28 February 2009 | Conferences, Medieval, Modern, Renaissance
Allyson Drucker reports from CAA: You would have been hard-pressed to find the geographic and temporal boundaries that academics have traditionally abided by in two of this morning’s sessions where, instead, panelists focused on the points of intersection among art and artists hailing from different milieux. At “The International Contribution to Renaissance and Baroque Art” [...]
27 February 2009 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our contributor Allyson Drucker writes: The topic of this morning’s session “Renaissance and/or Early Modern: Naming and/or Knowing the Past” promised to travel some well-rehearsed territory for scholars of the field who remain dissatisfied with the term early modern as a substitute for “renaissance” and its troubling connotations. And while the session as a whole [...]
25 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Two of the contributors to the CAA blog this year are Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. They are academics and the creators of smarthistory.org, where they also maintain a blog. In one recent entry, they contrast Stanley Fish’s recent obit for the humanities with the Digital Humanities Manifesto, which is “a project of the Mellon [...]
24 February 2009 | Conferences
So, the big show begins tomorrow — The College Art Association annual conference, this year in Los Angeles. CAA is again hosting a conference blog; we’ll also try to do some posting of our own as well as link to other bloggers. If you’d like to share your observations, contact us about becoming a contributor, [...]
20 February 2009 | Journals
Always on the look-out for blogging art historians, we recently discovered Daniel A. Siedell, assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, whose “work as an art historian, critic, and curator operates on the margins of cultural criticism, theology, and philosophy and is motivated by the conviction that Christian thought and practice as it is embodied [...]
19 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Tate Britain is marking the 40th anniversary of the book and television series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s “epic survey of one thousand five hundred years of western culture,” with a series of debates. Debate participant and Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones writes: Reading Clark is like drinking champagne compared with the small beer of most art history. [...]
18 February 2009 | Journals, Medieval
A new online-only periodical Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, has been launched, with Rachel Dressler of the University at Albany as editor. Virginia Blanton, Richard Emmerson, Corine Schleif, Linda Seidel, Debra Higgs Strickland, and Christine Verzar round out the editorial board. It is an open-access, peer-reviewed annual, devoted to progressive [...]
17 February 2009 | Books, Theory
It’s the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and numerous authors are publishing books that review and extend his work, including philosopher Denis Dutton, who has written The Art Instinct. In Bookforum historian Rochelle Gurstein writes: Denis Dutton is a man with a mission: Against cultural anthropologists, art historians, critics, and aestheticians who have advanced the [...]
16 February 2009 | Theory
Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 and Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922, kicks off the latest Art Bulletin “intervention,” “Decentering Modernism,” in the December 2008 issue, with another critique of the four-year-old Foster/Krauss/Bois/Buchloh survey, Art Since 1900: … the last two decades have witnessed serious [...]
14 February 2009 | Architecture, Asia
From The National of Abu Dhabi: “Basically, I am an art historian,” he says by way of introduction, but this is a typically modest description. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the world’s leading forces behind the renaissance of traditional Islamic and Indian craftsmanship, arguing continually for their protection and that of those [...]
11 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Art historian Franz-Joachim Verspohl of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena died last week. Some excerpts from a (alas machine-translated) remembrance: He was instrumental in the founding of the Art History Department in Jena … Additionally, he initiated lively exhibitions … notably of Paul Klee (1999) and Frank Stella (2001) … After his dissertation on the history of [...]
10 February 2009 | Theory
In caa.reviews, Charles G. Salas reviews Victor I. Stoichita’s The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock: Stoichita shows that simulacra are not quite the alien threat some think they are. It turns out that we have been living with them all along, albeit without attending to them much … The framework of this book would [...]
9 February 2009 | Career
Let’s crunch the numbers a bit more. Large departments naturally win more jobs, so let’s see who performed best over the last couple years relative to how many people they graduate. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton win out, each winning a number of top jobs each year roughly equal in size to one-third of an annual [...]
6 February 2009 | Uncategorized
On several occasions, we’ve gotten valuable tips from the CultureGrrl blog, and so if you have the means to do so, we encourage you to consider helping to keep it afloat. There, veteran cultural journalist Lee Rosenbaum frequently reports on art-world controversies from deaccessioning to culture ministers in a timely and tenacious fashion. She is [...]
5 February 2009 | Career
Two years ago, we wrote Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs? [...]
5 February 2009 | Uncategorized
When we started the Art History Newsletter three years ago to “synopsize news and opinion of interest to art historians and provide original reporting on conferences, lectures, and other special events,” we hoped to also provide a forum for discussion and so we invited readers to comment on our posts. Alas, spam robots added all [...]
4 February 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune‘s Didier Rykner writes: … a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. [...]
2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”: “One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about [...]
