15 February 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Washington Post: “Normally jurors do not speak in trials until the last day. Not the jurors in former White House aide I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby’s perjury trial. Valentine’s Day broke their silence early. On the last day of testimony Wednesday, the 12 jurors and two alternates came into court with a surprise: Thirteen [...]
15 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences, News, Renaissance
Contributor Ross Finocchio writes: This year I had every reason to think that getting to CAA would be a breeze. After all, I live in New York. Although February can be brutal here, what could be worse than the deep freeze that covered Boston during the ’06 conference? The answer turned out to be stinging [...]
15 February 2007 | Conferences
The rotten weather has kept more than a few attendees away. Blogger Gregory T. Davis writes: “melanie and I fly out tomorrow evening for new york city to attend the college arts association’s annual meat market … the conference was a bust last year, so we’ll see if it still blows this year … the [...]
15 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences
CAA has its own blog again this year. Bloggers include Benjamin Lima (see here, third paragraph), who posted recently on William Tabler, the mid-century brains behind the Hilton Hotel where College Art Association members spend so much of their time every few years. As one article cited by Lima notes, “Few Tabler hotels win design [...]
14 February 2007 | Conferences, News
Numerous papers and indeed entire panels this year are devoted to non-western topics — especially to the collision of western and non-western cultures. This afternoon we have panels on “The Reception of Caribbean Art,” “The Appropriation of Classical and Gothic Architecture by Indigenous and Diasporic Communities,” “The Art of Being Global: International Art of International [...]
14 February 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary, Modern, News
About 120 people are here for the “Reframing Modernism” panel in the Hilton’s rather unmodern Trianon Ballroom, where bad lighting is making the slides near-impossible to see. One speaker, Jenny Anger, considers it still necessary to contest Michael Fried’s concept of “theatricality.” Among other things, she believes that there is a fascist element in modernism [...]
13 February 2007 | Modern, Museums
“Richard Brettell, the highly respected art historian at the University of Texas, Dallas … realized in conversations with French colleagues that Monet’s roots in Normandy, the coastal region through which the River Seine flows west of Paris, had never been deeply explored in an exhibition … in a key head-slapping revelation, Brettell was reminded by [...]
13 February 2007 | Teaching
Sweet Briar College professor Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe has begun creating art history podcasts full of special effects that he calls “Art History in Just a Minute” (that are not necessarily under a minute long). According to his college’s newsletter, “Since its launch in December 2006, ‘The Last Supper’ has been downloaded more than [...]
12 February 2007 | Conferences
Already bored by this year’s conference? Start preparing your 2008 paper: “The 96th CAA Annual Conference takes place February 20–23, 2008, in Dallas, Texas. Listing more than 120 sessions, the 2008 Call for Participation arrives in the mailboxes of all CAA members in early March; it is also available for download. This publication describes many [...]
9 February 2007 | Uncategorized
According to Connaissance des Arts, Cabanne died January 24: “One of the world’s great cubism specialists … [Cabanne was best known for his] Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp … and his four-volume Le Siècle de Picasso … He also interested himself in older artists such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Georges de la Tour and in more [...]
9 February 2007 | Museums
A new exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts: “The Parrot in Art: From Dürer to Elizabeth Butterworth.” From the press release: “This groundbreaking exhibition explores how the parrot’s role in art has changed from the Renaissance to the present.” (via Art History Today)
8 February 2007 | Asia
From The New York Times: “[Beijiing] archaeologists excavated 700 ancient burial sites and recovered 1,538 artifacts, including porcelain urns and jade jewelry, while collecting more than 6,000 ancient coins … Construction zones across the country are uncovering so many antiquities that it might be considered a golden era for archaeology — except that sites and [...]
8 February 2007 | Uncategorized
Elizabeth Tashjian, “The Nut Lady,” has died.
7 February 2007 | Journals, Modern
In the Winter 2007 October, Sarah K. Rich resurrects and analyzes a singular chapter in 1950s art criticism that saw various writers bitterly lament Jean Dubuffet’s use of butterfly wings in collage: “Why does he massacre butterflies to evoke effects he would better achieve with paint and brushes?” “[He] uselessly massacred hundreds of butterflies with [...]
6 February 2007 | Books
Following Nicholas Penny’s review of three new volumes in the London Review of Books, he and Thomas Crow have mailed in dueling letters to the editor. Crow: “Nicholas Penny’s assertion that the ‘elite academics’ invited by the Getty Research Institute ‘rarely have any interest in the museum’ (LRB, 4 January) represents the fundamental premise of [...]
5 February 2007 | Ancient, Conferences
From The Wall Street Journal: “[A] conference organized by the Institute of Archaeology and the Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, in Bern, Switzerland, devoted itself to sorting out the Pantheon’s history. Breaking news, of a kind, caused an ‘absolute sensation’ (in a manner perhaps possible only at an academic conference). A revisionist [...]
4 February 2007 | Contemporary
On February 13, UCLA professor Saloni Mathur will present a lecture, “The Politics of Oil: Contemporary Indian Art and the War in Iraq”: “This paper juxtaposes several different uses and politics of ‘oil’ – as a painterly medium, a global commodity, and a discourse of imperial power – in part by examining the history of [...]
4 February 2007 | Modern
Or not? Yawn, some say. But not headline writers: “Peering Into Pollock” “Owner sees red as Pollocks doubted” “Doubts Splatter 3 Pollocks” “Critics canvass Pollock doubts” “Purported Pollock Paintings: Still a Pickle” “The case of the zombie Pollocks” “Pollocks or bollocks?”
2 February 2007 | Ancient, Books
Henri Meschonic recently published Le Nom de notre ignorance, la Dame d’Auxerre, a short book on a Greek statue at the Louvre. Dumitra Baron reviews the book in Acta Fabula: “How can an artwork speak to us, what can it transmit to us, what are the relationships between language and art, in what way can [...]
1 February 2007 | Conferences, Renaissance
In CAA Reviews, Diana Gisolfi discusses a recent symposium “Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting was the closing event of several associated with the exhibition Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington … Nicholas Penny’s presentation was incisive and provocative, noting the several unsettled attributions and various [...]
