30 April 2008 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the May 2008 issue of Art in America, Sue Taylor writes on recent histories of the erotic image. She dives into scandal straight away, of the scholarly kind: In his 1987 Secret Museum, a lively and polemical history of pornography, Walter Kendrick shows how Western culture is still riven by a debate begun in [...]
30 April 2008 | Africa
Artnet News surveys the Artforum debates over the most recent Venice Bienniale, declares a pox on all their houses: … The dispute has gotten delightfully nasty, if you like that sort of thing, with some of the art-world’s most sophisticated curators acting like so many playground bullies … One thing seems clear from the contretemps, [...]
24 April 2008 | Uncategorized
We read in The Times of London that art historian Michael Podro “died of cancer on March 28, 2008″: Michael Podro was one of a handful of pioneers who transformed art history, here and abroad, into an ambitious humanities discipline comparable with philosophy, literature and history … In 1956, under the joint supervision of [Ernst] [...]
22 April 2008 | Uncategorized
We belatedly take note of the third annual rankings of the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The index, designed to compare faculty using objective measures such as books published or times cited, has been criticized most for using faulty data. “Many want to see the National Research Council’s long-anticipated [...]
21 April 2008 | Ancient, Medieval, Theory
The latest issue of World Archaeology (39:4) is largely devoted to two themes: the senses and “symmetrical archaeology.” C. Pamela Graves writes: In the Middle Ages the senses were considered two-way processes. The senses ‘enabled tangible qualities, and indeed, spiritual or intangible qualities, to be passed from one party to another’ and were acknowledged as [...]
18 April 2008 | Books
What’s new with tradition? The International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), “an active network of individuals and institutions dedicated to the creation of human and harmonious buildings and places which respect local traditions … [it] brings together those who design, make, maintain, study or enjoy traditional building, architecture and places.” The proceedings [...]
Die Welt notes that Alfred Weidinger’s new catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt’s paintings (which was selected as the best art book of the year by Frank Whitford in The Times of London and by Tom Rosenthal in The Independent) has come under attack from fellow Klimt scholar Otmar Rychlik.
16 April 2008 | Awards
From CAA News: At its October 2007 meeting, the CAA Board of Directors voted to establish a twelfth Award for Distinction: the Distinguished Feminist Award. The award honors a person who, through his or her art, scholarship, or advocacy, has advanced the cause of equality for women in the arts. A three-member jury, appointed by [...]
14 April 2008 | Uncategorized
In caa.reviews, Emine Fetvaci considers Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797, the catalogue for the recent Metropolitan Museum exhibition: With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase [...]
11 April 2008 | Books
In Die Welt, Alexander Gauland defends Sedlmayr’s 1948 book Verlust der Mitte (Loss of the Center) from charges leveled recently by Rolf Schneider. Gauland argues that the book isn’t Nazi, it’s just conservative. (For more on Sedlmayr, we recommend the 2000 Vienna School Reader edited by Christopher S. Wood.)
10 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
“Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions” is now on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Bloomberg News has an entertaining short interview with “the Met’s Keith Christiansen, who curated the exhibition with Pierre Rosenberg, the retired director of the Louvre”: Hoelterhoff: In pulling this show together, did you make any discoveries? Christiansen: I think [...]
9 April 2008 | Museums
From Carol Diehl, “Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial“: …It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project…. (Todd Alden on Mika Tajima/New Humans) ——————– …invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial…inhabits those interstitial [...]
8 April 2008 | Awards
Mark Feeney has won the 2008
8 April 2008 | Uncategorized
In The Globe and Mail, we read of a video installation by Robert Morris titled The Birthday Boy that is now making its first North American appearance. It features two video projections – each ostensibly of an art historian at a lectern, standing next to a rotating model of [Michelangelo's David]. On a table next [...]
7 April 2008 | Awards
From the fields of “Fine Arts Research,” “Architecture, Planning and Design,” and “Photography studies,” there were six winners this year. Here they are, together with their affiliations, and areas of research: Meiling Cheng, Associate Professor of Critical Studies and English, and Director of Critical Studies, School of Theatre, University of Southern California: Contemporary time-based art [...]
7 April 2008 | Theory
In the most recent (Winter 2007) issue of Dalhousie French Studies, which is devoted to “Representations of Trauma” (and, alas, has pages out of sequence), Tom Conley writes: After a decade, in 1999, the reception and appreciation of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma too a forceful turn … Jacque Rancière examined its sense of history. [...]
4 April 2008 | Theory
In the March 2008 issue of Cultural Politics, Johanna Drucker argues that image interpreters need to turn away from the de-familiarizing effect that was a tenet of the historical avant-garde. The very identity of aesthetic images was in part linked to capacity for making strange (Shklovsky 1917). In our current, profoundly disturbed, cultural condition, no [...]
3 April 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the February 2008 issue of The Burlington Magazine, Xander van Eck reviews Eric Jan Sluijter’s Rembrandt and the Female Nude: … the scope of [Rembrandt's] genius was such that it still yields genuinely new research, providing that valid questions are asked. Eric Jan Sluijter has done just that in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, [...]
2 April 2008 | Museums, Renaissance
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviews the “Baccio Bandinelli 1493-1560, Dessins et sculptures du Louvre” exhibition now on view at the Louvre. It notes that this is a rare opportunity to reassess the artist, who’s been in disrepute since the Renaissance. His contemporaries starting things off by leaving to posterity “ein Negativbild” of the artist, which [...]
