by Jon Lackman | 6 February 2007 | Books
Following Nicholas Penny’s review of three new volumes in the London Review of Books, he and Thomas Crow have mailed in dueling letters to the editor.
Crow: “Nicholas Penny’s assertion that the ‘elite academics’ invited by the Getty Research Institute ‘rarely have any interest in the museum’ (LRB, 4 January) represents the fundamental premise of his general polemic against them: that these pampered academic art historians are indifferent to contact with actual works of art. Can he offer the slightest empirical foundation for his claim? Without that – and he could not produce it if he tried – that stale curator’s canard counts as nothing but unsupported defamation … it becomes clear that he aims to accomplish by petty innuendo what he cannot achieve through honest argument … On the topic of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, the object of some years of work by the staff of the Research Institute, I searched in vain for the one judgment any serious reader would most want: that is, an assessment of the quality of the translation and the rigour of its philological underpinnings. If Penny did not feel equipped to offer one, perhaps he should have passed on the assignment.”
Penny: “My observations on the dangers of privileged isolation for scholars – whether academics or curators – were not part of a ‘general polemic’ against academic art historians. But there certainly are some academics who have little interest in contact with real works of art, just as there are many curators who are indifferent to ideas, and I suppose that the former must constitute Crow’s ‘serious’ readers: those who will, he is sure, find it to be of no interest that a book about sculpture says nothing about where the sculpture can be found.”
