by Jon Lackman | 9 October 2008 | Conferences
Amy Poehler “reports”: “An art historian believes that the meal eaten in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was not bread or lamb, as previously thought, but eel garnished with orange slices. The historian will present his theory at the upcoming symposium, ‘Things That Don’t Matter.’”
by Jon Lackman | 8 October 2008 | Conferences
Who says art historians are never topical? Later this semester, the German Historical Institute London and the University of Exeter will co-host a conference on “Visual Representations of the Unemployed.”
Special Offer: The first unemployed art historian to email us a picture of him- or herself attending the conference is guaranteed to get their picture and CV published here.
by Jon Lackman | 6 October 2008 | Journals
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:
A large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it “a dangerous and misguided exercise” … Panels of four to six scholars, appointed by a steering committee, compiled initial lists of journals to be classified in 15 fields. Each journal was assigned to a category — A, B, or C — depending on its reputation and international reach … The panels rely on information provided by the 80 or so member institutions of the European Science Foundation, which sponsors the project. Citation rates also play a part in categorization, and the panels get that information from commercial databases.
For “art, architectural and design history” journals, the project’s jurors were:
Alain Schnapp, Université Paris 1 (FR)
Greg Clunas, School of Oriental and African Studies (UK)
Jose Burucua, Universidad Nacional del General San Martín-Argentine (AR)
Andreas Tönnesmann, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur (CH)
Ingrid Ciulisová, Slovak Academy of Sciences (SK)
Cinzia Sicca Bursill-Hall Università degli Studi di Pisa (IT)
They gave the following journals the “A” classification (FYI: this link goes to a pdf file):
Acta Historiae Artium
African Arts
American Art
American Journal of Archaeology
Annali di Architettura
Apollo
Archäologischer Anzeiger
Archeologia Medievale: Cultura materiale, insediamenti, territorio
Architectura: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Baukunst
Architectural History
Archives of Asian Art
Archivo Español de Arte
Ars Orientalis
Art Bulletin (The)
Art Criticism
Art History
Art Journal
Arte Cristiana
Arte Medievale
Artibus Asiae
Artibus et Historiae
Arts Asiatiques
Bollettino d’Arte
British Journal of Aesthetics
Bulletin du CIETA (Centre International d’études des textiles anciens)
Bulletin monumental
Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
Burlington Magazine (The)
Byzantinische Zeitschrift
Byzantion: Revue internationale des études byzantines
Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne
Cinema Journal
Computers and the History of Art
Construction History
Critical Inquiry
Design Issues (USA)
Design Journal (The)
Design Studies
Digital Creativity
Dumbarton Oaks Papers
Eighteenth Century Studies
Emblematica
Études photographiques
Eye
Film History: An International Journal
Film Studies
Francia. Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geschichte
Gesta – International Center of Medieval Art
Grey Room
Harvard Design Magazine
History of Photography
Hortus Artium Mediaevalium
I Tatti Studies: Studies in the Renaissance
Industrial Archaeology Review
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen
Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien
Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (The)
Journal of Architectural and Planning Research
Journal of Architectural Conservation
Journal of Architecture (The)
Journal of British Archeological Association
Journal of Cultural Heritage
Journal of Design History
Journal of Material Culture
Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts
Journal of the History of Collections
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
Journal of Urban Design
Journal of Urban History
Journal of Visual Anthropology
Journal of Visual Culture
Konsthistorisk Tidskrift
Kritische Berichte
Landscape History: Journal of the Society for Landscape Studies
Landscapes
Master Drawings
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz
Muqarnas
Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek
Nineteenth-Century studies
Nuovi Studi
October: Art, Theory, Criticism, Politics
Oriental Art
Oud-Holland: driemaandelijks tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Kunstgeschiedenis
Oxford Art Journal
Papers of the British School in Rome
Paragone
Print Quarterly: The Scholarly Journal on Prints from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Reales Sitios
Renaissance Quarterly
Renaissance Studies
Representations
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics
Revue de l’Art
Revue de Louvre – La revue des musées de France
Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte
Screen
Sculpture Journal
Simiolus: Netherlands quarterly for the history of art
Storia dell’arte
Studies in Iconography
Studies in the Decorative Arts
Studies in the History of Art
Studiolo
Textile History
Third Text
Umění: časopis Ústavu dějin umění Akademie věd ČR
Word & Image
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte
by Jon Lackman | 2 October 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
In the past six months have you regularly:
Been glared at in a hostile manner?
Been excluded from work-related social gatherings?
Had others storm out of the work area when you entered?
Had others consistently arrive late for meetings that you called?
Been given the “silent treatment”?
Not been given the praise to which you felt entitled?
Been treated in a rude or disrespectful manner?
Had others refuse your requests for assistance?
Had others fail to deny false rumors about you?
Been given little or no feedback about your performance?
Had others delay action on matters that were important to you?
Been yelled at or shouted at in a hostile manner?
Been subjected to negative comments about your intelligence or competence?
Had others consistently fail to return your telephone calls or respond to your memos or e-mail?
Had your contributions ignored by others?
Had someone interfere with your work activities?
Been subjected to mean pranks?
Been lied to?
Had others fail to give you information that you really needed?
Been denied a raise or promotion without being given a valid reason?
Been subjected to derogatory name calling?
Been the target of rumors or gossip?
Shown little empathy or sympathy when you were having a tough time?
Had co-workers fail to defend your plans or ideas to others?
Been given unreasonable workloads or deadlines — more than others?
Had others destroy or needlessly take resources that you needed to do your job?
Been accused of deliberately making an error?
Been subjected to temper tantrums when disagreeing with someone?
Been prevented from expressing yourself (for example, interrupted when speaking)?
Had attempts made to turn other employees against you?
Had someone flaunt his or her status or treat you in a condescending manner?
Had someone else take credit for your work or ideas?
Been reprimanded or “put down” in front of others?
If so, you might want to read about “Academic Bullies.”
by Jon Lackman | 30 September 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Yale Daily News:
If being deemed a “great teacher” is any indication of a faculty member’s worthiness to assume the job of dean of Yale College, University President Richard Levin’s likely short list can quickly be reduced to one candidate: Mary Miller … But the 55-year old Sterling Professor — the highest academic rank at Yale — may have a different life path in mind, one that does not lead to the spacious corner office on Prospect Street. Miller announced three weeks ago that she plans to step down from her post at Saybrook next year to become the A.W. Mellon Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. … “[Miller] is part of a new wave with Maya scholarship,” Sterling Professor emeritus of the history of art Vincent Scully said of Miller’s academic specialty, Mesoamerican art with a focus on Mayan culture. “She changed everyone’s attitude. Pre-Columbianists wanted to think of Mayans as philosopher kings, and her book [“The Blood of Kings”] reveals that they were more bloody than the Aztecs” … In addition to her six-week appointment at the National Gallery, Miller has also been selected as Cambridge University’s Slade Professor of Fine Art, the senior post at Cambridge in art history, for the academic year 2014-2015 … After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1975, Miller earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale and immediately began her ascent up the University’s academic ladder as a lecturer in the History of Art Department in 1980.
by Jon Lackman | 29 September 2008 | Uncategorized
According to the (soon to be defunct?) New York Sun,
An art history professor at Columbia University jumped to his death from his Morningside Heights apartment. Petrus Schaesberg, an adjunct professor … began teaching in the art history department in 2005 but was not teaching this semester. The German native was also a photographer.
According to Wikipedia, he compeleted his PhD at “Munich’s Institute of Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University in 2004″ and had published on Louise Bourgeois, David Salle, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha.
by Jon Lackman | 26 September 2008 | Uncategorized
According to the Telegraph,
A portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh that he later painted over has been revealed in more detail than every before thanks to a new X-ray technique … [which] allowed the team – led by Dr Joris Dik, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and Professor Koen Janssens from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, – to build up a “colour photo” of the picture.
In another article, the paper notes that
It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can’t be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over … It is not the first time that art historians have employed science to peer beyond the façade of masterworks … “But with this new technique we can reveal the image in colour.”
by Jon Lackman | 23 September 2008 | Africa, Books
In the Autumn 2008 issue of African Arts, anthropologist Joseph Nevadomsky reviews Art, Performance, and Ritual in Benin City by Charles Gore:
Gore’s book signals a change of direction in Benin Studies. It chips at the ossifications that had become the boundary markers of Benin research. John Piction, in his blurb, call Gore’s book “the most important book on Benin art and ethnography since Robert Bradbury’s 1973 Benin Studies.” … Gore provokes a conversation … where hardly any academic discourse existed before … His monograph meticulously accounts for the ideologies and practices of priests whose creative energies and spiritual transformations are displayed in fantastic mud and concrete shrine constructions, trance and dance possessions of extraordinary vitality and individuality, and the allegiances of followers whose search for belief, drama, and creation is met by a panoply of religious leaders enticing them. What places Gore’s book on a par with Bradbury’s work is its careful exposition of religious and structural linkages among the various levels of society … The summary chapter, “Art History and Artefact,” … incisively critiques art history’s and anthropology’s constructions, those uncritical baseline assumptions that form the fabric of research on Benin. This is essential reading to resituate Benin Studies … Gore’s book is a fundamental revamp. It shatters the standard hype. It will lead into new terrain and generate a passel of PhDs …
To celebrate his monograph, I wrote a rap song honoring his achievements, happy to have him as a comrade-in-arms and colleague.
That dude Gore
Talkin’ the note
Slingin’ the tote
Goin’ over the wall.He got the spill
Dude innocent ‘nough
Yet he got the skill
T’ git over that wall.The wall that confines
The big house done built
That make we believe
The wall it for realBreak happenin’ man
We gotta go
From ‘diana, New York, an’ UCLA too
From London, Vienna, even KokomoFree at last
Free at last
Thank god almighty
From that historyJust breakin’ free!
Said Rev King
An honest dude, man
Too bad he deadBut Gore is here
Settin’ us free
From Benin folklore
And art historyThat art history, bro’
Leave it behind
Like a turd in the cell
For ‘ficials to find.
by Jon Lackman | 18 September 2008 | Books, Theory
In caa.reviews, Keith Moxey considers the anthology Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science edited by Lorraine Daston:
Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively determine the significance we ascribe to them. The various scholars included in Things That Talk seek to articulate the ways in which things speak to us even if we are ultimately responsible for what they have to say …
Art historians are all too familiar with peremptory calls for a “return to the object” when accepted norms of interpretation are threatened or broken. Imaginative interpretations (those based on psychoanalysis, identity politics, or postcolonialism, for example) are sometimes dismissed because they allegedly stray too far from the object itself—even if it is clear that those very objects called these interpretations into being. This book offers a new understanding of what a “return to the object” might amount to. Instead of closing off inventive approaches to interpretation, Daston and her colleagues open the doors to exciting new representations of what we encounter in experience.
by Jon Lackman | 12 September 2008 | Books
In the September 2008 Art Bulletin, Aruna D’Souza reviews Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s book The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture. In her conclusion D’Souza writes:
Ultimately, this book approaches–even if it chooses not to address head-on–what is perhaps the most urgent cultural question of our moment: How does art find a politics in a time defined, on the one hand, by an overheated and all-devouring art market that effectively turns every artistic gesture into a salable commodity, and, on the other, by a political situation in which the need to act is equaled only by the absence of clear terms within which to do so? How does art find its political footing on a terrain in which any critical utterance is so readily co-opted by the marketplace? We would be fair to wonder, at the end of the book, if Chu has merely replaced the image of Courbet as an independent and defiant hero of a politically engaged, newly born avant-garde with that of its seeming opposite, as cynical an “operator” as any of the contemporary art superstars that now grace our cultural stage. I will admit that I do not want to believe this to be true, and perhaps that is my own failing: I am invested in the idea that there is a politics–a real politics–to Courbet, one that still has lessons to teach us. I want the “both/and” version of Courbet: both an economic pragmatist and a revolutionary. I am willing to concede–almost–that this fantasy might no longer be possible, or that it perhaps never was. But not quite.
by Jon Lackman | 10 September 2008 | Museums
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis chose the wrong time to announce their new chief curator, the Baltimore Museum of Art contemporary art head, Darsie Alexander. Everyone is now too busy reporting another story, “Ending months of fervid speculation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reached into its own ranks on Tuesday and chose Thomas P. Campbell, a 46-year-old English-born tapestries curator, to succeed Philippe de Montebello as director and chief executive.”
In the May 2008 issue of Textile History, Maria Hayward reviewed Campbell’s 2007 book Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court:
highly impressive in the scope of its scholarship … a very well researched and skilful analysis of Henry VIII’s tapestry collection … Campbell makes a highly convincing case in this book for these objects to be seen as a visual expression of the religious, political and intellectual culture at the Henrician court … this book marks a key point in the development of tapestry studies and it will fill a very significant gap in the historiography … a very impressive book … a splendid achievement.
by Jon Lackman | 8 September 2008 | Uncategorized
We’re back from vacation, untanned and badly rested. It was a surprisingly busy summer for art historians, which we dare not attempt to summarize. Instead, select morsels:
MoMA named Ann Temkin its chief curator of painting and sculpture. Michael Baxandall died at the age of 74. At the Getty Villa in Malibu, “20 art historians, conservators and museum officials theorizing, listening and pondering out loud whose head to put on a headless 1,800-year-old Roman statue … the Roman god Bacchus or the real-life boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian, known as Antinuous, or the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great.” Museum director and “monuments man” Charles Parkhurst died, at 95. The art collection of the late Rubens scholar Julius Held went up for auction; it included works by Max J. Friedlander and Meyer Schapiro. The Art Gallery of Western Australia appointed a new director, Stefano Carboni, an Islamic art curator at the Met (who holds two doctorates and speaks seven languages). Wellesley College’s Davis Museum accidentally threw out a choice Leger painting. Poland named an art historian, Bogdan Klich, as its defense minister.
by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2008 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Monday, September 9.
by Jon Lackman | 23 May 2008 | Books, Museums
The Art Newspaper writes up three new books on Harald Szeeman:
“It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions,” states—rather provocatively—the introduction to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology. A concomitant phenomenon is the emergence of a new profession, namely that of the curator, and Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) is often credited with inventing the job … Indeed, so strongly did he extol the exhibition as a medium of expression rather than a merely mediatory activity that some accused him of turning it into a work of art, using the individual works on display as so many “touches of colour”. While Szeemann refuted this status as an artist, he did claim that of an author, staging deeply subjective shows.
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times:
Philippe de Montebello will … become the first professor to teach the history and culture of museums … Mr. de Montebello, who turned 72 on Friday, said he planned to teach full time. But rather than lecturing on what might seem most obvious — how to run a museum, for example, or the history of 15th- and 16th-century French and Netherlandish painting, his scholarly area of expertise — he said he would cover the history of collecting and connoisseurship and the evolution of museums, including the central issue of how the museum’s mission can be defined in today’s world.
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From The Age:
Peter Tomory, an inspirational figure in the art world who was foundation professor of art history at La Trobe University, has died in Wales, aged 86. His passionate commitment to art, its history and scholarship was matched by an instinct for pedagogy … [He] was a colourful conversationalist and tireless raconteur, both charming and feisty, although he could also be curmudgeonly. He took a dim view of parochial self-importance and was quick to puncture pomposity and self-promotion, which did not always earn him friends in the art world. His professional reputation was established soon after his graduation from Edinburgh when he published the Ellesmere Collection of drawings by Annibale Carracci — some of which were later acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria — at a time when scholarly interest in Baroque art was in its infancy … In 1972 he published The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli, a scholarly monograph on the artist’s work. Following his teaching positions in Auckland, he was associate professor at Columbia University, New York, and senior curator of baroque art at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, before he was appointed at La Trobe.
by Jon Lackman | 19 May 2008 | Uncategorized
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
A well-known art historian from Thailand who was indicted in a federal investigation into looted antiquities died Wednesday at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, apparently after a heart attack. Roxanna Brown, a 62-year-old U.S. citizen … was the first person arrested as part of a five-year, undercover investigation into smuggled Thai artifacts at some Southern California museums and galleries … Brown had been the director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University, which holds more than 2,000 ancient ceramics. She had been lecturing worldwide on the significance that shipwrecked Asian ceramics have in detailing the histories of ancient kingdoms. A proponent of proper excavation and documentation of artifacts, Brown told a Malaysian newspaper last year that antiques buyers should look at “published finds” only from specific sites … According to UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Brown holds a doctorate in art history from the university.
by Jon Lackman | 14 May 2008 | Journals
The latest issue of Art Journal is devoted to “microblindness and blindsight”:
Research has shown “microblindness” to occur when subjects encounter emotionally difficult visual material, while subjects with impaired visual processing may nevertheless be capable of “blindsight,” noting visual detail without being conscious of having seen it. Essays in this issue of Art Journal explore these two interrelated effects through materials that are affectively charged and in some cases emotionally challenging.
by Jon Lackman | 12 May 2008 | Architecture, Museums
The March 2008 issue of JSAH contains a review by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers of the recent Robert Moses exhibition curated by JSAH editor Hilary Ballon. Following the review is an “Editor’s Note”: “Hilary Ballon, JSAH editor, was not involved in commissioning, editing, or publishing this review.” One is left to imagine that these roles were filled by the issue’s Exhibition Review Editor, Anthony Alofsin. For what it’s worth, Ballon and Alofsin collaborated on the 2005 book Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, according to the Rizzoli website. (JSAH‘s website indicates that Ballon’s and Alofsin’s editorships are now held by David Brownlee and David DeLong respectively.)
Rogers seems inclined to pass judgment on the exhibition’s arguments, but hesitant to follow through. (Its main argument, in the words of The New York Times, is that “too little attention has been focused on what Moses achieved, versus what he destroyed, and on the enormous bureaucratic hurdles he surmounted to get things done.”) The closest that Rogers gets is with statements such as these: “[The exhibition] seeks to resuscitate the reputation of the master builder” [emphasis added]. “Although Moses is rightly cast as the villain in these fights, he operated within the urban planning orthodoxies of the time.”
She does criticize the exhibition design. Of the Queens Museum section she writes that
The relatively small, monochromatic renderings hung in high-ceilinged galleries, a confusing spatial flow, and hard-to-read labels are mitigated by the fascinating subject matter.
This is the second time Rogers calls something in the exhibition “fascinating.” But is she saying that the exhibition is fascinating, or just that Robert Moses is always fascinating? This line from her concluding paragraphs would seem to suggest the latter:
Overall, it is the subject of these three related, ephemera-heavy exhibitions, not their design presentation, that holds our attention.
by Jon Lackman | 9 May 2008 | Career
An article in Die Welt examines the job prospects for German art historians:
Currently around 800 unemployed [art historians] are registered at the federal employment agency. That is almost a whole year’s worth of art-history graduates, given that, of around 11,000 students of this field, around 900 conclude their studies each year.
