckel has just published the second volume of his study of East Asian portraiture, which concerns typology. He defines two main portrait types: the formal portait, an objective expression of a social type set within the bounds of [...]
27 September 2006 | Contemporary
In a long interview with Phong Bui in the Brooklyn Rail, Serra hints that he might have had something to do with the beginnings of Arte Povera, when he was in Italy on a Fulbright: “I dropped painting and started working with stuffed and live animals, including chickens, rabbits, and a live pig, zoological cage [...]
27 September 2006 | Renaissance
From ANSA: “A French art expert has found evidence for the idea that the Mona Lisa had just given birth – and hence her enigmatic smile. Bruno Mottin of the French Museums’ Center for Research and Restoration has examined 3D images of Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting produced by laser and infrared scans … He [...]
21 September 2006 | Uncategorized
First we go on vacation, then the site goes down. All seems fixed now, we should be back on track shortly with new posts.
20 September 2006 | Uncategorized
“Tuesday, Sept. 19. AntiquiTEA: Enjoy afternoon tea and scones as Sarah Scher, a Ph.D. candidate in the art history department, discusses the ritual practice of human sacrifice in the ancient Americas.” (Found in the Emory University newspaper events listings.)
20 September 2006 | Uncategorized
From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “Jim Schinneller … a retired University of Wisconsin art professor, died at home Sept. 9 at age 81 … When Jim received the first royalty check in the 1960s for a popular art history textbook he wrote, ‘Art: Search and Self-Discovery,’ he brought home the money in 1,000 single dollars. He [...]
20 September 2006 | Uncategorized
From Artnet, an update on Getty goings-on: “The Getty Research Institute is digitalizing all nine volumes of Ceremonies et Coutumes Religieuses de Tous les Peuples du Monde by Bernard Picart (1673-1743), the rare 18th-century study of world religions. The Getty Foundation announced a $240,000 grant for a series of eight books on African art to [...]
19 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the September 2006 Art Bulletin, Robert Williams and Christopher S. Wood contribute a mock Platonic dialogue. They write in their introduction, “Its value as a point of departure — as a tool with which to anatomize the challenges now confronting us — rests on the figure of Protagoras, who, as a Sophist, can be [...]
19 September 2006 | Uncategorized
104 years old, the widow of Meyer Schapiro, she quit her career in medicine in 1996 to edit his papers. According to the couple’s daughter, “She was incredibly single-minded, gathering every scrap of my father’s intellectual output, and she was very successful in getting young volunteers to work with her.” (Via the Villager.)
18 September 2006 | Books
John Ott writes in CAA Reviews: “The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the Summer 2006 October, comparative literature scholar Daniel Heller-Roazen discusses “the concept of the perception of the fact of perception, the ‘sense,’ as Aristotle wrote in the De Anima, ‘that I am seeing and hearing.’” Poetic, difficult to summarize, his article concludes: “Sensation, in this way, outlasts its own activity. At the limit, there [...]
18 September 2006 | Uncategorized
We received the following email from Jonathan Gillis of the Aaronsohn Sher Aboulafia Amoday & Co. Law Offices in Jerusalem, regarding our recent post on Gannit Ankori (whom he represents): “Dear Sirs Re: Libelous attacks and harrassment by Kamal Boullata of Gannit Ankori I would ask that you act immediately to correct the erroneous impression [...]
18 September 2006 | Journals, Theory
In the summer 2006 Representations, English professor Mark Canuel writes: “It would be both right and wrong to say that aesthetics has returned as a subject of urgent scholarly inquiry within the past five years … Renewed commitments to defining and defending aesthetic pleasure center mainly on … a certain restricted type of pleasure — [...]
18 September 2006 | Ancient, Books
Also in CAA Reviews, Genevieve S. Gessert writes: “The title of Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society subtly delineates the major premise of his innovative study: that the modern notion of sculpture hinders our ability to understand the quotidian functions of statues within Roman society. As explained in his introduction, ‘classical art history has generally [...]
