31 January 2008 | Uncategorized
From Harper’s Magazine: George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born-again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled A Charge to Keep. Bush was so taken by it, he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about [...]
29 January 2008 | Conferences
The annual College Art Association conference convenes February 20–23 in Dallas. If you’re going, please consider writing about your experience! We’ve enjoyed hearing from a variety of people in the past, and it’s an opportunity for you to opine before our audience of 1000+ readers per day. Email your write-up(s), which can be brief and [...]
25 January 2008 | Journals
Citation indexes are often controversial (for one, they can never be comprehensive), but they can be of some interest nonetheless. We recently discovered the citation ranking feature of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. We typed in a few art-history-related journals to see what their most frequently cited articles are. Here is a sampling: {FORMAT: [...]
24 January 2008 | Uncategorized
Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation continues to attract attention. From the Times of London: An historian claims to have solved a Renaissance murder mystery by deciphering one of the world’s most enigmatic masterpieces. The true meaning of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, kept at the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino, has been the [...]
22 January 2008 | Museums
The Washington Post and CultureGrrl report that Philip Conisbee has died. According to CultureGrrl, “the British-born French paintings expert may be best remembered for two glorious exhibitions: Georges de La Tour and His World, 1996, the first American exhibition devoted to that artist; and the recent blockbuster Cézanne in Provence, 2006.” According to the Post, [...]
21 January 2008 | Theory
Nicolas Slonimsky asserted in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective that the human instinct toward “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar” is usually to blame when critics assail a work of genius. Interestingly, there is a body of empirical work supporting the converse idea, that we tend to like what we’ve seen a lot of. See, for [...]
18 January 2008 | Books
Hol Art Books is a new publisher with an interesting idea: [We] will allow anyone to suggest titles, form professional-level publishing groups, peer review one another’s work, and collaboratively develop their title to ultimately be published as a Hol book … Hol takes care of printing, marketing and distributing every book, but we turn the [...]
17 January 2008 | Photography
From Le Monde: It’s a stunning photograph that has caused much ink to be spilled since it was published January 3rd on the cover of the Nouvel Observateur. On the occasion of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth, the magazine chose an image of the writer, nude, seen from behind, in the middle of [...]
16 January 2008 | Contemporary
When artists fail as marketers, their marketing becomes art that’s easy to market.
15 January 2008 | Conferences
From The Age: The fact that Melbourne is hosting the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art [Jan 13-18, 2008] is no small feat. Held every four years, and considered the “Olympics” of art history, the congress has never been staged south of the equator. The conference, Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration [...]
14 January 2008 | Uncategorized
The Austrian art historian and longtime director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle has published on Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya and Edgar Degas, among other artists. Marion Lauschke and Isabella Woldt also won awards. More here (rough English translation).
11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947. One interviewer notes that He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He [...]
10 January 2008 | Museums
Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello is stepping down. More here: “Director (and Voice) of Metropolitan Museum to Retire” “The Legacy of a Pragmatic Custodian of Human Civilization,” by Michael Kimmelman “Let the Horse Race Begin: The Search for a Successor” CultureGrrl The New York Sun
9 January 2008 | Teaching
From Libération: “In school, children learn to read but not to see.” In these pages, the day after the presidential election, the painting historian Pierre Rosenberg, former Louvre president, reminded candidate Sarkozy of his promise to introduce art history into the schools. If a report Libération obtained a copy of is to be believed, “starting [...]
8 January 2008 | Ancient, Books
A recent issue of the South African Archaeological Bulletin (62:185) includes a lively exchange of letters. We can’t do them justice here; nonetheless, some excerpts: J.D. Lewis-Williams writes: With attacks in (remarkably) two successive issues of the South African Archaeological Bulletin Anne Solomon has raised the boredom rating of her current dispute about San rock [...]
7 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary
When every inch of every building is covered in posters, and the posters change daily, how do you find your way home? In a recent issue of South Asian Popular Culture (5:1), Iftikhar Dadi writes on “Political Posters in Karachi: 1988-1999.” During this time, “Pakistan attempted to ‘return’ to parliamentary democracy.” Consequently, the existence of [...]
4 January 2008 | Theory
The September 2007 issue of Social Semiotics is devoted to “Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification.” The editors, Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray, write in their introduction: … the term “body modification” has a ring of deviance about it. The heterogeneous practices this rubric encompasses — from piercing, tattooing, suspensions, scarification, [and] branding, to corseting, the splitting [...]
3 January 2008 | Photography
A recent issue (29.2) of Studies in American Culture includes an essay by Larry Vonalt (who died in 2005) on “The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams’s ‘Disturbing’ Family Photograph’: The photographs in Shelby Lee Adams’s first two monographs, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), attracted praise and, often in his native Eastern Kentucky, blame. [...]
2 January 2008 | Conservation, Museums
In a recent issue of Studies in Conservation (52:3), Clare Richardson and David Saunders write on “Acceptable Light Damage”: A panel of observers was presented with pairs of reproductions of figurative and abstract oil and watercolour paintings, regions of which had been altered digitally prior to printing to give a known colour difference from the [...]
