31 March 2011 | Journals
The College Art Association is also marking its centennial by assembling lists of greatest hits from Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. Canon definition is a perennially controversial exercise — witness the brouhaha over one recent attempt to name the 64 “greatest” artworks “made since World War II,” which prompted one commenter to ask, “Will [...]
29 March 2011 | Books, Medieval
I apologize for having posted little lately, but I return with a book to strongly recommend: “The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France,” by Stephen Perkinson. I come to this book a bit late — it was published in 2009, but my review copy went to the wrong address, [...]
13 March 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
The rise of peer-reviewed, online journals dealing with art history and visual culture, and not associated with an academic publisher, is an interesting development. Traditionally an academic press, complete with editorial board and a peer-review process, has lent a certain cache and reliability to the items it publishes, though this varies of course. These editorial functions [...]
I recently received three striking publications that consider the intersection of word and image from a French perspective. My personal favorite is Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. Don’t let the cover’s drab reproduction of a Henri Cueco painting fool you — this book crackles visually, lavishly reproducing the fascinating French artists [...]
3 March 2011 | Conferences
This year’s College Art Association conference has just finished and they’ve already launched the CFP for next year (pdf). The one hundredth annual conference will take place February 22-25, 2012 in Los Angeles, and paper proposals are due May 2, 2011. They also posted a brief conference summary, which notes there were an astonishing 7,000+ [...]
2 March 2011 | Journals
In the latest Art Bulletin, Fabio Barry traces the iconography of the famed Bocca della Verità – Rome’s Mouth of Truth. With visitors ranging from Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday to Freud, there is an enduring fascination with what Barry terms the “massive relic of antiquity… a terrible demon who cautioned against perjury on pain [...]
