by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2011 | Uncategorized
Victoria Coates, who earned an art-history PhD at UPenn and has worked at the Cleveland Museum, is Rick Perry’s chief foreign-policy advisor. I struggle to think of an art historian playing this prominent role in politics since Anthony Blunt. Anyone?
The Noguchi catalogue raisonné begins.
Art historian Semavi Eyice was one of four to receive Turkey’s Presidential Grand Awards in Culture and Arts this year.
The Rose Art Museum is back.
So is the Musée d’Orsay, as France Today reports:
The aim of the new Orsay is to surprise visitors, to make them reflect, says [director Guy] Cogeval. “We will put the artworks into context with other disciplines: history, literature, music, even philosophy and psychoanalysis. The approach will be broader, looking for similarities, for intersections.” That’s something Cogeval has long done. As a curator, he introduced the idea of interaction with cinema as the basis for Hitchcock et l’Art, an exhibit shown in 2000 in Montreal and later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examined the role of Salvador Dalí’s work in the dream sequences in Spellbound. He returned to cinema in Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney; the 2006 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris spotlighted stories and legends—the sources of inspiration for the Disney team.
“I’d like to have a major exhibit at the Orsay on the birth of cinema,” he says. “Not so much about its technical invention, but its mental invention, what made artists look forward to the possibility of images in movement. Everyone from Degas to Wagner laid the ground for it to happen.”
What about Cynthia Schneider, who was an art history professor at Georgetown and US Ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998-2001?
The ability of Coates or any other art historian to play a prominent role in a president’s administration, I don’t question. It’s Perry’s abilities that are doubtful!!
Victoria was also one of our top MA students when I was director of the Graduate Program in Art History at Williams College. Rick Perry is certainly in need of someone with her intelligence. It may be too late to help him, but brava Victoria for trying!