23 February 2010 | Conferences, Theory
From Artforum.com: IN HINDSIGHT, I suppose it was inevitable that this year’s SITAC would be controversial. Titled “Blind Spots,” the eighth edition of the annual art-theory conference in Mexico City was organized by Americas Society’s visual-arts director Gabriela Rangel and dedicated to “an analysis of radical discourses and practices such as feminism, cinema, and performance [...]
23 February 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Oxford University Press recently mailed us a new essay collection by critic David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual. Strauss has remained relatively little known despite plaudits from Arthur Danto, John Berger, Dave Hickey, and others. Perhaps Oxford will change things (his previous collections were published by Autonomedia and Aperture). This [...]
19 February 2010 | Conferences
Bad at Sports discusses the recent CAA conference in the first few minutes of their latest podcast: So Mark [Staff Brandl], you’re the only one of us who’s actually been at CAA for the last couple of days. I stopped by yesterday to buy a book and promptly ran away. There’s a huge number of [...]
19 February 2010 | Ancient, Conferences
Coming to Bristol this September, “Seduction and Power is the second in a series of major international and interdisciplinary conferences focusing on the reception of antiquity in the performing and visual arts.” Paper topics include: “Woman on Top? Semiramide and the Power of the ‘Oriental Woman’”; “‘Jewel-in-the-belly-button’ Orientalism in Oliver Stone’s Alexander: The Fantasy of [...]
19 February 2010 | Uncategorized
“The trouble with art history? It’s boring,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones: At just the same time that Simon Schama was calling on art to help bring social history to life, art historians were disappearing up a dark theoretical hole. They were rejecting the kind of old-school art history epitomised by EH Gombrich or Kenneth [...]
16 February 2010 | Conferences, Modern
Artinfo is running advertisements for what must be the most hyped art-history conference in recent years — “Russia and the Global Cézanne Effect, 1900-1950.? Sponsored by Gazprom, the government-controlled petroleum producer, the conference will be held in Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library in St. Petersburg. (There are other sponsors listed as well, including The Art Newspaper [...]
15 February 2010 | Conferences
Keynote speaker Dawoud Bey, who “began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the ‘Harlem On My Mind’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” has a blog, to which he has posted a transcript of his remarks. Excerpts: The art world is often presumed to be a rather liberal place. But–to be sure–it contains more [...]
12 February 2010 | Conferences, Renaissance
On March 6 a symposium on French Renaissance art will convene at NYU in honor of art historian Colin Eisler. This is apparently where Gregory Hedberg will present his argument for the new Degas plasters (although it’s not clear what that topic has to do with French Renaissance art). The full roster: Thomas Crow Rosalie [...]
11 February 2010 | Conferences
Newcity Art has dug up a forty-two-year-old letter to Allan Kaprow from Jan van der Marck, then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in which he describes that year’s CAA conference in Chicago: “The CAA is a hotel full of aging fags. I was certain it would be raided by the police.”
11 February 2010 | Conferences, Contemporary
College Art Association conference attendees, you could return home with some actual art — free! That is, if you’re willing to leave the hotel to look for it. From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune: [Patrick Skoff] tools around Chicago for a few hours and leaves hundreds of dollars worth of his art in random spots. He drops [...]
10 February 2010 | Conferences
starwarsmodern Blizzard and an Earth Quake in Chicago – God’s way of saying no to the CAA? brilliant wishing i was @collegeart in chicago, because earthquakes and blizzards make for good art dialog #caa10
10 February 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical
After disappearing mysteriously in late 2008, the excellent blogger-art-historian David Packwood appears to have resurfaced a few months ago. In one recent post, he discusses the recent debate over two apparent Anthony Van Dycks: That – and other connoisseurship issues – may be resolved by the large Van Dyck exhibition being planned for the Prado [...]
10 February 2010 | Conferences
Alas, the Art History Newsletter has been snowed out of Chicago. Which means that we’ll have to cover it from a distance. And that you won’t be able to ask Jon Lackman in person your burning questions about the Parisian underground movement UX. (However, someone will apparently read his paper for him at Thursday morning’s [...]
10 February 2010 | Conferences
This promises to the be the first extensively tweeted College Art Association conference. Attendees have already started chiming in: profbarryRjones Why would anyone schedule a conference in February? In Chicago? CAA = crazy ebukva Off to a CAA conference in Chicago tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing some old friends. kueblerwolf CAA in Chicago this weekend. [...]
9 February 2010 | Renaissance, Teaching
Connecticut College professor Robert Baldwin has decided to place online a large proportion of everything he’s ever written, 200 essays, lectures, bibliographies, and interdisciplinary syllabi on Western Art with a focus on European art, 1300-1700. This web site is aimed at ABDs and recent PhDs struggling to work up new courses, hunt down primary source [...]
9 February 2010 | Conferences
CAA’s website says confidently, “CAA’s 98th Annual Conference will take place as scheduled.” Nonetheless, as the event approaches, snow falls, and many wonder if and when they’ll make it there. Few seem to be as worried about the week ahead as the blogging PhD candidate and conference presenter known as “MrAntiquity“: … So that impending [...]
9 February 2010 | Modern, Museums
The exhibition “Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde” opens Thursday at Tate Modern. The Telegraph writes … a small group of Dutch artists and architects came together, united by an ambition to redesign the world on purer, better lines – and those lines would always be straight ones … After his death, Alfred Barr, founding [...]
9 February 2010 | Uncategorized
Charles J. Pratt, a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU’s new Game Center, writes a two-part review (1, 2) of the recent “Art History of Games” conference in Atlanta, GA, asking first of all, are games art? “It’s interesting that we have to justify this question in the first place,” said co-organizer, author [...]
5 February 2010 | Uncategorized
We recently discovered that the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture launched a blog in June of last year, Enfilade. One recent entertaining entry concerns “Academics and the F-Word” [i.e. fashion]: With the spring conference season here once more, many of us will soon find ourselves rummaging in the closet with an open suitcase on [...]
2 February 2010 | Career
As the College Art Association conference approaches (Feb 10-13, in Chicago), the unemployed and the underemployed spell-check their CVs, oil the squeaks out of their voices in mock interviews, and iron their professional-yet-scholarly formal wear. What are their chances this year? The CAA has released a few statistics. Job listings for art historians declined 14.3% [...]
