7 July 2010 | Conferences, Theory
The theme for this year’s Stone Summer Theory Institute is “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic”: This year’s event addresses one of the central puzzles of contemporary art practice: the choice between continuations of modernism (with its aesthetic values) and the many kinds of postmodernism (which privilege politics, gender, identity, and many issues outside of [...]
6 July 2010 | Theory
In an article titled “Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence” in the March 2010 PMLA, Tim Dean writes: Leo Bersani’s contributions to queer theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”) Bersani’s writing on [...]
5 July 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
There’s nothing like a holiday weekend for catching up on unread issues of The New York Review of Books. I belatedly discovered Willibald Sauerländer writing in April 8 issue: “the full richness of eighteenth-century French sculpture—as spirited as it was virtuoso—has been little noted outside its homeland.” And Ingrid Rowland in the March 11 issue, [...]
1 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The 63-year-old actor Peter Weller, known best as RoboCop, recently completed Syracuse University’s MA program in Renaissance art (two-thirds of which is conducted in Italy) and he is now at work on a PhD at UCLA. He recently discussed his life in a commencement address at the City University of New York: I was inspired [...]
1 July 2010 | Conferences, Islamic, Pre-Columbian, Renaissance
On July 9th, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris will present “1500-1600. Entre Islam et Nouveaux Mondes: les réformes dans un contexte global,” in the Salle Walter Benjamin of the Galerie Colbert. The event aims to extend the Reformation’s questions of “idolatry” beyond the European context, and consider well-known Reformation images within a broader frame [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Respected art historian Daniele Di Castro … died last Friday following a long battle with cancer. Born in Rome in 1958, Di Castro revamped the Jewish community’s museum in the mid-2000s and turned it into the city’s leading Jewish cultural institution.” According to a bio, Di Castro taught at [...]
1 July 2010 | Museums
Richard John Boileau Walker died May 6, aged 93. From The Independent: After school at Harrow came Magdalene College, Cambridge, and thence, prompted by the Dean, to the Courtauld Institute, where, taught by TR Boase and Anthony Blunt … As Curator of the Palace of Westminster he compiled the five-volume catalogue of its pictures, published [...]
