by Jon Lackman | 12 April 2010 | Uncategorized
From the Washington Post:
Toiling in the bowels of the National Gallery, CASVA’s intrepid scholars shape what all the rest of us will someday believe about art. We may think we come at pictures with fresh eyes and ideas, but our everyday insights are likely to echo the thoughts, once esoteric and radical, of some long-dead expert. If we look ahead to an art scene 15 or 20 years in the future, we’ll find that its exhibitions, its wall texts, its college primers, its PBS specials — even its newspaper reviews — are likely to depend on research being done now by the unsung heroes of CASVA. At any given time there are something like 35 of these operatives, based in Washington or scattered overseas. They work in the shadows to find new insights into art — so the rest of us don’t have to. One CASVA scholar has shown that Renaissance patrons had such flexible ideas of time that they could know a bronze of Jesus was brand-new, yet still count it as dating to the time of Christ. A CASVA lecturer made the convincing case that a tame seascape by Edward Hopper — nothing more than a boat, Sunday sailors, water and sky — was in fact all about World War II and radio newscasts … “No one questions that physicists need to operate in a very rarefied and esoteric environment, where they can entertain wild ideas, many of them unprovable,” [Alexander] Nagel says. “But it’s not obvious to everyone that art history needs to get done at that level — so it’s good that a place exists that insists it does.”
