30 November 2009 | Modern, Museums
From the Times of London: “Everything is going to be alright” reads the sign above the entrance to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh … But it is controversy not hope that dominates the mood of the gallery’s first re-hang in 25 years. From a collection of more than 130 Scottish Colourist [...]
23 November 2009 | Contemporary
From the Guardian: … the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the [...]
23 November 2009 | Awards
From the TAXI Design Network: The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2009–2010. They include Bert W. Meijer, Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Florence/Universiteit Utrecht (emeritus), as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Miguel Falomir, Museo Nacional del Prado, as Andrew W. [...]
20 November 2009 | Contemporary
Artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, known as Jeanne-Claude, has died. She was, of course, the longtime collaborator with Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo. Of the numerous obituaries that are now appearing, few seem to want to deal with the questions of authorship, individuality, and gender relations that were raised by their collaboration, which have [...]
18 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Those who proposed sessions for the 2011 College Art Association conference are now receiving their responses. CAA says it received “464 proposals, the highest ever.” CAA 2010 will have about 140 regular sessions (plus another 60 or so sponsored by affiliated organizations). So if 2011 will feature a similar amount, that means that roughly 30% [...]
17 November 2009 | Career
Michael Bérubé wrote recently of the job market in modern languages; job-seeking art historians may find considerable ground for commiseration: It’s that time of year again, only worse. The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some [...]
16 November 2009 | Islamic
Duke University professor Gary Hull (editor of The Abolition of Anti-Trust and co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader) has founded Voltaire Press (which is not affiliated with Duke) and has published Muhammad: The “Banned” Images, which includes the following statement signed by Nadine Strossen, Cary Nelson, Eugene Volokh, and others: A number of recent incidents [...]
16 November 2009 | Contemporary
ARTINFO interviews Gerhard Richter: In his essay, [Benjamin] Buchloh discusses the various associations white paintings can have — with the idea of reductiveness, the end of painting. And of course there are Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and Ryman’s. Were any of these things on your mind while you worked on yours? I don’t know the Rauschenberg [...]
11 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Wayne Dynes writes on Levi-Strauss’ death: When I was teaching at Columbia University in the early seventies I fastened on the idea of trying to adapt structuralism to the field of art history. Lévi-Strauss had himself pointed the way with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. I formed a little group [...]
11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph: One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s [...]
9 November 2009 | Islamic
Oleg Grabar writes in The New Republic: Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though [...]
5 November 2009 | Islamic
From The Baltimore Sun: In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project [...]
3 November 2009 | Uncategorized
From the AP: Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100 … During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964). [...]
3 November 2009 | Museums
Former Northwestern University dean Rudolph H. Weingartner and Princeton University Art Museum director James Christen Steward duel in the pages of Inside Higher Ed over the Rose Art Museum. Weingartner: … I said to myself “good for them” when reports first surfaced last winter that Brandeis intended to sell its collection of modern art, so [...]
2 November 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA has posted online the paper titles for the Chicago conference (Feb 10-13). A few piqued our interest: “‘Forget Bourriaud’: Queer Relationally and/as a Queer Aesthetics of Existence” “Interrogating Photography’s Indexical ‘Identity Crisis’” “Autofiction as Dissidence: Julius Koller’s Extra-Terrestrial Alter Ego” “The Concept of Anukrti in Rasavada in Abhinavabharati” “Posthysterical: The Study of Comics Advances [...]
2 November 2009 | Conservation
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles conservator Joyce Hill Stoner: An art conservator who set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies’ artifacts … In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America’s first doctoral [...]
