31 January 2007 | Modern, Museums
Cassandra Albinson reviews the Géricault show that appeared at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon last summer: “Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, [...]
30 January 2007 | Conferences
From the New York Times: “‘Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. ‘Especially in a museum not [...]
29 January 2007 | Books, Contemporary
“Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice” assembles essays (some already published elsewhere) by James Elkins, Thomas McEvilley, Jerry Saltz, Katy Siegel, Lane Relyea, Arthur C. Danto, JJ Charlesworth, Nancy Princenthal, Carter Ratcliff, Eleanor Heartney, Michael Duncan, Peter Plagens, and Raphael Rubinstein, the anthology’s editor. In his introduction, he writes: “The mess [...]
26 January 2007 | Contemporary
According to the University of California, Berkeley, which is showing an exhibit of “Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s depictions of Abu Ghraib prison abuses,” it will host “a series of public conversations on campus on related issues such as art and violence, torture, human rights and terrorism,” including “a panel discussion on ‘Art and Violence’ [that] [...]
25 January 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From the Guardian: “It is one of a mysterious group of works that has intrigued art historians for many years. They are all sensitive character studies of predominantly New Testament figures, but it has remained unclear why they were painted. This portrayal of Saint James the Greater is the only one of Rembrandt’s late religious [...]
24 January 2007 | Books, Contemporary
From the press release: “London’s famous Whitechapel Gallery and the MIT Press announce a new series, Documents of Contemporary Art. Each volume will cover a single theme, practice, or obsession central to contemporary visual culture … selecting writings that range from foundational texts to freshly made arguments … The first two volumes in the series [...]
23 January 2007 | Museums, Renaissance
From the Art Newspaper: “Spanish art historians have renamed one of Italy’s greatest painters. Specialists at the Prado have established that Tintoretto’s family name was Comin. This revelation will be presented at a major retrospective on Tintoretto (1519-94), which opens in Madrid on 29 January … the result of research following publication of an article [...]
22 January 2007 | Books, Contemporary
In the December 2006 Art Bulletin, James Meyer celebrates Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s: “The narrative style … is dazzlingly associative … [it] enlists all manner of sources and evidence to make its case … that Chronophobia opens up more questions than it is able to answer is [...]
19 January 2007 | Career, Conferences
As CAA’s annual carnival of job seeking approaches, it’s worth looking at a few statistics. A recent search of CAA’s website showed 106 full- and part-time art-history teaching jobs available. According to our analysis of data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. has minted about 200 new art-history PhDS each year [...]
18 January 2007 | Asia, Conservation
The official China Daily writes on efforts to save frescoes and statues in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves: “Artisans began working on the caves in the Mingsha Mountain in AD 366, or 1,641 years ago. The more than 3,000 Buddha statues and the frescoes that together can add up to 30 kilometers are a treasure trove [...]
17 January 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Guardian (second item on page): “The Metropolitan Police Authority recently told its art and antiquities squad, which now employs only four full-time officers, that it would be dissolved unless it becomes 50% self-financing by 2008. As a result, the unit is trying a radical new tack: recruiting curators and art historians to work [...]
16 January 2007 | Renaissance
From Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa: “Italian officials have approved a scientific exploration designed to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of art: the whereabouts of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, a large mural depicting a 16th century battle between the Florentine Republic and the Milanese … [Conservationist Maurizio] Seracini, who has dedicated [...]
15 January 2007 | Awards
The following individuals (and others) will receive awards at next month’s CAA conference: Peter Selz (best art-history book), Teresa A. Carbone with Barbara Dayer Gallati and Linda S. Ferber (museum catalogue), Elizabeth Marlowe (Art Bulletin article by a young scholar), Sean Cubitt (Art Journal article), Jerry Saltz (art criticism), Wanda M. Corn and Alan Wallach [...]
14 January 2007 | Americas, Museums
In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman recaps the recent controversy over Eakins’ Gross Clinic (and visits some other Eakins paintings). The painting was being lured away from Thomas Jefferson University not by the National Gallery alone, but by the National Gallery in collaboration with Alice L. Walton. Did the subsequent outcry result from a [...]
12 January 2007 | Uncategorized
“A New Standard for Measuring Doctoral Programs,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, describes the new “Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, partly financed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook and produced by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company, [which] rates faculty members’ scholarly output at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country. It [...]
10 January 2007 | Medieval, Museums
From Columbia Magazine: “[James] Beck’s challenge to the authenticity of the Metropolitan Duccio has been laid out in the appendix of his book, Connoisseurship in Crisis: From Duccio to Raphael, to be published by European Press Academic Publishing this fall … ‘It’s a delicate matter, all this crap,’ says Beck, 76. ‘The politics of culture. [...]
8 January 2007 | Books, Photography
In CAA Reviews, Martha Langford considers Geoffrey Batchen’s Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance: “Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence … we [...]
5 January 2007 | Museums
More from The New York Times on French museums lending their collections: “Questions are being raised about plans to create a satellite of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and to establish an outpost of the Georges Pompidou Center in Shanghai. Critics have accused President Jacques Chirac of using [...]
3 January 2007 | Conservation
From The New York Times: “Craig Hugh Smyth, an art historian who drew attention to the importance of conservation and the recovery of purloined art and cultural objects, died on Dec. 22 … Mr. Smyth led the first academic program in conservation in the United States … He wrote many scholarly articles and books, including, [...]
