29 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
In her new book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art Wendy Steiner posits that the modernist “ ‘separate sphere of the aesthetic’ has become indistinguishable from normal life … [W]e gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists.” To illuminate this new world, she examines models and [...]
28 October 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal have lately been discussing some unusual proposals emanating from Texas A&M University. According to the WSJ: A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students [...]
27 October 2010 | Books, Museums
Much recent contemporary art focuses on disaster. Journalist Paul Reyes recently wrote (and was interviewed) about “foreclosure photography.” Since 2001, a group of ten photographers and writers named Collectif Argos has documented “climate refugees.” Richard Misrach has depicted the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Edward Burtynsky the BP oil spill. A recent interdisciplinary conference at UC [...]
26 October 2010 | Books, Museums
Various recent books and exhibitions have examined art’s interaction with the non-visual senses. “The Record,” now at Duke’s Nasher Museum, “is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art.” Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Kourea recently edited Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present [...]
25 October 2010 | Books, Contemporary
We noted in 2007 the debut of “Documents of Contemporary Art,” a series of books that collect writings on individual themes. The latest volume to appear is Failure, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, which announces, “Amidst current global uncertainty failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art … Here success is deemed [...]
22 October 2010 | Conferences, News
“A man stood up from the audience and said, ‘I’m Mary Jane Jacob and I’d like permission to speak.’ ” The audience at this conference session had just been introduced to the session’s panelists and informed that one scheduled participant, the curator Mary Jane Jacob, wouldn’t be able to make it. So who then was [...]
20 October 2010 | Awards
From The Clark: The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute today announced that critic, author, editor and educator Hal Foster will receive the 2010 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing … Foster was selected by an esteemed three-member jury: • Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London • Bruce W. Ferguson, independent [...]
19 October 2010 | Museums
Over at L’atelier des icônes, Louise Merzeau writes: In the form of a “digital odyssey to the heart of painting,” the exhibition “Révélations” at the Petit Palais confronts us with the most poverty-stricken discourse on art and the art of looking. Produced and financed entirely by the screen manufacturer Samsung (for the Journées du Patrimoine), [...]
17 October 2010 | Museums
LACMA’s Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins exhibition is closing tomorrow, the first organized exhibition of his work in the city since 1927. With the recent restoration of The Gross Clinic at the PMA, the man often referred to as “the greatest of all American figure painters” has made a showing on both [...]
14 October 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Photography, Renaissance
Recently in the papers: In the Economist, reviews of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate, and Bronzino at the Palazzo Strossi. In the FT, Jackie Wullschlager on four books on Caravaggio (Strinati, Fried, Graham-Dixon, Schütze). At the NYRBlog, a teaser of Willibald Sauerländer’s article on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. In the Guardian, Rosemary Hill on the pre-Raphaelites [...]
14 October 2010 | Career
I don’t have any data yet on how this year’s job market in art history is shaping up. Good-looking positions have been advertised at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, SAIC, USC, BU, Rice, Mt. Holyoke, and Reed, among other places. Follow the progress of those searches over at the Art History 2010-11 rumor [...]
13 October 2010 | Conferences, Islamic
From The National (Abu Dhabi): [A panel] hosted by the British Council at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation … struggled to reach a conclusion as to the nature of what defines Islamic art … [Emirates Foundation arts director Salwa Mikdadi] said the theoretical framework of Islamic art had been defined by the West. “The [...]
12 October 2010 | Conferences
The “Networked Humanities: Art History in the Web” conference we mentioned back in May is now underway, and you can (sort of) follow its goings-on on Twitter using the hashtag #nethum2010. Talks include “Game-Based Learning in Collaborative Virtual Worlds,” “Distributed Objectivities of Imagining: The Generative Scholarship Driving ‘Networked,’ “Do you see what we’ve seen? Using [...]
11 October 2010 | Journals
Something else I’d love to see collected into a book: The Burlington Magazine is in the middle of publishing an excellent 18-part series in which authors reconsider seminal books from twentieth-century art history. Published so far: June 2009: Alexandra Gajewski on “Emile Mâle’s ‘L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France. Etude sur l’iconographie du mozen [...]
8 October 2010 | Uncategorized
This Sunday witnesses the premiere of a new 13-part national public television series Art Through Time: A Global View, “a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG for Annenberg Media.” The entire series can be streamed online, on the show’s website, which also includes images and transcripts and bonus material. What is the show’s approach? [...]
7 October 2010 | Books, Renaissance, Theory
Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have recently published Anachronic Renaissance, an expansion of their 2005 Art Bulletin “intervention” (pdf), a “reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance”: While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication … it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it [...]
6 October 2010 | Americas, Awards
The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art has announced that this year its “Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History will be presented to William H. Gerdts.” Gerdts, a former curator and professor emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center, has published several books including The Color of Modernism: The American [...]
5 October 2010 | Museums
Opening tomorrow: an exhibition organized by German doctoral students tracing the lives of “20 Jewish art historians who had links with Munich,” such as Richard Krautheimer, Ernst Kitzinger, Kurt Badt, Ruth Kraemer, Lili Heinemann, and Rudolf Berliner. The catalogue is available in German and English (pdf). Some excerpts: Several came to Munich to study and [...]
5 October 2010 | Museums
When you hear “Impressionism” you think of French masters like Renoir or Monet, right? A current exhibition at the MFAH reminds us that the movement thrived in Germany as well (although 20 years after its inception in France). German Impressionist Landscape Painting focuses on the paintings of the group’s “triumvirate” – Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, [...]
4 October 2010 | Books, Modern, Museums
The Hungarian-British portrait painter Philip de László (1869-1937) has been the subject of a determined revival campaign led by some of the artist’s descendents. They have been creating a catalogue raisonné, organizing the artist’s archives, and sponsoring exhibitions and publications. The effort began bearing fruit in 2004 and culminated most recently in a National Portrait [...]
