30 September 2010 | Career
After reading Jon’s interesting posts on the NRC rankings, as well as the nifty interactive tool from the Chronicle of Higher Education ($) that makes it easy to scan the range of data for each field, I would concede that many of the criticisms of the process and results are valid. Nonetheless, I would suggest that it’s [...]
29 September 2010 | Career
Let’s break down the NRC data a bit. Here are the top scoring art-history departments in various sub-categories: Research Activity (which is based on publications per faculty member, percent of faculty with grants, and awards per faculty member) 1. Columbia 2. Duke 3. Chicago 4. MIT 5. UC-Berkeley 6. Penn 7. NYU 8. Harvard 9. [...]
29 September 2010 | Career
[Update, 9/1/2011: the NRC revised its data.] The NRC has at long last released its “Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States.” Here’s a first look at it. The data is from 2005-2006, fatally outdated say some critics. The NRC retorts, “most faculty have been at the same university in the same program [...]
28 September 2010 | Americas, Modern
On The Atlantic‘s website, William Haseltine transcribes a recent talk by Museum of Fine Arts Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramirez: The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001 [...]
27 September 2010 | Americas
Historians of American art: Norman Rockwell used photography, Winslow Homer has been dead 100 years (as of Wednesday), and Grant Wood was gay:
24 September 2010 | Uncategorized
André Gunthert has called my attention to a fascinating new “reverse image search” tool called TinEye. Simply put, you give it an image and it finds similar ones. Gunthert found himself wondering where Le Nouvel Observateur had gotten the photo it used to create a recent cover. TinEye located it easily, despite the additional text [...]
23 September 2010 | Architecture, Books
It’s not too often that authors of university-press books are interviewed in The New York Times. I belatedly noticed this Q&A from July with “American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture” author Alice T. Friedman. Apparently it was her use of the word “glamour” in her title that did the trick. But then she [...]
21 September 2010 | Asia, Books
Despite suffering major heart problems, James Cahill, the CAA “lifetime achievement” award-winner noted for “championing previously ignored painters and restoring them to a more prominent place in the artistic pantheon,” has brought to completion a new, amply illustrated book titled Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China. These lesser known paintings [...]
18 September 2010 | Africa, Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
Recently in the papers: Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National) On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan [...]
17 September 2010 | Books, Theory
In the September 2010 Art Bulletin, Karen Beckman reviews a new book by Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh: … For Silverman, Lacan shows us how, in response to humanism’s “impossible-to-satisfy demand” that each of us be an “individual,” we turn other beings into “rivals and enemies”: it is this transformation that blocks analogical thinking. [...]
15 September 2010 | Ancient
On NPR, ecologist/journalist Craig Childs calls for an end to archaeology or, at least, an end to archaeological digs: I’ve come to believe that artifacts need to stay in their place. And that’s after having gone through museum collections and seeing just the vast amounts of material that we’ve gathered already and going through private [...]
14 September 2010 | Career
In The Guardian, art historian Marianne M Gilchrist writes: In December 1993, I got my PhD. I was 28 and passionate about art and history. I found it impossible to gain a toehold in academia: no one wanted my specialism and my first degree was in a different subject. Interviews for lectureships dried up after [...]
11 September 2010 | Modern
Last March, advised by Jonathan Fineberg and Ethel Kessler, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps reproducing works by the Abstract Expressionists.
8 September 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
In the Yale Alumni Magazine curator John Marciari “tells how it feels to discover a masterpiece”: I cannot say that I knew what it was at first glance, but I knew that it was worth puzzling out. In the parlance of curators and art dealers, the work was by someone; it was attributable. Not only [...]
7 September 2010 | Museums
According to The Indian Express, The National Museum of India, the nation’s largest and most prestigious — and described on its web site as ‘The Pride of India’ — has been without a leader for the past three years. No one wants the job, it seems — and even a relaxation of eligibility criteria has [...]
4 September 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Museums, Photography
Recently in the papers: “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE) Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB) Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian) Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at [...]
2 September 2010 | Modern, Museums
One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”: He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification [...]
1 September 2010 | Awards
From The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art: The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; [...]
