by Ben Lima | 30 May 2010 | Uncategorized
Can art history be published, reported on, or otherwise communicated through the medium of the podcast? In logging many hours of commuting time, I have had reason to ponder this question.
The podcast (for that matter, the radio broadcast), by reducing the flow of information to a single, exclusively verbal channel, take us back to the days before engravings accompanied written texts on art. What might be seen as a problem, can also be seen as an opportunity to appreciate the verbal genius of good lecturers. This also is a chance to increase the amount of time spent with the topic. It’s challenging to appreciate good illustrations while driving a car; hence the prudent ”no reading while driving” rule of thumb.
Especially for students, there are a growing number of resources. Smarthistory, a leader as usual, offers a long list of podcasts (currently 155 available in iTunes). These are each several minutes long, and focus on a single work of art. Media coverage of the open-courseware movement hasn’t focused on art history so far (see the N.Y. Times, 12/19/07 and 4/8/10), but there’s no reason why it can’t be as revolutionary for art history as for physics.
Recently, Evelyn Welch, Martin Kemp, and David Ekserdjian appeared on the “In Our Time” [IOT] podcast (Melvyn Bragg; BBC Radio Four) to discuss Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists.” The IOT format — multiple panelists, strong-willed moderator, pitched to general educated audience, 45-minute timeframe – works well for a podcast, although specialists will inevitably find it superficial. I didn’t learn as much from this IOT episode as I did from the recent ones on “The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation” and “The Cavendish Family in Science.” Also, in this case, the panelists were discussing a book and not primarily a body of visual work. They weren’t obliged to attempt the feat of giving a formal analysis without illustrations. This was successful on its own terms, while sidestepping the medium’s biggest art-related hurdle.
Several institutions also “publish” lectures in podcast form. The public service is welcome, and I can’t imagine these hurting the market for eventual book or journal editions, for obvious reasons. The biggest challenge is finding them. To some extent, you have to already know what you’re looking for. The iTunes search function is really clunky (and seems to have gotten worse in Version 9, if that’s possible), and Google searches get mixed results, unless, again, you already know exactly what you’re looking for.
The University of Oxford has currently available three lectures from the fall of 2008: two by Kemp, and one by Craig Clunas. These were not designed as stand-alone podcasts, but as illustrated lectures, and the podcasts come across as auxiliary supplements (like the venerable audio recordings of CAA conference sessions – what about podcasting those?). Having listened to Kemp’s, I would say the format works, in spite of the low audio quality and the missing visuals. It’s possible to imagine what he discusses when he points to an unseen slide. Still, the polish of an NPR or BBC production is not there.
As far as I can tell, museums are ahead of universities in this area. The National Gallery of Art lists many exciting topics, including Keith Christiansen on Ghiberti, P. Adams Sitney on visionary film, and T. J. Clark’s six-part Mellon lectures on “Picasso and Truth” (cf. MAN). Some of these, but not all (not Clark’s, for example) can be downloaded through iTunes. There is no index; you just have to scroll down the very long web page, and experience some of the serendipity of the new-books shelf at the library.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a leader, with some (all?) of its symposia and other public programs available; examples include the “Representing Dada” symposium (Sept. 2006); “Pioneering Modern Painting” (Sept. 2005); “Before and After 1933: The International Legacy of the Bauhaus” (Jan. 2010); and “Kirchner and the Berlin Street” (Oct. 2008). Searching is somewhat difficult, as is separating the scholarly programs from the others, but the range is impressive. Listening to Clark’s lecture on Cézanne and Pissarro, for “Pioneering Modern Painting,” was cause for optimism about the medium. His verbal brilliance was enough to make up for the limits of the audio-only format. In fact, those very limits allowed for a greater appreciation of that brilliance than would otherwise be the case.
I’m sure that art librarians would be able to frame this issue more intelligently and precisely than I am doing here, but I think there would be great value in incorporating podcasts into a repository (like JSTOR), or an index (like the Art Index), or even just a list on a web page, as CAA Reviews does with dissertations and books received. These “publications” are valuable and should be treated as such.
By rough estimation, about 154 million Americans are employed. Each of these spends about 100 hours commuting to work every year, which amounts to 15.4 billion hours annually that are potentially available for podcast listening. More realistically, the potential audience for art-history podcasts is probably closer in number to the 14 million who tune into NPR’s “Morning Edition,” or the 20.9 million cumulative listeners to NPR news programs. That’s still a billion or two hours annually (not counting the global audience), part of which could be potentially captured by art history podcasts. There is a huge opportunity here — the only question is how it will play out.
It’s hard to read on the go! Were it not for podcasts and audiobook version of media I would never have got through as much as I did over the last 2 years.
Librivox.org is an audiobook repository that produces free audiobook versions of public domain works. I love it! Currently listening to The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini when I go hiking!
The Smarthistory podcasts can be subscribed also via RSS, for those that dislike iTunes ;)
H Niyazi
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Incidentally, Rosalind Krauss called T.J. Clark’s National Gallery lectures “the greatest intellectual stimulation and the most superb rhetorical skill I experienced in 2009.”
Partway through the first lecture (I was wrong, they are on iTunes), I completely agree about “rhetorical skill.”
(In my opinion, reviewers in the field do not always sufficiently distinguish between 1) said skill, 2) logical coherence, and 3) correspondence with objective reality.)