30 April 2007 | Books, Journals
We belatedly take note of the special issue of Art History (28: 5) devoted to art historian Stephen Bann, which has been published in book form. Editor Deborah Cherry highlights Bann’s concern “to create a dialogue between ‘present thinking about history’ and the ‘new codes of historical awareness that were established in the nineteenth century’ [...]
27 April 2007 | Books, Contemporary
At least one prominent art historian believes that “our leading sculptor, male or female, in the United States today is by all odds Louise Bourgeois.” We read that “In October 2007 Tate Modern presents the first major survey since 1995 of the work of the French-born artist Louise Bourgeois.” (According to Artnet, the show will [...]
26 April 2007 | Contemporary, Journals
From the College Art Association press release: “Kotz is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and an affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities … Kotz received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University in 2002, with a dissertation [...]
25 April 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In CAA Reviews, John Beldon Scott considers Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque: “Evonne Levy argues that art historians peremptorily dismiss totalitarian art because we judge it to be mere propaganda and therefore not worthy of consideration. Asserting that there is no such thing as ‘mere propaganda,’ her provocative and insightful book on the [...]
24 April 2007 | Modern
From the Barnes Foundation website: “The Board of Trustees of the Barnes Foundation has announced the award of a $5 million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation … [to] establish a permanent endowment to support scholarly activities … Among the initiatives that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded at the Barnes Foundation [...]
23 April 2007 | Contemporary
From The New York Times: “Roy Moyer … died on April 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85 … Mr. Moyer was a longtime administrator at the American Federation of Arts, which organizes exhibitions for travel across America … Among the shows he helped create was ‘Art and the Found Object,’ which included [...]
20 April 2007 | Uncategorized
Blogger Millinerd (“a student in Princeton U’s art history PhD program” who in “a previous life … graduated from the same town’s Theol. Seminary”) writes: “What is remarkable is that [T.J.] Clark’s most recent book, which he was visiting our department to discuss, leaves politics behind to focus back on the object. Clark is still [...]
19 April 2007 | Crime
In an editorial in the latest Revue de l’art (n. 155), the editors write that “The recent indictment of Henry-Claude Cousseau, currently director of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, for an exhibition that he organized in 2000, as director of the CAPC-Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, again raises the question of censorship in art. [...]
18 April 2007 | Uncategorized
Is praise “from an art history perspective” different from other kinds of praise? Consider this report from Reuters: “Singer Bryan Ferry has apologised for remarks he made in an interview with a German newspaper in which he praised Nazi iconography as ‘just amazing’ and ‘really beautiful’. The 61-year-old lead singer of Roxy Music told Germany’s [...]
In the March-April 2007 Acta Fabula, Marianna Marino reviews the essay collection Puissances de l’image: “As its title indicates, Puissances de l’image considers the multiple forms that iconic power can take. It prefers puissance to pouvoir, puissance being tied more closely to notions of virtuality and possibility. (It collects studies presented at the 2nd International [...]
16 April 2007 | Uncategorized
In CAA Reviews, Christine Kuan discusses Susan M. Bielstein’s Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property: “In today’s litigious ownership society, there are more visual arts permissions hurdles than ever before for both publishing and artistic expression … Intellectual discourse and artistic practice can be severely handicapped by these factors, and [...]
13 April 2007 | Renaissance
From the Guardian: “After lying almost untouched in the vaults of an Italian university for 500 years, a book on the magic arts written by Leonardo da Vinci’s best friend and teacher has been translated into English for the first time. The world’s oldest magic text, De viribus quantitatis (On The Powers Of Numbers) was [...]
12 April 2007 | Books, Museums
Is it possible to publish 300+ pages on a theme such as “Venice and the Islamic World: 828-1797″ without once footnoting Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism? Is it even possible for scholars, post-Said, to speak of “the Islamic world: 828-1797″? (Imagine a show titled “Baghdad and the Christian World.”) Apparently it is. This exhibition catalogue [...]
11 April 2007 | Contemporary, Theory
Caroline A. Jones reviews David Joselit’s new book Feedback: Television Against Democracy in Artforum: “The field of art history registered a seismic shift in the late 1990s, when crops of grad students began to designate ‘video art’ as a topic for their oral exams, or even to write their dissertations on the formerly bereft genre.” [...]
10 April 2007 | Theory
Art Bulletin continues its series of “interventions.” In the March 2007 issue, Michael Ann Holly opens a discussion on the melancholy aspects of our discipline: “The experience of visual captivation (when the two become one) is transitory, even ephemeral, however powerful its aftereffects. In ‘workaday consciousness,’ its consolation lingers, and like ruins contemplated across many [...]
9 April 2007 | Uncategorized
Visit this academic blogs page, and compare the number of art-history blogs to, say, the number devoted to linguistics and philosophy. There are more art historians blogging than appear on this list, but most of the others that we know about blog mostly about their personal lives. (Not that that — or, say, this or [...]
6 April 2007 | Theory
At the recent College Art Association conference, several speakers referenced the work of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s new book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (“the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Courbet in a generation” according to its flap copy), she opens with [...]
5 April 2007 | Uncategorized
From the University at Buffalo (aka SUNY-Buffalo) Reporter: “As the first new faculty member to join the Department of Visual Studies since it was created from the merger of the departments of Art and Art History last spring, Nancy Anderson is on a mission to help UB become one of the first universities in North [...]
4 April 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In the Dec. 2006 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Paul Gladston writes: “The publication of Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, by Karen Smith, a British-born art critic and a longtime resident of China with extensive firsthand knowledge of the contemporary Chinese art world, is … an extremely [...]
3 April 2007 | Renaissance
Maggie Reid writes in the Yale Daily News: “Ben Sweeney became interested in the idea that da Vinci may have had a misshapen left hand, a theory that he said has been overlooked for 500 years by the art world. Sweeney, a real estate broker in San Diego … developed the idea that the third [...]
