30 January 2009 | Modern
The Times of London writes on the re-attribution of The Colossus: “After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants … the Prado started an investigation last year [upon] the discovery of the initials [...]
29 January 2009 | Books, Modern
In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber: Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly [...]
28 January 2009 | Books, Theory
“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud: Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and [...]
27 January 2009 | Museums
From the Boston Globe: Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and [...]
27 January 2009 | Career
For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice: Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter. “Last year, about a quarter of the positions I [...]
27 January 2009 | Uncategorized
According to Michele D. Marincola, interim director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts: It is with real sadness that I report the death of Olga Raggio, former Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor at the IFA from [...]
26 January 2009 | Books
In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”: Hobby Horse is an exuberant book – exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, [...]
23 January 2009 | Career
Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog: In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of [...]
22 January 2009 | Books, Theory
Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of this year’s CAA award for lifetime achievement in art writing) has just published a new book, Quand les images prennent position. André Gunthert writes: In a world where images are proliferating in every way, and where their use-values so often leave us disoriented — [shuttling] between the most vulgar propaganda and [...]
21 January 2009 | Conferences, Modern
Last Friday marked the 100th birthday of Clement Greenberg. You hadn’t heard? Almost no one marked the occasion. In Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt wrote a wistful reminiscence. This April, Harvard will host a two-day symposium, “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art”: Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: avant-garde and [...]
21 January 2009 | Awards
Via Artnet: The College Art Association has announced the winners of its annual awards, in advance of the organization’s 2009 conference in Los Angeles, Feb. 25-28, 2009. Winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism is Boris Groys, the Berlin-born NYU prof whose most recent book is Art Power (MIT, 2008). In one [...]
19 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated statistics that do not give an overview of the field. That changed this month, as the American Academy of [...]
16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes: What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look: Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection … Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of [...]
14 January 2009 | Photography
André Gunthert discusses Gaza images on his blog: Scandalized by the Jan. 7 issue of L’Humanité, Alain Korkos, columnist for Arrêt sur images, published an “Open Letter to Pierre Laurent“, in which he condemned the usage of this “unbearable photo,” which shows a dead child buried in rubble in the Gaza Strip (taken by Fadi [...]
12 January 2009 | Museums
In an article on the Rijksmuseum’s recent dalliance with Damien Hirst, art historian Gary Schwartz writes: If Hirst exploits violence and Koons sex, Lucas Cranach went after them both in combination. Cranach has gotten into the best collections and museums in the world with paintings of the suicide of the rape victim Lucretia. He wasn’t [...]
9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more: Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In [...]
7 January 2009 | Renaissance
Amid all the talk of the UK’s national galleries buying Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, The Art Newspaper “has delved into the untold story of the 1916 Titian negotiations, combining material from archives in London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles”: The two Titians of Diana, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, both 1556-59, were [...]
5 January 2009 | Contemporary
From Artinfo: Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S.1 contemporary art center, is retiring from her position as the center’s director, the New York Press reports. Heiss founded P.S.1 in 1976 as a space for large-scale visual and performing artworks by established and emerging artists; the center merged with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. [...]
2 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From The Telegraph: Sir Michael Levey, who died on Sunday aged 81, was a distinguished art historian who rose through the ranks of the National Gallery to become its director. Levey joined the National Gallery in 1951, aged 24, as an assistant keeper. His academic career had ended abruptly when he left and lost his [...]
