30 June 2010 | Museums
ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest writes: When the Association of Art Museum Directors assembled in Indianapolis for its semi-annual conference … which was attended by 117 of the AAMD’s current 198 members … [it adopted] two major policy changes designed to transform the AAMD in terms of both perception and reality. One plan, sure to spark [...]
30 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From SMU: Following an international search, the Department of Art History at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts today announced the appointment of Dr. Roberto Tejada as the new Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History, effective August 1. The new endowed senior position was made possible by a generous anonymous gift of $2 million, intended [...]
30 June 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
A few weeks ago, Gary Schwartz wrote: Until 27 June a small exhibition of irresistible charm and interest is being held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after a run at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp: Willem van Haecht: room for art in 17th-century Antwerp … Van Haecht was the subject of a dissertation that I [...]
29 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Economist: It was bad enough that an art exhibition attracted the attention of Russia’s criminal-justice authorities. It was worse that the exhibition was in Moscow’s Sakharov centre and museum, one of the few institutions in Russia that stands squarely behind the tradition of human rights, exemplified by the saintly physicist and dissident for [...]
28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video). He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript: 1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the [...]
28 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From Variety: Sam Waterston and Brian Murray will play an art historian and an art dealer, respectively, in the American preem of Simon Gray’s 2004 play “The Old Masters.” Production runs Jan. 19-Feb. 13 at New Haven’s Long Wharf theater … Script revolves around a 1937 meeting between Bernard Berenson (Waterston) and Joseph Duveen (Murray) [...]
28 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval, Renaissance
In the Wall Street Journal, Jay Pridmore considers Florence’s Ponte Vecchio: When the morning sun reaches across the Arno and hits the varied ochre tones, the whole bridge glows as one in the hazeless Florentine light. Visually, distinct elements weave together like immutable strands— genius, commerce and tyranny, to name three big ones—of the Florentine [...]
25 June 2010 | Theory
Bruno Latour is currently hosting Selon/Salon at the Centre Pompidou, a series of conferences with contemporary artists, filmmakers, curators and intellectuals. The French theorist has taken up the themes of Eloquence and Demonstration in an effort to gauge their roles within the arts, the sciences, and politics, and to forge a path for a new [...]
25 June 2010 | Theory
A propos of our recent discussion of Ruskin, I recently discovered a new article on Ruskin’s views of art and morality in the Jan 2010 Modern Language Review (105:1) by Jeremy Tambling. He contrasts Ruskin with Nietzsche: Ruskin wishes to believe that art reveals morality, or that morality shows itself in art; in other words, [...]
24 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA reports on an agreement between the Getty Research Institute and ProQuest, a database service that also publishes ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index, and the International Index to Music Periodicals, to take over indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA, the successor to BHA). ProQuest will distribute IBA content created by GRI—covering the years [...]
According to the Guardian: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been [...]
22 June 2010 | Uncategorized
Sir Adam Roberts of the British Academy has issued a report titled Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities and Social Sciences that is sure to be useful for art historians wishing to bolster the credibility of our discipline. As was discussed in Art History Today, the report emphasizes “public” rather than [...]
22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes: “[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone [...]
20 June 2010 | Uncategorized
The Economist alerts its readers to the enduring Portuguese tradition of azulejos, “glazed ceramic tiles that were fashioned into narrative scenes.”
18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”: [T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and [...]
17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster: [M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in [...]
16 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval
Designboom posts a blurb and excerpt from David Stephenson, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). (See also a review by Marcus Bunyan of the 2009 exhibition at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond, Australia; 2007 show at Julie Saul and Brian Sholis review.) What appeals to me about this project is 1) seriality as a way of [...]
15 June 2010 | Museums
I recently ventured to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to view the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, the first museum retrospective of her drawings. Immediately upon entering the gallery, I felt uncomfortable. What is bothering me about this show? Is it the layout, the work, the theme? Then it dawned on me: it’s the lighting! When [...]
15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes: In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism [...]
14 June 2010 | Architecture
Historians of contemporary architecture (and television) will find interesting this essay by Daniel Harris, “Celebrity Houses, Celebrity Politics,” in the winter 2010 Antioch Review: Elegance in the eyes of many celebrities is bound up with the concept of hugeness. Size and quantity are the key tenets of their aesthetic. Their houses are not prettier and [...]
