30 March 2007 | Contemporary
The latest issue of Third Text includes an essay by Laura Mulvey on Kiarostami that is excerpted from her recent book, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image: “Digital technology does not imply an inherent, teleological development from the old to the new, but rather varied opportunities and possibilities reminiscent of the now [...]
29 March 2007 | Renaissance
Nature reports on a new interpretation of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation: “Piero planned his paintings down to the last detail, and this meticulously executed scene contains several mysteries, particularly the identities of the three men on the right. Countless attempts have been made to name them … A leading historian of science now believes he [...]
28 March 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary
Contributor Daniel Belasco reports from “Writing the Contemporary: Art History and Art Criticism,” last night’s CUNY Graduate Center panel, moderated by Katy Siegel and including Johanna Burton, Branden Joseph, Scott Rothkopf, and Lawrence Weschler: “What’s the difference between, say, a monograph on Cindy Sherman and a long exhibition review of the same artist in Artforum? [...]
28 March 2007 | Ancient, Theory
In the January-March issue of Word & Image, Mary Stieber writes: “… throughout Classical antiquity, writers, poets, and thinkers were in the habit of looking to the visual arts to find ways to present and clarify various ethical and philosophical questions that modern life posed and modern literature dramatized … There is a degree of [...]
28 March 2007 | Journals
caa.reviews may still be spelled lower-case, but it does have a new look and new features. Perhaps most notably, its “Recent Books in the Arts” list “will include a much larger number of new book titles and will sort them by the same CAA subject categories used for our dissertations and job listings.”
27 March 2007 | Uncategorized
Various stories of interest to art historians get little play here, because they’re already well covered elsewhere. We particularly recommend the ArtsJournal visual-arts newswire and ArtsJournal blogger CultureGrrl. To summarize some recent developments: The Met has gone forward with its plans (similar to the V&A’s) to make previously expensive images more available to professionals (via [...]
26 March 2007 | Museums
The latest issue of Revue de l’Art (n. 154) is devoted to “the presentation of the work of art.” Introducing the issue, Etienne Jollet writes: “One might imagine that [this question] has been well explored. It seems to us however that much remains to be done. First, because the question arises even before the arrival [...]
23 March 2007 | Medieval
From The Independent: “An immense treasure trove of medieval wall paintings, concealed by whitewash for 300 years, has been found in a small church in south-eastern France. Experts believe that up to 600 square metres of the upper walls of the nave of the church in Vif, near Grenoble, are decorated with frescoes painted in [...]
22 March 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
The Winter 2007 Representations features an article by Katalin Orbán on “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers“: “[these are] parallel books, devoted to historical crisis as family history — the former to the Holocaust, the latter to the attack on the World Trade Center — both narrated through [...]
21 March 2007 | Modern, Museums
From The Virginian-Pilot: “‘It’s an understudied period,’ [curator Jeff Harrison] said, grinning because the Chrysler Museum of Art is able to exhibit what few Americans have seen: 19th century and early 20th century Spanish paintings. The show, which opened last week, contains about 65 works from the collection of New York City’s Hispanic Society of [...]
In the Fall/Winter 2006 Woman’s Art Journal, Ute L. Tellini reviews Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, which was edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard: “The problem, the editors state in the introduction to their latest volume, is that postmodernism, grounded in the masculinist principles of Freud, Lacan, and Saussure, benefited [...]
19 March 2007 | Modern
In the latest Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Patricia Mainardi discusses the invention of comics: “While the Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the comic strip, no one has yet analyzed the development of the visual language of comics. This essay traces many of the signs, symbols, visual conventions and narrative strategies [...]
Of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, 95 are women. That’s 69%. For comparison, about 75% of art-history PhDs produced this decade have been women. It’s hard to say much about the hiring patterns of individual schools, given the small numbers involved. The most significant examples we could find were these: all six of [...]
Are there professors whose students fare especially well on the job market? Here the data starts to run thin. Few professors advise large numbers of dissertations at a time. That said, we tried to see what we could find. We tracked down advisors for 121 of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, and present [...]
How does the hiring data break down by subfield? Who’s getting the most jobs for modernists? For medievalists? Getting answers here is complicated by the fact that there’s no one accepted way to subdivide the field, nor do all art historians fit neatly into one category. We took our best shot. We also found it [...]
To put our survey findings better in context, it helps to compare departments’ placement numbers with the number of PhDs they award each year. Relatively good data is available via Dissertation Abstracts. We counted up doctorates for each department having more than one top placement in our survey. Art-history Dept. (PhDs granted per year, ’99-’05) [...]
Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs? “Top jobs” are hard to [...]
12 March 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From The Art Newspaper: “In a brilliant piece of art historical detective work, two Dutch academics have solved the puzzle of Jan Steen’s 1655 painting The Burgomaster of Delft and His Daughter. The work does not depict a burgomaster, but the merchant who supplied grain for the artist’s brewery. We also now know about a [...]
12 March 2007 | Uncategorized
He died March 6. From the London Times: “Jean Baudrillard was a leading French social theorist. His prolific writings — more than 50 books — and his status for many years as a cult figure among students of postmodern theory established him as one of the most celebrated and provocative French thinkers to emerge in [...]
9 March 2007 | Conferences, Theory
This July, the week-long Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will consider “Globalism in Art”: “Faculty include Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, James Elkins, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, and Shigemi Inaga. Lectures and discussions are open to the public (tickets required). The seminars are limited to 15 Fellows; [...]
