28 November 2008 | Conferences
The 2009 CAA conference in Los Angeles now has sessions and individual paper titles listed on its website. A few highlights: “The Disciplined Body and Rational Architecture: The Foro Mussolini in Rome as the Setting for Performative Ritual of Synchronized Gymnastics” “Statelessness: Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter, Clean Torture, and Guantánamo Bay” “Riding the Rails of [...]
26 November 2008 | Photography
Just as Sarah Palin’s fashion was hamfistedly spruced up by individuals hoping to help her fit in on the national stage, so a French minister’s image was recently edited by a sympathetic newspaper worried she might stand out in the wrong way. Or was it? André Gunthert writes in Actualités de la Recherche en histoire [...]
24 November 2008 | Medieval, Theory
In caa.reviews, Kathryn A. Smith considers A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, edited by Conrad Rudolph: The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future [...]
21 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
From Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann: Why do people become painters? In two out of three cases, suspected the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, to overcompensate for a congenital sight defect. That’s hard to prove. Yet there is no doubt that Claude Monet had serious eye problems in the last two decades of his life. The [...]
18 November 2008 | Modern
From the Baltimore Sun: Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. “There will be no [...]
14 November 2008 | Uncategorized
In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Laurie Fendrich writes: … I stopped by the Met last week (as I’ve said, the pleasure of $60 Met membership is that you can do drop-ins) to check out the current Morandi exhibition, up through December 14th. I’m happy to report that Morandi is still great. Go see [...]
13 November 2008 | Modern, Museums
It’s caviar for modern art skeptics: Tate Modern hung Rothkos on their side and it made so little difference that barely anyone noticed. The truth of the matter is a bit more complex. From The Times of London: Curators of the blockbuster Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern in London have displayed two of the artist’s [...]
10 November 2008 | Photography
An article in Le Temps recounts the controversy that ensued in 1994 when Time darkened a photograph of O.J. Simpson for its cover. Then it writes: Fourteen years later, it’s impossible not to notice how scrupulous such magazines have been to present Barack Obama favorably, taking care to neither darken nor lighten overmuch the skin [...]
6 November 2008 | Uncategorized
Perhaps now is a good time to start analyzing art related to Barack Obama.
5 November 2008 | Architecture, Theory
In caa.reviews, Oleg Grabar considers “the unease most of us feel about traditional categories like Islamic and medieval, which are still the categories in which the field of art history is divided. We can probably agree that national labels are inadequate or misleading when dealing with the past, even though they are essential in identifying [...]
4 November 2008 | Photography
Rémi Coignet, who blogs about photography and books for Le Monde, recently reviewed Playboy: Posters, La collection complète, which is a kind of catalogue raisonné comprising all the hundreds of centerfolds the magazine has published since 1953: Flipping through the work, you get an impression of great repetition, an impression confirmed by a quick tally [...]
