by Jon Lackman | 17 November 2009 | Career
Michael Bérubé wrote recently of the job market in modern languages; job-seeking art historians may find considerable ground for commiseration:
It’s that time of year again, only worse.
The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now. Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc….
In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700. This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250. “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?” It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace … But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000 … No word yet on how many of those perhaps-fewer-than-one-thousand jobs will be tenure-track.
OK, so that’s the backdrop to what I came to say—a backdrop of anxiety and despair …
I am stunned by what some departments want their job candidates to submit … in an abysmal year these things seem especially obnoxious, particularly when they are expensive … enormous packages of materials up front: not just the usual application letter/ cv/ dossier (sent under separate cover), but writing samples as well. This doesn’t sound like a major human rights issue, no, but when you stop to consider that these jobs would routinely have 500-1000 applicants, each of whom was sending out 30-page writing samples, you realize that’s an enormous amount of waste paper and a gratuitous expense for the job candidates …
This year, I’m hearing of universities that want job candidates to send transcripts. Yes, transcripts. Transcripts of graduate school grades, and even, in some cases, transcripts of undergraduate grades. I’m tempted to reply LOLcats style, APPLIKASHUN PROCESS: UR DOIN IT WRONG …
by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2009 | Islamic
Duke University professor Gary Hull (editor of The Abolition of Anti-Trust and co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader) has founded Voltaire Press (which is not affiliated with Duke) and has published Muhammad: The “Banned” Images, which includes the following statement signed by Nadine Strossen, Cary Nelson, Eugene Volokh, and others:
A number of recent incidents suggest that our long-standing commitment to the free exchange of ideas is in peril of falling victim to a spreading fear of violence. Not only have exhibitions been closed and performances cancelled in response to real threats, but the mere possibility that someone, somewhere, might respond with violence has been advanced to justify suppressing words and images, as in the recent decision of Yale University to remove all images of Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons that Shook the World.
Violence against those who create and disseminate controversial words and images is a staple of human history. But in the recent past, at least in Western liberal democracies, commitment to free speech has usually trumped fears of violence. Indeed, as late as 1989, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses continued to be published, sold, and read in the face of a fatwa against its author and in the face of the murder and attempted murder of its translators and publishers. In 1998, the Manhattan Theater Club received threats protesting the production of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi, on the ground that it was offensive to Catholics. After initially canceling the play, MTC reversed its decision in response to widespread concerns about free speech, and the play was performed without incident.
There are signs, however, that the commitment to free speech has become eroded by fears of violence. Historical events, especially the attacks of September 2001 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, have contributed to this process by bringing terrorist violence to the heart of liberal democracies. Other events, like the 2004 murder of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in apparent protest against his film Submission, and the threats against Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script and provided the voice-over for the film, demonstrated how vulnerable artists and intellectuals can be just for voicing controversial ideas. Under such threats, the resolve to uphold freedom of speech has proved to be lamentably weak: in the same year as Van Gogh’s murder, Behzti, a play written by a British Sikh playwright, was cancelled days after violence erupted among protesters in Birmingham, England on opening night.
In response to rising concerns about fear-induced self-censorship, in 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published an article, “The Face of Muhammad,” which included twelve cartoon images. The cartoons became the focus of a series of violent political rallies in the Middle East in February 2006 and a subject of worldwide debate pitching free speech against “cultural sensitivity.”
For all the prominence of Islam in such debates, threats of violence against words and images are not the sole province of religious extremists. In 2005, a politically controversial professor’s scheduled speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY was cancelled in response to alleged threats of violence. In 2008, the San Francisco Art Institute closed a controversial video exhibition in response to threats of violence against faculty members by animal rights activists. Later that year, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled a speech by former Weatherman and education theorist William Ayers, citing security concerns.
The possibility of giving offense and provoking violence has entered the imagination of curators, publishers and the public at large, generating more and more incidents of preemptive self-censorship: in 2006, for instance, London’s Whitechapel Gallery declared twelve works by Surrealist master Hans Bellmer too dangerous to exhibit because of fears that the sexual overtones would be offensive to the large Muslim population in the area; and publisher Random House canceled the 2008 publication of Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina because “it could incite acts of violence.” The suppression of images in Jytte Klausen’s book is the latest, but not likely to be the last in the series of such incidents.
Words and images exist in complex socio-political contexts. Suppressing controversial expression cannot erase the underlying social tensions that create the conditions for violence to begin with, but it does create a climate that chills and eventually corrupts the fundamental values of liberal democracy.
A Call to Action
The incident at Yale provides an opportunity to re-examine our commitment to free expression. When an academic institution of such standing asserts the need to suppress scholarly work because of a theoretical possibility of violence somewhere in the world, it grants legitimacy to censorship and casts serious doubt on their, and our, commitment to freedom of expression in general, and academic freedom in particular.
The failure to stand up for free expression emboldens those who would attack and undermine it. It is time for colleges and universities in particular to exercise moral and intellectual leadership. It is incumbent on those responsible for the education of the next generation of leaders to stand up for certain basic principles: that the free exchange of ideas is essential to liberal democracy; that each person is entitled to hold and express his or her own views without fear of bodily harm; and that the suppression of ideas is a form of repression used by authoritarian regimes around the world to control and dehumanize their citizens and squelch opposition.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, will get neither liberty nor safety.
If you would like to be considered as a signatory to the Statement of Principle, please email us [email protected]. You may add a brief comment, if you would like.
(via The Volokh Conspiracy)
by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2009 | Contemporary
ARTINFO interviews Gerhard Richter:
In his essay, [Benjamin] Buchloh discusses the various associations white paintings can have — with the idea of reductiveness, the end of painting. And of course there are Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and Ryman’s. Were any of these things on your mind while you worked on yours?
I don’t know the Rauschenberg paintings, but I know Ryman very well, and many others. What I didn’t agree [with Buchloh about] is that white painting is so abstract. I told him even Ryman, who intends to show nothing, gives us associations. I think it’s not possible to avoid giving a cue of something. I would like to look at these paintings the same way I look at photographs. They show something. They are not abstract.
How do you see the relationship between abstraction and figuration in your work? Some of the pieces in this exhibition seem to toe the line between the two approaches. The September print, for instance.
It’s hard to explain it. But I don’t see such a big difference. Both show something.
In the white paintings one might see atmospheric effects, or clouds.
For me it’s more an area I don’t know, and an object I don’t know.
by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Wayne Dynes writes on Levi-Strauss’ death:
When I was teaching at Columbia University in the early seventies I fastened on the idea of trying to adapt structuralism to the field of art history. Lévi-Strauss had himself pointed the way with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. I formed a little group of graduate students to effect the adaptation. As with other such attempts to expand the horizons of art history, in the end our efforts did not amount to much. One problem was that structuralism, which seemed so promising, had been overwhelmed by the blight of poststructuralism, with the appalling Jacques Derrida in the vanguard.
Various other art historians influenced by Levi-Strauss include Pierre Daix, Linda Nochlin, and Thomas Crow. Note also critic Jonathan Jones.
by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph:
One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image is transmitted through in the brain … The research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. This isn’t the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School with a side interest in art history, showed that Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral vision.
by Jon Lackman | 9 November 2009 | Islamic
Oleg Grabar writes in The New Republic:
Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer … Yale’s decision [recently to excise representations from a book about them] is certainly a denial of free speech, though of course the argument can be made that a possible danger to people may compel restrictions in the expression of opinions and of facts. I am not persuaded by this argument about this book. And the deletion of the images is also–a far more important criticism in this instance–a gratuitous betrayal of scholarship, since many other books (including at least four published by Yale, two of them by me) do show images of the Prophet … In the past, and still today, pictures of the Prophet Muhammad have been produced, and are still produced, by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons … there can be no doubt that, especially from the thirteenth century onward, the Muslim world accepted the existence of representations of the Prophet. This iconography was not common, and was usually restricted to the accompaniment of a narrative text, or to serve as pious reminders of an exemplary life … To the extent that the argument against the so-called cartoons has centered on the legal propriety or impropriety of representing the Prophet Muhammad, it has been a pointless argument. Of course it is possible to question the Danish caricatures on grounds of taste, or social or political intent; but the lack of taste is not a legal category, and mischievous or even evil intent is difficult to discern in the absence of clearly stated moral and philosophical principles. The only certain lesson to draw from the sad story of the Danish cartoons is the almost universal prevalence of ignorance and incompetence–and that everyone, from writers and pundits to the leaders of mobs, should learn more before making a judgment or starting a riot.
What the myopic masses seem to observe in the case of Yale’s alleged “gratuitous betrayal of scholarship” and “free speech” is that the choice not to print the images means that this book will likely find a much more receptive audience in the Muslim world. The images are obviously easily available via the internet for those who wish to see them, and now this scholar’s work will also be available to thinkers who exist outside our Eurocentric scope of vision.
by Jon Lackman | 5 November 2009 | Islamic
From The Baltimore Sun:
In a quiet, windowless room deep inside the Walters Art Museum, a digitization specialist places a 900-year-old Quran into the cradle of the Stokes Imaging System … It’s painstaking work, photographing one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in North America, and slow. But scholars say the two-year project has put the Baltimore museum at the vanguard of a movement that is transforming the study of ancient texts. Working with a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters is placing its entire collection of Qurans and other Islamic pieces online, where high-resolution images of the roughly 230 often richly illuminated or illustrated pieces may be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection …
“It’s very important to remember that Islamic art is a very nascent field,” [Walters curator Amy Landau] says. “It’s not like Renaissance art history that’s very well developed. We’re just really beginning. People are now trained in the languages. There’s more material documented. So there’s still so much more to do in the field, and it’s digitization projects such as this that make that possible. It’s going to be a huge push forward.” Persis Berlekamp, an art historian at the University of Chicago, says the still-nascent movement has transformed the field. As recently as the early 2000s, when she was pursuing her doctorate at Harvard, research could be a hit-or-miss affair, involving expensive and time-consuming travel that might not yield useful results.
by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2009 | Uncategorized
From the AP:
Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100 … During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964).
More to follow.
by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2009 | Museums
Former Northwestern University dean Rudolph H. Weingartner and Princeton University Art Museum director James Christen Steward duel in the pages of Inside Higher Ed over the Rose Art Museum.
… I said to myself “good for them” when reports first surfaced last winter that Brandeis intended to sell its collection of modern art, so that the considerable (envisaged) proceeds could support functions closer to the central goals of the university … I see a significant role for art museums on higher education campuses. But, with quite special exceptions, I see a very small pedagogic function for colleges and universities to own works of art, especially given the current cost and value of so many of them. I’d rather those museums were reclassified as galleries. To be sure, the provisions of deeds of gift must be scrupulously observed; but assuming that to be the case, let them sell their works of art if the funds thus gained will better serve the institutions’ educational mission … This month’s article in Inside Higher Ed quotes a task force formed by arts groups to figure out ways to avoid the next Brandeis as saying that campus museums should be regarded as “essential to the academic experience and to the entire educational enterprise.” But why should they be so regarded when, by my admittedly not systematic observations, most of those museums do nothing or very little to deserve to be so regarded?
… And why do we university museums so annoyingly feel the need to collect artworks, creating the inevitable drain on resources caused by those pesky stewardship requirements? I offer in answer a fundamental article of faith, that even in the digital age, the sustained engagement with original works of art necessary for teaching, research, and layered learning would be difficult if not impossible if we ceased to be collecting institutions and instead taught only from objects temporarily made available for exhibition … Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are a “public good,” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose — often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing by their parent institutions in the perpetual fight against the perception that art represents a “luxury” in the logo-and data-centric university — is to be regretted.
Now seems as good a time as any to also belatedly catch up with Robert Storr’s April 2009 Frieze article on the matter:
… Word has it that Madoff’s chicanery cost several of Brandeis’s patrons a bundle, but the Rose costs the university nothing – much of its collection was bought for a song but is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars due to the market bubble Madoff helped to inflate. It is separately endowed, in the main self-supporting and even contributes to the larger institution’s budget. So what drove the trustees to make this catastrophic decision was not their inability to maintain the Rose; it was sheer opportunism. With the same money crisis confronting them that stares all colleges and universities down – but without any respect whatsoever for their predecessors who had created a model museum of contemporary art that put Brandeis on the cultural map nationally and internationally – the current stewards of its long-standing, now grievously compromised excellence looked at the Rose’s art holdings and saw a quick fix. In essence it would seem that the collection shimmered in the cash-strapped trustees’ eyes like grandmother’s bejeweled necklace; an expensive bauble that would be easy to liquidate. And so, while she slept, they euthanized Rose.
by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2009 | Uncategorized
CAA has posted online the paper titles for the Chicago conference (Feb 10-13). A few piqued our interest:
by Jon Lackman | 2 November 2009 | Conservation
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles conservator Joyce Hill Stoner:
An art conservator who set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies, at the University of Delaware, has been named to a new chair in material culture, the study of societies’ artifacts … In 1990, Ms. Stoner set up North America’s first doctoral program in preservation studies at Delaware, even before she had completed her own Ph.D. (There are now two others, at New York University and the State University of New York College at Buffalo.) … With a colleague, she is editing a 700-page volume, Conservation of Easel Paintings, due out in 2011 … Ms. Stoner hopes she will reach more people by speaking than she can by treating paintings one by one. Her goal? “To stop people from throwing out their torn paintings. And if I can get to the public and say ‘Do not clean your paintings with Ajax,’ I’ll have done well.”
by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Lopez reviews the new book “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” by Nicholas Fox Weber:
Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Weber’s text … offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s … Weber’s tendency to stint the political circumstances surrounding the history of the Bauhaus leaves his narrative, at times, lacking a sense of real-world context. Nonetheless, this book provides an excellent introduction …
(Lopez might have mentioned that Weber is director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.)
by Jon Lackman | 30 October 2009 | Renaissance
Didier Rykner reads the Italian newspapers and wonders how it could be true that
Giorgio Vasari’s archives, held in his native city of Arezzo and belonging to the Museo Casa Vasari, a private museum whose owner, Count Giovanni Festari, passed away a few days ago, could have been sold for the extravagant sum of 150 million euros to a Russian firm which has not disclosed what it plans to do with them … Vittorio Sgarbi, the famous art historian and former Minister of Italian Culture, known for his numerous antics and for his bluntness, asserts that … this is all a huge prank meant to twist the government’s arm into becoming interested in and acquiring the archives.
by Jon Lackman | 29 October 2009 | Contemporary, Photography
From The New York Times:
Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89. His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his wife and an art historian who wrote frequently about his work. Mr. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography, in part because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.”
See also The Los Angeles Times.
by Jon Lackman | 28 October 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
From The New York Observer:
Ever since he got his start in the art world as an editor at the influential bimonthly magazine Flash Art in Milan, [Massimiliano] Gioni has enjoyed an extraordinarily swift rise as a curator … Some of the more outlandish stunts Mr. Gioni has overseen … include sending a 90-foot helium balloon of a naked man flying through the skies, installing a house made of bread by [Urs] Fischer in a church, and hanging three puppet children made by the satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan from the oldest tree in Milan … In his current capacity at the New Museum, Mr. Gioni says he is devoted to promoting radical art, and to putting on shows that people love even though they can’t understand them … For me not getting it is part of the excitement” … “In a society and a culture in which everything has a message and everything has a meaning and everything has a purpose,” he said, “I think we should cherish things that are obscure, that are directionless, that are useless, that are complicated beyond reasonable levels. That’s the greatness of art– even in New York, where everything has a price” … he began making his name as a critic … But writing and editing “was just a way to be involved with art,” Mr. Gioni explained. “Eventually I started knowing artists more and more, and I realized that there were different ways to be engaged with them, besides writing about their work.” One of the more unusual ways Mr. Gioni did this was by collaborating with the artist Maurizio Cattelan, whom he served for three years starting around 1998 as a Cyrano de Bergerac-style press guru, pretending to be him while giving interviews and delivering lectures. “People would phone me thinking it was him, and I would give these interviews in his place, and I would make up things,” Mr. Gioni said. “It was sort of first a game, but it became a profession.”
(via Artinfo.com)
by Jon Lackman | 27 October 2009 | Photography
Two recent posts by French photo historian André Gunthert have generated considerable discussion. In one post, Gunthert discusses elites who protest that one of their own is being “lynched,” an expression whose power lies in part in its ability to evoke a potent image, an expression that is also too easily abused. In the other post, Gunthert addresses the question of what photographs of varying and sometimes uncertain vintage can tell us about Roman Polanski’s culpability. He quotes one commentator arguing that “there was no rape,” “you’ve seen the photos, she looked 25.”
by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2009 | Books, Teaching
Also in caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies edited by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas.
A collection of essays by authors of diverse academic backgrounds, the book … should prove useful to teachers just starting out as well as to veterans eager to update their courses or otherwise come to grips with the technological changes occurring around them … In “The Slide Library: A Posthumous Assessment for our Digital Future,” art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker … rue the loss of the communal space around the light table, the art historians’ “public square” where meaningful interactions among colleagues and students traditionally have taken place … Other injuries to the teaching of art history brought about by the new technology bear mentioning in this context … Until projection systems improve significantly, surface values, always difficult to bring to the attention of students, will likely receive even less consideration in our classrooms than previously. Another matter of concern is the fate of the one-to-one comparison as a pedagogical device.
by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2009 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terry Smith considers David Carrier’s 2008 book A World Art History and Its Objects:
“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” … [Carrier] sets out to ask if such a world history is possible, decides that it is, and proposes a structure for it. The feeling that the history of art as a discipline should encompass all the visual arts of the world has been coming back into focus for a decade or more … Carrier aims to “demonstrate what art historians can learn from historians and from analytic philosophers” … [Carrier creates a] “basic structure for a world art history”. It consists of four parallel lines indicating the evolution of the art of Europe, China, India, and the Islamic World as occurring in parallel, with diagonal arrows indicating points of major contact … About these, Carrier believes, art historians should write “parallel stories,” thus producing “a “multicultural art history” … The problem is that a pile-up of parallels would bring his account perilously close to the essentialist generalities of the “the clash of civilizations” thesis … Carrier concludes that a multicultural history of world art will not become possible until Chinese, Indian, and Muslim art historians write their own narrative histories … Although he claims to offer a “political” analysis, the implications of postcolonial critique, now three decades deep, are not grasped … A worldly art history would, surely … devote considerable energy to tracing the trafficking in artifacts, the exchanging of artistic ideas, the differentiation and fusion that have occurred for millennia as cultures come into and go out of contact. The interaction between these regional and global flows and local art traditions and inventions is the core “object” of any world art history worth its name. An approach akin to this is identified as “intercultural” in what is probably the most useful publication to date on these questions, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008) … The journal World Art, currently being prepared for its launch by the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, will channel these and other approaches.
by Jon Lackman | 20 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Artist Nancy Spero has died. As has longtime Architectural Design (AD) editor Monica Pidgeon.
Theorist Peter Weibel and art historian Hans Belting have won prizes.
According to ARTINFO, “a fire destroyed 90 percent of the estate of Brazilian neoconcretist Helio Oiticica.”
And according to NPR, “The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal” to the notion that Greece has nowhere to put the Elgin Marbles.
by Jon Lackman | 16 October 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to Christiane Tauber, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer‘s new biography of Caravaggio successfully portrays the artist as more strategic and professional, and less scandalous and out-of-control, than previously thought.
A west coast art history department that shall not be named asked for undergraduate transcripts. I was aghast but sent them anyway because I would like to be considered for the job. But what does a hiring committee hope to find out by requesting an undergraduate transcript?