28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable? Skira [...]
27 September 2007 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Jones writes: Why do journalists write the same six generic stories about art over and over again? … Imagine how little news about visual art would appear in the papers if the following generic stories were banned: 1. The most expensive work of art ever … 2. Anything about graffiti … 3. Lost masterpiece [...]
26 September 2007 | Books, Modern
The top Independent Publisher Book Award in the fine arts category went to the first two volumes of the four-tome Eva Hesse, Catalog Raisonne. They were edited by Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, with Annette Spohn and Jörg Daur.
25 September 2007 | Modern, Museums
From the L.A. Times: [The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art keeps] the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S. Ruled by one of the [...]
24 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the (Memphis, TN) Commercial Appeal: Leave it to the art history majors to change the world. That’s what Lynda Ireland did. She graduated from college with an art history degree in the 1960s, taught art for 20 years, then shifted her career to work for a business. In the process, she became a fascinating [...]
21 September 2007 | Islamic, Medieval, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Dorothy M. Shepard summarizes the recent “Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797″ symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which mounted an exhibition on the topic): James Harper of the University of Oregon gave the last paper of the morning. Titled “Iron Curtain and Global Village: The Historiographic Positioning of Venice and Islam,” [...]
20 September 2007 | Modern
Signandsight.com summarizes an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: For art historian Werner Spies, Cardinal Meisner’s comment on “degenerated culture” in his service Friday in the Cologne’s Cathedral (more here) merely gives voice to latent tendencies: the ignorance of the Catholic Church in face of modern art: “This attack on Gerhard Richter’s life’s work (the [...]
19 September 2007 | Modern
From the International Herald Tribune: A visit to the State Tretyakov Gallery’s newly updated permanent exhibition of 20th-century Russian art is as dizzying as the twists and turns of the country’s history and ongoing debates over post-Soviet national identity. It fills 42 halls of the museum’s Krymsky Val affiliate, a vast late Soviet-era labyrinth not [...]
18 September 2007 | Journals
Didier Rykner’s four-year-old online art journal La Tribune de l’Art is best known for having led the recent fight against the Louvre’s deal with Abu Dhabi, but it is more than that, containing a variety of news, scholarship, and editorials, and it now has an English version, which features translations from the French site as [...]
17 September 2007 | Ancient
The Independent has published a “special investigation” by Robert Fisk on the recent destruction of Iraq’s cultural property: 2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining [...]
14 September 2007 | Teaching
How not to win over your students: “The class laughed when my UC Irvine Art History professor said she wrote a letter to Comedy Central explaining that she would boycott the station unless they stopped playing ‘Girls Gone Wild’ commercials.”
13 September 2007 | Teaching
For art history professors returning to the classroom this fall, the signs are good. In a quick survey of student blogs, we noted the following recent comments: “My art history professor is absolutely amazing. I feel so good about this being my major, especially if I can have more classes with him later on. I’m [...]
12 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: Gaehtgens, 67, a native of Germany who has art history degrees from the universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Vienna and Paris, is expected to arrive in Los Angeles in November. He will take charge of the Getty’s program for interdisciplinary scholarship in the arts and humanities, founded in 1984 as a branch [...]
11 September 2007 | Books
Some might call it a bold move. The CAA’s online reviews journal has appointed an editor with, it would appear, little experience writing and reviewing full-length academic books. Oakley has curated shows, reviewed them, performed other museum work, taught university classes, and published scholarship. Of course, caa.reviews is not just book reviews — it also [...]
10 September 2007 | Books
It’s never too late to review an academic book. In the September 2007 Art Bulletin, Reindert L. Falkenburg considers Klaus Krüger’s 2001 Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien: It offers an intensely insightful analysis of a series of works of art that, despite the forcefulness [...]
7 September 2007 | Americas, Modern
Are they genuine? Decide for yourself, now through December 9 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. From the Boston Globe: “‘There obviously remains a mystery here,’ said Claude Cernuschi, a BC art history professor and one of the show’s curators. Still, the 178-page catalog, also released yesterday, did contain some revelations. For example, although [...]
7 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the press release: “Elizabeth Hutton Turner, senior curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., will join the faculty of the University of Virginia McIntire Department of Art … During her 18-year tenure at The Phillips Collection she directed exhibits and wrote extensively on Pierre Bonnard, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Wassily Kandinsky, [...]
6 September 2007 | Uncategorized
As we continue catching up on the movements of art historians, we note that ARHV reported the promotion of Giovanni Careri to “directeur d’études” at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where he’s been the director of the Centre d’histoire et théorie des arts (CEHTA) since 2001. “Born in 1958 in Rome, Giovanni [...]
5 September 2007 | Uncategorized
The NYU Institute of Fine Arts director will become “Vice Chancellor of the University with a brief to establish campuses of NYU abroad.” “Intended as a new model for higher education worldwide, the first such campus is to be established in the Middle East. Other locations are under discussion.” She will “remain on the Institute [...]
4 September 2007 | Uncategorized
Earlier this summer, Williams College “announced the appointment of Marc Gotlieb as the Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of Art and director of the Graduate Program in Art History, effective July 1. He succeeds Mark Haxthausen as director of the graduate program. Gotlieb is associate professor and chair of the department of fine art at [...]
