by Jon Lackman | 9 February 2009 | Career
Let’s crunch the numbers a bit more. Large departments naturally win more jobs, so let’s see who performed best over the last couple years relative to how many people they graduate. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton win out, each winning a number of top jobs each year roughly equal in size to one-third of an annual graduating class. (This is ignoring departments that only a generate a few graduates per year.)
Now, which subfield gives you the best chance of landing a top teaching job?
We examined the subfields of our 205 assistant professors, and then we compared that with the number of people graduating each year in those subfields (which we calculated using the lists of “dissertations completed” compiled by CAA for 2007, 2006, and 2005).
From best subfield to be in to the worst:
1. African Art
2. Asian
2. Medieval/Byzantine
2. Ancient
3. Renaissance/Baroque
3. Modern
by Jon Lackman | 6 February 2009 | Uncategorized
On several occasions, we’ve gotten valuable tips from the CultureGrrl blog, and so if you have the means to do so, we encourage you to consider helping to keep it afloat. There, veteran cultural journalist Lee Rosenbaum frequently reports on art-world controversies from deaccessioning to culture ministers in a timely and tenacious fashion. She is intelligent and blessedly opinionated and we’d hate to see her go.
by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2009 | Career
Two years ago, we wrote
Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs?
In subsequent posts, we wrote on which departments landed the most top jobs per graduate, on how the hiring data breaks down by subfield, on the advisors who produce the most job-getters, and on gender equity.
Over the past couple weeks, we reviewed the fate of those 137 individuals and catalogued new members of the assistant-professor club. Here’s what we found:
Of the 137 assistant professors that we originally catalogued, 86 haven’t changed status in the last two years.
Of the 51 who have changed in status, 36 have been promoted to associate professor, while 15 have left their institution. Of the latter 15, five now have new assistant-professor jobs at other top departments.
Sixty-eight new assistant-professor hires have been made at the institutions we study. Seven of the new hires are Yale grads, seven from Harvard, six Columbia, six Princeton, five NYU, four Chicago, three Berkeley, three UCLA, two Northwestern, two Penn, two MIT, two Johns Hopkins, two University of Munich. There’s one grad each from Brown, Bryn Mawr, CUNY, Duke, Emory, IUAV(Venezia)/Sorbonne [joint PhD], London, Oxford, Politecnico di Torino, Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, Stanford (Anthropology Dept), Texas, Toronto, UMASS (Dartmouth), University of East Anglia, and University of Sydney.
Of the 68 new hires, 22 specialize in modern or contemporary topics, ten in Asian art, eight in American and/or Latin American and/or Native American, eight in ancient, six in renaissance or baroque, five in medieval/byzantine, four in African and/or African diaspora. two in Islamic, two in pre-Columbian.
More analysis to come. As always, we invite all suggestions on how to improve our method, which is outlined in the original post.
by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2009 | Uncategorized
When we started the Art History Newsletter three years ago to “synopsize news and opinion of interest to art historians and provide original reporting on conferences, lectures, and other special events,” we hoped to also provide a forum for discussion and so we invited readers to comment on our posts. Alas, spam robots added all kinds of irrelevant comments to the blog, we soon tired of deleting said comments, and so finally we just turned off the option to add comments. Well, art historians still need an online discussion forum, now more than ever perhaps, so we’ve decided to give it another try. Comment away.
This is great, thanks so much. I rely on this blog for my art history news summary, and I’m sure it will be that much greater with increased participation.
Thank the gods!
Heureux de pouvoir envoyer enfin mes saluts, de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique! Bravo pour ce blog et sa sélection d’informations précieuses.
I visit you blog often and hope you get less spam that I had initially. However, there are programs to help out in this respect. Once in place, they save many headaches. Best of luck from the Flying Fox.
Excellent news!
by Jon Lackman | 4 February 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune‘s Didier Rykner writes:
… a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. This publication offers many new findings on the artist’s life as well as his work. This is one of Arthéna’s best volumes, thus continuing an editorial policy which can never be praised enough …
Along with Valentin de Boulogne, Régnier was one of the main adepts of the Manfrediana Methodus, a term which designates a Caravaggism reinterpreted through the prism of Bartolomeo Manfredi’s style. Régnier quickly oriented his manner towards a pursuit of refinement and gracefulness, which Annick Lemoine calls “a poetics of seduction” or “a Caravaggism of seduction” …
Régnier’s half-brother was Michele Desubleo. The book does not question a rather strange fact: these two artists from the same family, both born in Maubeuge then living in Rome, are considered as having different nationalities, one French, the other Italian … Régnier’s activities as an art dealer and expert are also studied by Annick Lemoine with one amusing anecdote which recounts how the painter commissioned fake paintings from his son-in-law Pietro della Vecchia … Were these pieces sold as copies or were they part of a veritable counterfeiting business? Annick Lemoine does not say either way but seems to favor the second hypothesis …
Thanks to this publication Régnier definitely appears as a major 17th century artist and we feel he deserves to have an exhibition organized in his honor … Since the pioneering exhibition in 1974, the French Caravaggesque have become better known: Valentin has had a monograph devoted to him in Italian, Tournier had an exhibition in Toulouse in 2001 and the Roman Vouet is currently being exhibited at the Musée de Nantes (see article). Annick Lemoine’s book, which benefits from extensive research in Italian archives, is a superb example of the trend to rediscover this school.
by Jon Lackman | 2 February 2009 | Books, Modern, Teaching
Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”:
“One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about a kind of dialogue with itself and its past and more about a dialogue with the outside world,” she says. Hence the titles of the 16 chapters in her book: Art and Popular Culture, Art and Politics, Art and Time, Art and Technology, Art and Propaganda, and so on … Heartney’s insights are thought-provoking, even if they provoke disagreement. A shorthand summary of a few points goes thus: contemporary artists are more like novelists whose narratives tend not to lead anywhere. Art is no longer reassuring. The feminist art movement is important and does tend to have a narrative, and women artists brought the body back into art …
One might venture to ask why so few South American artists (fewer than a dozen) found their way into the book. Or Germans (fewer than 50), or British (about 45) or Chinese artists (5). Almost half of the 400 featured artists are Americans, while four Australians are listed: Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini, Natalie Jeremijenko and Tracey Moffatt. I suggest to Heartney that the Western art world is yet to overcome its egocentricity, treating other cultural spheres as fertile hunting grounds rather than places where contemporary art with distinctively Islamic, Oriental, Latin American or even Eastern European roots is being produced. “I think American culture has been hugely impacted by the rise of China, of India, of Asia generally,” responds Heartney, perhaps inadvertently proving my point.
by Jon Lackman | 30 January 2009 | Modern
The Times of London writes on the re-attribution of The Colossus:
“After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants … the Prado started an investigation last year [upon] the discovery of the initials A. J. in one corner of the canvas … Goya experts have been split for years over the authenticity of the painting. In 2001 Juliet Bareau-Wilson, a British art historian, claimed that The Colossus and another work, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, had been created by others … The Prado denied the claims at the time and many experts believe the quality of the work means that Goya must have been involved. Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work.
by Jon Lackman | 29 January 2009 | Books, Modern
In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber:
Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly visual, something he had in common with a number of other famous and successful scientists. However, this quality makes it even more striking how little interest he seems to have had in the visual arts. Although this volume devotes three essays to Einstein’s influence on the visual arts, each of the essayists (Lynda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones and Matthew Ritchie) is ready to admit that there does not appear to be any causal connection between Einstein and artistic modernism. This finding provides a salutary antidote to the claims that cubism and other artistic movements of the 20th century owed their existence, in some part, to Einstein’s work on relativity and early quantum physics.
The truth is that, insofar as artists may have been influenced by advances in non-Euclidean geometry and talk of time as a fourth dimension of space, these vague ideas were in the air before Einstein made any contributions to their realization in science. And where science influences art, the influence is often of so decidedly nontechnical and nonspecific a nature as to make any proper citation impossible. One may say, for instance, that 20th-century artists have been, at times, focused on the notion of how to treat or portray time in a traditionally static medium. But it is impossible to decide whether they have been influenced by physicists’ evolving understanding of time, much less estimate the influence of one physicist in particular.
(via 3 Quarks Daily)
by Jon Lackman | 28 January 2009 | Books, Theory
“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud:
Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and interpretation according to a depth/surface dialectic where meaning resides and must be coaxed into visibility. The image, according to this model, can be interpreted as a beautiful symptom. The model offers a historical and anthropological challenge to art history, thus throwing a gauntlet first to art-historical scholarship. In recent years, the Warburg approach has been explicitly reclaimed by an argument in favor of a cultural history of the image as part of a continuing critique (Warburg’s critique) of the formalism of art history and in a newer dissatisfaction with the surface-to-surface limitations of semiotically based visual studies. Insofar as the image itself can be extended metonymically into the semiotic surface of the contemporary moment, then the cultural analysis or cultural history of the image becomes a depth analysis of the present, or indeed a depth analysis of the past/present dialectic in any image or any moment at the point of its production. In at least one context, the Warburgian history/analysis of the image has produced a veritable institution; I refer to the Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History) at the University of Leeds. Warburg’s presence is less explicit but just as present in the institution on which the Centre-CATH is modeled, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. In recent years as well, scholarly attention to Warburg’s method and to Warburg himself has increased, though these two agendas are not easy to combine. Anthropology and art history have not yet produced the fusion for which one might hope.
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Museums
From the Boston Globe:
Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries … “This is not a happy day in the history of Brandeis,” President Jehuda Reinharz said tonight. “The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it’s a hidden jewel. It does not have great foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are just not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.” Brandeis said the museum would be closed late this summer. It was founded in 1961; a new wing designed by celebrated architect Graham Gund was added in 2001 … [T]here is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature.
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Career
For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice:
Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.
“Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year’s market didn’t look as bad as this year’s,” says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. “I’m wondering how many of these positions I’m applying for are actually real.”
Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She’s seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.
“I do sense a permanent change,” she says. “I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system” …
[The] odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She’s thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration—universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she’d like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.
“For Ph.D.’s in the humanities market, it’s almost like we really shouldn’t make any more, because there’s such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don’t have the jobs,” she says. “The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?”
Regardless of Dutton’s insights, the notion that preliterate societies that have developed in isolation from the West “reflect those of our ancient ancestors” is an extremely old notion. Anthropologists like Taylor were talking about it a century ago (in fact it was the prevailing ideology within emergent anthropological discourse at the end of the 19th century). It is an idea which has been rigorously attacked and dismantled by scores of thinkers since then.
by Jon Lackman | 27 January 2009 | Uncategorized
According to Michele D. Marincola, interim director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts:
It is with real sadness that I report the death of Olga Raggio, former Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor at the IFA from 1965-1998. Miss Raggio passed away on Saturday, January 24th. She was 82.
Miss Raggio came to the US in 1950 from Rome, and joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum, where she remained her entire professional career. Her expertise was in European sculpture from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. She was a valued teacher and mentor to a number of students at the Institute, many of whom now hold leading positions in the museum world and academia.
There will be a funeral mass for Miss Raggio on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10 A.M. at Holy Innocents Roman Catholic Church in Pleasantville, NY.
Raggio co-wrote the two-volume The Gubbio Studiolo and Its Conservation, which won the 2001 Salimbeni Prize for Art History and Critics (awarded to books on Italian topics).
by Jon Lackman | 26 January 2009 | Books
In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”:
Hobby Horse is an exuberant book – exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, Gombrich passionately reveals that history, politics, philosophy can be condensed into the most ordinary artefacts … The book that truly gave me my “Eureka!” moment was Mythologies by Roland Barthes – in a bookshop in Washington, DC in 1972. I was writing my study of the Virgin Mary, which would appear four years later, and was fumbling towards understanding her cult. Here, in Barthes’s essays about the relations of myth and ideology, and especially in the closing, extended essay, “Myth Today”, he was expressing the ideas I was trying to shape for myself. I reeled and my pulse raced as, standing up in the shop, I began reading it.
To my mind now, Barthes is too swingeing, too implacable, too much of the French revolutionary pur et dur in his denunciation of myth’s collusion with power. But the book did clear the horizon for me then in an utterly elating way. However, I could never have grasped his arguments or even recognised what he was saying without the ground laid by the iconographical decoding work that I’d encountered before, through Wind and, far more importantly, through Gombrich, from whom I learned that there is no stroke of the pen or brush that can be innocent of meanings reaching out into the world.
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by Jon Lackman | 23 January 2009 | Career
Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog:
In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things … healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have [already] largely vanished … In “two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce” … “the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability” … have now triumphed … and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”
by Jon Lackman | 22 January 2009 | Books, Theory
Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of this year’s CAA award for lifetime achievement in art writing) has just published a new book, Quand les images prennent position. André Gunthert writes:
In a world where images are proliferating in every way, and where their use-values so often leave us disoriented — [shuttling] between the most vulgar propaganda and the most inaccessible esotericism, between a screen function and the possibility of even destroying this screen — it seems necessary to revisit certain practices where the image’s act has truly accorded with critical activity and the work of the mind. In sum, one would like to consider the conditions for a possible politics of the imagination. This essay, the first in a series titled “L’Oeil de l’histoire,” attempts to analyze the concrete procedures and theoretical choices inherent in the reflections of Bertolt Brecht on war …
by Jon Lackman | 21 January 2009 | Conferences, Modern
Last Friday marked the 100th birthday of Clement Greenberg. You hadn’t heard? Almost no one marked the occasion. In Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt wrote a wistful reminiscence. This April, Harvard will host a two-day symposium, “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art”:
Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: avant-garde and “kitsch,” distinctions between high and low culture, “decoration,” the Partisan Review, medium specificity, abstraction versus figuration, multiple modernisms, and modernism’s self-reflexivity. Papers may address Greenberg’s critical engagement with abstract expressionism, color field painting, post-painterly abstraction, or his disengagement with “non-art” or postmodernism.
by Jon Lackman | 21 January 2009 | Awards
Via Artnet:
The College Art Association has announced the winners of its annual awards, in advance of the organization’s 2009 conference in Los Angeles, Feb. 25-28, 2009. Winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism is Boris Groys, the Berlin-born NYU prof whose most recent book is Art Power (MIT, 2008). In one of his more glib pronouncements, Groys likened Osama bin Laden to a video artist.
Other award winners are Mary Heilmann (distinguished body of work), Chris Burden (artist award for lifetime achievement), Guerrilla Girls (distinguished feminist award, a new honor), Georges Didi-Huberman (lifetime achievement for writing on art), Roland Reiss (teaching of art), Charles W. Haxthausen (teaching of art history) and Carol Stringari (scholarship and conservation).
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award goes to Anthony J. Barbieri-Low for Artisans in Early Imperial China (University of Washington). The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award goes to Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (Yale). Another new prize, the Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries and Collections, goes to Phillip Earenfight, ed., A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion (University of Washington).
The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for an article in Art Bulletin goes to Marnin Young for “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers.” And the Art Journal Award for an article in that publication goes to Richard Meyer for “Artists sometimes have feelings,” a personal essay on working with living artists (in Meyer’s case, Paul McCarthy and Anita Steckel).
by Jon Lackman | 19 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated statistics that do not give an overview of the field. That changed this month, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveiled the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators project.
Combing the report, we came across a couple interesting (if outdated) art-history-related statistics:
“Art History” (presumably “Intro to Art History”) was the 17th most popular college course among students who graduated high school in 1992. Seventeen percent of these students took the course, down from 23% of students who graduated high school in 1972.
Fifteen percent of art-history PhDs were employed as curators, versus 56% as college teachers/professors, as of 1995.
by Jon Lackman | 16 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum writes:
What’s that new addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s old masters galleries, catty-cornered with the museum’s iconic Vermeer, “Woman with a Water Pitcher”? Let’s approach for a closer look:
Vermeer, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” Private Collection
… Until Sotheby’s had reported (in advance of the 2004 sale) the favorable findings of a committee assembled to study and restore the work, many experts had regarded this painting as a “near-Vermeer”—an imitation by a less gifted artist. A new book by Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, theorizes that it (along with six other generally accepted Vermeers) was painted by the master’s eldest daughter—a hypothesis that Martin Bailey, in his review (not online) for this month’s Art Newspaper of five recent books on Dutch old masters, derided as a “wild assumption based on limited information.”
Although Walter Liedtke, the Met’s curator specializing in Dutch 17th-century art, now accepts the painting as a Vermeer (and includes it in his new monograph on the artist’s oeuvre), he balks at the yellow shawl.
According to the Met’s label … “another hand may have painted the yellow shawl, under which are traces of less voluminous attire.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 January 2009 | Photography
André Gunthert discusses Gaza images on his blog:
Scandalized by the Jan. 7 issue of L’Humanité, Alain Korkos, columnist for Arrêt sur images, published an “Open Letter to Pierre Laurent“, in which he condemned the usage of this “unbearable photo,” which shows a dead child buried in rubble in the Gaza Strip (taken by Fadi Adwan of the Associated Press). Comparing this image with Frank Fournier’s photograph of the young Omayra Sanchez published in Paris-Match in 1985, Korkos accuses L’Humanité of imitating “the logic of Paris-Match,” of having sought to shock in order to “sell an idea and, secondarily, a paper (or vice versa)” … [His comparative] method here shows its limits … Is it pertinent to associate an image of Omayra Sanchez, a victim of a natural catastrophe, with that of the young Kaukab Al Dayah, a civilian victim of war acts? … To glimpse a connection between these two images is only possible if one perceives the Israeli invasion of Gaza (and its inevitable “collateral damage”) as a tragedy for whom no one, except fate, is responsible.
Thanks so much, AHN. And the same back at you: My blog and I have been enriched by many valuable insights and ideas that I’ve gotten from you. If CultureGrrl dies an impecunious death, I would want your much appreciated praise to be its epitaph!