by Jon Lackman | 25 February 2008 | Crime, Modern
From The Art Newspaper:
Art historian and Modigliani specialist Christian Parisot is facing trial in Paris, accused of faking 77 drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist’s mistress and mother of his daughter, also called Jeanne … Mr Parisot told The Art Newspaper that … they are genuine and that they came from a clear-out of André Hébuterne’s studio after his death. “The [original] payment by cheque exists, it was a legal transaction,” he says … Sending Mr Parisot to trial, the French judge Henri Pons said that “Mr Parisot wanted to give a fraudulent provenance to the drawings … so that he could increase the prices for her work…he used his reputation as a Modigliani specialist [to achieve this].”
by Jon Lackman | 25 February 2008 | Conferences
X.M.B. writes:
So here is a brief overview of the 2008 CAA conference in Dallas. There is no Bohemia. everyone gets dressed up and applies for jobs, the world of academia is as cold and stiff as everyone described. There are good eggs and bad eggs though, It is fun to differentiate between the folks who are obligated to be here and the ones who came for the party. At times i find myself being part of the sea of dazed graduate students, flowing in and out of the interview tables, finding out that there are thousands of people exactly like them.
Shermaniac writes:
The word of the conference that I wasn’t familiar with is indexical. I’m probably way behind since several people used it with ease.
B.S. writes:
Man, I had hoped to go to Dallas yesterday. Me and Maria Elena were going to stop by the CAA conference at the Adam’s Mark and sweet talk our way in with fake press passes.
Artist / teacher Mike Odom writes:
… It’s a little embarrassing to confess, but that was my total involvement with the 2008 CAA: Meeting friends from out of town for restaurant meals and a little gallery hopping. Not exactly career building, I suppose.
SlideRoom representative Christopher Jagers, wrote a few days ago of his pre-conference woes:
1) My dog ate my (very expensive) glasses, so now I have to wear old ones which are ugly and barely work.
2) My copy of Photoshop expired, and my new copy isn’t working. (I need this for my presentation).
3) My orthodontist inserted a new device into my mouth which is painful and bulky. This is the worst. It holds my mouth open a little all the time, so I can’t enunciate words nor eat. I sound retarded, literally. So, over the next week, I am trying to: Learn how to speak again (S’s are the hardest). Learn to love soup. Learn to look at the upside (I am going to be skinny)!
Trying to keep a sense of humor, see you at the conference …
Fortunately, all seems to have turned out for the best:
The CAA conference was a huge success for SlideRoom, and felt very different from last time. I believe the university art world is reaching a tipping point in its desire for online systems. Even just last year, there was some resistance. But this year, art faculty were eager to hear all about how SlideRoom worked, and were aggressively asking for info. Change is coming.
Jeanne Jo writes:
Heather, Rachelle and I were lucky enough to have a few run-ins with Yoko Ono, who was at CAA receiving a Distinguished Body of Work Award. Can I just say, that lady is fierce. So beautiful and full of life. She restores my faith. Her bodyguard told Heather that “they” (meaning himself and Yoko) liked her hair! Preceeding Yoko’s participation in the CAA Annual Artist’s Interview, she showed the audience film clips from when she was child. She was incredibly funny and touching, talking about her parents and her life growing up in both Japan and San Francisco. She then read a very moving poem that she had written four days prior, on her 75th birthday. Here it is:
It is a giddy feeling
like being on a mountain
looking down
many little houses
many little streets
I was once in them
how little they were!
The cars are driving
like soldiers
like cockroaches
like dotsI look up
there are many trees
leading me to…
is that the top of the mountain?
I see that I have
much more to goThen I see
that I am still in my kitchen
In one of the little apartment buildings
which looked like a pebble from the mountain!
making my morning coffee
sitting at my computer
looking over the park
Sunrises.Yes!
Seventy five
and I’m aliveMy body is filled with
many people
many cities,
many countries
many laughters,
many loves
many, many spaces and
oh, many, many times…Is that what it is
to be omnipresent?
to experience all your
senses and feelings
of all times and space at once?
With no limitations
of the human world
Freed from time
Freed from space?
Are we all getting there?I am full of thankfulness
for being alive
I am full of love
for knowing you
knowing lifeYour beauty
Life’s amazements
still unfolding
it’s mysteryThank you, thank you, thank you
For a very rich experienceYes. I’m seventy five!
I’m alive
still dancing
in love with life.Now, I’m suddenly
at the top of the mountain
Seeing the other side -
The Future!It’s so magical
I’m speechless.
It’s so beautiful
We’re smiling!
You are there
We are thereYes. we are all there!
We are all there.
Still dancing
In love with life…
by Jon Lackman | 22 February 2008 | Conferences
Alas, neither we nor CAA are blogging from the conference this year. Fortunately, a few other people are:
Artist E. Marie writes:
… Dallas does not adhere to the same coffee standards as Northern California. Now. On to the more esoteric lessons. The day started off with an interesting conference session entitled “Photography After Photography” in which exactly two of the seven panelists identified themselves as photographers … I wondered what exactly was being said by the composition of this panel. Is “Photography After Photography” doomed to be nothing more than documentation? … with photography playing a subservient role to performance or social practice or some other mode of artistic endeavor[?] … All of the presentations were uncommonly engaging, and even those panelists who simply stood up and read their presentations did so with a certain amount of vocal animation. So “Photography After Photography,” once blended with an appropriate amount of espresso and a tasty breakfast pastry, turned out to be a good way to begin my day.
Karla the Czech-surrealism dissertator writes:
As usual, I report from a low-lying slab of granite in the conference hotel, very popular with conference-goers who wish to check their email and can’t get a seat in the bar. The granite is a little cold and hard, but at least my feet reach the floor when I sit on it. I have attended good panels on surrealist drawing and on avant-gardist projects that never really got off the ground … None of the schools I sent applications to confess to doing interviews here, so either they are secretly interviewing other people or else they are just not here. I am not, actually, all that concerned, since there is no urgency about finding a job for next year. The year after that… well, that’s different.
by Jon Lackman | 22 February 2008 | Museums
According to The Art Newspaper:
the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has decided to quietly sell its Rockefeller Rooms to make way for a modernisation of its building on upper Fifth Avenue. The two period rooms from the Manhattan townhouse of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller have been the museum’s signature attractions for 70 years. The dressing room is likely to go the Metropolitan Museum which is currently reinstalling its suite of American period rooms, expected to reopen in January 2009. According to a spokeswoman, the MCNY’s reconfiguration will consolidate offices on the fourth and fifth floors, displacing the Rockefeller Rooms; ceiling heights on the three lower exhibition floors preclude reinstallation.
by Jon Lackman | 21 February 2008 | Career, Conferences
Karla, completing a dissertation on Czech Surrealism, writes:
I have reached the architecturally unexpected city of Dallas and am trying to get myself into full College Art Association mode. I’ve always enjoyed CAA in the past, but this year it’s more of an effort. It is kind of difficult to enjoy much of anything to the full a week and a half before one hopes to turn in a PhD dissertation … On Tuesday night, those of us on the job market had the opportunity to attend a sort of orientation, so I went. It was pleasant enough, but not as useful as I would have liked (I do not need to be told to check in the mirror for dandruff before going to a job interview) … Today I have attended a couple of panels – one on Etruscan art and one on Japonisme. After all, when else do I get a chance to go to hear about things that have little to do with my own research? Both panels were satisfactorily interesting.
Artist E. Marie writes:
I’m at the College Art Association conference in Dallas right now, in a massive beige hotel that makes me wish I’d brought along my GPS and maybe a sherpa for good measure. I’m not here for the kind of big “social reunion” that these conferences can be; there don’t seem to be any people here whom I know, and this is only my second time at the conference. And I’m not here just to soak up the sometimes great, sometimes brain-killing programming and presentations on the schedule (although I’m pretty excited about the interview with Yoko Ono happening this Friday). I’m actually here for the next big piece of the puzzle, you see. I’m here to get ready to start looking for work … I witnessed a friend of mine interviewing for jobs at a CAA conference a few years ago, and when I ran into him he was so stressed out he couldn’t even manage to talk—and this was at 9 o’clock in the morning. I’m not quite ready for that; hence, “getting ready” to look, rather than “looking.”
Photo curator/historian Leslie K. Brown writes:
This post is in honor of Bruce, who was just on an ARTspace panel at the College Art Association conference with fellow UConners in Dallas, TX (and got even offered a job in the elevator even though he’s not looking and went on to meet the renowned Annie Sprinkle).
by Jon Lackman | 21 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From the Telegraph:
During his lifetime, the Roman painter Pompeo Batoni was among the most celebrated artists in Europe, counting several popes among his patrons as well as Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia.
But only two years after his death in 1787, Sir Joshua Reynolds predicted that Batoni’s name would quickly fall into oblivion – and he was absolutely right.
Throughout the 19th and for most of the 20th centuries few artists were more completely forgotten – or, if remembered, more thoroughly despised.
When the National Gallery of Wales bought one of his most impressive group portraits in 1947, it paid £200 – and that was mostly for the frame.
But, as with Reynolds, Batoni began to be rediscovered in the late 20th century, and is now having a sort of apotheosis in the form of a major exhibition at the National Gallery.
by Jon Lackman | 20 February 2008 | Conferences
Various individuals descend on the College Art Association conference, which begins today in Dallas. Artist Kathy O’Connell writes, “There I will be schmoozing my way to a job (wearing power shoes, but avoiding Dallas power hair).”
by Jon Lackman | 19 February 2008 | Ancient, Awards, Books
The new Art Book Award, awarded by The Art Book and the Association of Art Historians (both in the UK), “aims to promote and acknowledge the best in art publishing by honouring the contributions and collaboration of the many different people involved.” Its first award has just gone to Antinous: the Face of the Antique by Caroline Vout:
Published by the Henry Moore Institute to accompany the exhibition ‘Antinous: The Face of the Antique’ … [its cover] is devoid of text; it is a black and white photograph of a sculpture being released from stony earth. This picture begins a story which unfolds as one opens the book to encounter a succession of compelling photographs of large sculptural heads, eloquent as independent images and provocative as spectacle … Antinous is a book of discovery. Sensitively and beautifully designed, it transforms the experience of a fascinating exhibition into an enduring object which makes vision an act of archaeological discovery and renders the art of antiquity relevant to twenty-first-century viewers.
by Jon Lackman | 18 February 2008 | Crime, Museums
From the Boston Globe:
… as one museum after another negotiates deals [to repatriate art], and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world’s cultural inheritance.
“What’s at stake,” says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, “is the world’s right to broad and general access to its ancient heritage.” Cuno, the former head of Harvard’s art museums and someone often mentioned as a possible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the retiring director of the Metropolitan Museum, is this spring publishing a book-length argument against returning cultural artifacts, “Who Owns Antiquity?” [blurbed, by the way, by Montebello]. Cuno, who is among the most vocal and prominent voices in the debate, argues that laws meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they’re found are wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving collectors and dealers into the black market. They also present an existential threat to great “encyclopedic” museums like the MFA or Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the full breadth and diversity of the world’s cultural history in one place.
Such arguments have triggered fierce responses, not only from source country governments, but from archeologists who see in the recent repatriations and prosecutions the best chance for protecting the fragile sites from which antiquities are too often looted. Ricardo Elia, chair of the archeology department at Boston University and an expert on the problem of looting, describes Cuno as an “aesthetic fundamentalist” willing to ignore ethical and archeological values to get his hands on pretty objects. Cuno’s argument, many of his critics charge, is simply an endorsement of plunder.
by Jon Lackman | 15 February 2008 | Museums
In caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings:
… Timed to coincide with Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday (2006) and the publication of [curator Walter] Liedtke’s masterful two-volume catalogue, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this impressive exhibition puts on display every one of the museum’s 228 Dutch paintings produced from 1600 to 1800. Since normally only about a third of the collection can fit in the galleries at any one time, many of the Met’s “lesser” Dutch pictures hardly ever appear in public …
The significance of The Age of Rembrandt lies also in its unusual system of organization and scholarly focus. Rather than adopting a conventional scheme—chronological development, geographical origin, or genre—Liedtke grouped the pictures largely according to when and how they came to the Met, that is, by benefactor and collector… Liedtke’s scheme for presenting the museum’s vast collection has multiple virtues. Not least among them, it draws welcome attention to the intricate process of collection formation … The show’s developmental format also has the merit of illuminating the tastes of the collection’s principal organizers and benefactors, revealing how those preferences changed over time … Liedtke’s chosen system of presentation has yet another asset: it plays to the strengths of the collection better than any of the likely alternatives. Despite impressive size and splendor, and key recent additions, the Met’s assemblage of Dutch paintings is notably uneven … For all of its adeptness, The Age of Rembrandt also possesses some less adroit attributes. One of those features, it seems to me, is an underlying ambiguity about its fundamental objective. Is the main intention of The Age of Rembrandt to allow for the dispassionate examination and scrutiny of the Met’s Dutch holdings and the growth of the collection? Or is its aim to glorify the museum’s Dutch asset and to extol those benefactors and others who have participated in amassing it? The exhibition’s comprehensiveness—putting on display every Dutch painting in the collection—speaks clearly in favor of the former option. Other features of the hanging, however, suggest the latter to have been the operative concern … Also troubling is the exhibition’s near absence of information or argument concerning the nature of Dutch painting per se. When did the entity that we call Dutch painting begin to take shape? How did it change over time? Was it conceived differently in different Dutch towns? Was it the product of rising national consciousness? What role did religion play? These questions and others like them receive little attention here …
To be sure, the matters raised in the preceding few paragraphs have had no adverse affect upon the show’s popularity. Visitors have been mobbing The Age of Rembrandt from day one, and almost everybody seems to leave happy. What accounts for the exhibition’s enormous appeal? Surely not its comprehensiveness. My guess is that the show’s developmental structure is playing a primary role here. By presenting Dutch paintings as commodities highly desired by generations of wealthy consumers rather than as expressions of a remote, hard-to-grasp foreign culture, the current show recontextualizes the art under discussion in terms both familiar and comforting to modern Americans.
by Jon Lackman | 14 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Power enough to persuade the London Underground to ban the Royal Academy from using his “Venus” in a Tube advertisement. The Guardian writes:
… if Cranach’s nudes didn’t prevent his friendship with Martin Luther – hardly a slouch in the morality department, what with the Reformation and all – you wonder if they are really, truly, inappropriate now … I have no doubt that a little bit of a frisson was at the back of the RA’s mind when they chose this picture for the poster – which museum can afford to ignore sex appeal these days? – but really, in what kind of a society does a frisson require censorship?
by Jon Lackman | 13 February 2008 | Medieval
From The Johns Hopkins University Gazette:
Grants of $779,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow The Johns Hopkins University and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France to provide scholars with virtual access to more than half the known versions of Le Roman de la Rose, a medieval poem on the art of love that was the most-read work of French literature for hundreds of years …
The poet’s frank language inspired artists of some manuscripts to paint highly erotic images, provoking horrified responses and sparking a controversy that continued throughout much of the period. Christine de Pisan, one of the leading poets of the 15th century and an adviser to the queen of France, led one of the most spirited denunciations of the Rose. Her critique of the poem as anti-feminist has been echoed by some modern scholars.
“Rose scholarship has long focused on a few manuscripts available in Paris,” said Stephen Nichols, James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities at Johns Hopkins and co-director of the project. “The idea was to study the text of the work but not the colorful and informative paintings found on many manuscript pages.
“Access to a wide variety of manuscripts produced over a period of 250 years will now allow scholars to study the paintings and poetry together, as well as revealing evolving styles of manuscript painting and linguistic change,” Nichols said.
by Jon Lackman | 11 February 2008 | Contemporary, Museums
What percentage of art museum collections are on display at any time? If the percentage is too small, should the art travel more so that it can be seen? What about the risk to the works? According to the New York Times, Eli Broad recently made the surprising decision not to give his contemporary-art collection to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is about to open the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, “a $56 million addition”:
“I have total confidence in Lacma,” he said in an interview last month at his office in West Los Angeles. But he added firmly, “We did not build the collection and are not continuing to build it to have 80 percent of it in storage,” something that often happens with large collections once they are passed along to a single museum. “I’ve seen too much of that happen.”
by Jon Lackman | 8 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Blogger Sneakysnu analyzes the Barack Obama campaign’s imagery:
As an art historian by training, I have been fascinated by the campaign’s use of images and graphic design. It has inspired other Obama supporters to create their own images that produce a specific message: Obama as cultural icon. Below, I am going to engage in visual analysis of a series of images from the Obama campaign. I will then explain why the use of images is a crucial component of the overall campaign and has been central to his success.
by Jon Lackman | 7 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Columbia University architectural historian Hilary Ballon, who recently co-authored a report on art-history publishing with Mariët Westermann, “left Columbia last semester for a curriculum development job at New York University’s new Abu Dhabi campus,” where Westermann is vice chancellor.
by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The Sacramento Bee writes on a recent TV ad for Orangina:
… This has got to be one of the weirdest spots to air in quite a while. With a soundtrack of pulsing dance pop, here are some of the images we see: A flamingo in a G-string, sliding down a vine as if it were a stripper pole; a panda with a wardrobe malfunction, and a lizard groping a grasshopper while dirty dancing. Still, the high level of animation expertise is impressive … The ad was originally meant for French TV. But it’s become a viral hit here in the United States, thanks to (repeat after me) YouTube. But, putting aside the truly bizarre image of sexy animals for a minute, let’s note the filmmaker’s, uh, vision. The opening scene in which the bear encounters the deer on the swing? Any art historian can tell you that’s an allusion to Jean-Honore Fragnard’s erotic art masterpiece “The Swing.”
by Jon Lackman | 4 February 2008 | Uncategorized
Regarding our earlier post (‘The Abu Ghraib Effect’), see also this recent segment from NPR’s “On the Media”:
Models wearing designs from John Galliano’s Fall 2008 Mens collection looked as if they’d stepped out of Abu Ghraib prison and onto Paris runways. Do the designs fetishize torture? RISD professor Kathleen McDermott says Galliano is following in a long tradition of designers who use couture to make shocking political commentary …
by Jon Lackman | 4 February 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terri Weissman considers Stephen F. Eisenman’s new book, The Abu Ghraib Effect:
The 2004 appearance of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, which showed in horrific detail U.S. soldiers violating the human rights of supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist and Iraqi insurgency suspects … failed to instigate radical political change in the United States … Eisenman interprets this political status quo as evidence that by and large Americans took a “so what” attitude toward the Abu Ghraib torture images, an attitude he labels the “Abu Ghraib effect” … Eisenman explains the Abu Ghraib effect not through a sustained analysis of growing racism in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, or via an administration whose condoning of torture and abandonment of Geneva is a substantial change in U.S. policy, but rather through what he calls, after the early twentieth-century art historian Aby Warburg, a Pathosformel or pathos formula. In the Western classical tradition, the pathos formula is the motif of eroticized, rationalized torture as found in select art-historical examples … the pathos formula reemerges, Eisenman argues, in the twentieth century with the rise of fascism and remains alive and well today in popular culture. His evidence spans the canon of Western art …
There is much in this book to commend. It provides, for instance, a model of engaged, critical scholarship, one that makes art history relevant to today’s political concerns. Eisenman’s political commitments, moreover, are evident without ever feeling preachy or overly didactic. Dedicated to holding art history accountable for its racist representations, he debunks, in easy flowing prose, the myth that high culture somehow exists outside the desublimatory impulses that guide much of popular culture—video games, movies, pornography, etc. And in demonstrating that art’s history is not as humanist or angelic as it is often presented, he effectively shows how throughout history artists and art historians have been more than willing to service the powerful. Yet the book is not all pessimism and finger-pointing. It appears that Eisenman’s true concern is to construct a history that counters the celebration of violence as conquest and that refuses to make suffering beautiful. This counterhistory, I think rightly, is presented as the antidote to the Abu Ghraib effect …
But there is also much in this book that does not quite sit right. To begin with, it seems unfair to characterize the U.S. general population’s response to the Abu Ghraib pictures as morally blind—or worse, erotic … But perhaps my biggest concern with The Abu Ghraib Effect, and this despite a clear and admirable intention otherwise, is that Eisenman … leaves out too much of the history and politics that formed the Abu Ghraib images’s reception and thus runs the risk of falling prey to the very reifying tendencies against which Eisenman struggles.
by Jon Lackman | 1 February 2008 | Museums
From Le Monde:
The Musée d’Orsay, which is devoted to nineteenth-century art and is one of France’s most important institutions, will have a new chief as of March 7: Guy Cogeval, 52. Formerly the director of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal – he spent nine years there – he was the favorite to replace Serge Lemoine, who is reaching retirement age.
The latter’s record isn’t bad – museum visits went from 1.7 million in 2001 (the year Lemone was named director), to 3.2 million in 2007 … “I especially increased the number of temporary exhibitions, which now average 16 a year, and I developed exhibitions outside the museum’s walls, especially abroad, which welcomed 2.2 million visitors” … His greatest accomplishment, in his view, was to have built bridges between contemporary art and nineteenth-century art: “It’s an idea that everyone’s taken up, to the point of making it banal.”
However, Lemoine wasn’t welcomed [by insiders] at the Orsay … [because] this reputed professor and art historian, who had successfully renovated the Musée de Grenoble, was not a nineteenth-century specialist … Guy Cogeval, “a man of the nineteenth century,” should please them …
However, this flamboyant curator … considered iconoclastic by some, has had some harsh words for the “museum bureaucracy” and the institution that trains it, the Ecole du patrimoine …
He has mounted exhibitions on themes such as Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. “I like doing thematic exhibitions that are at the same time popular and scholarly. It’s a difficult marriage to pull off. However it doesn’t stop me from also completing monographs such as the one I did on Vuillard” …
Cogeval [also] wants to open up the Orsay to infrequently represented disciplines such as theater, opera and cinema.
by Jon Lackman | 1 February 2008 | Books, Teaching
Artist and writer Morgan Meis reviews the new Phaidon megasurvey 30,000 Years of Art: The story of human creativity across time and space:
… [I] imagine a group of art historians sitting around a table with a sixth or seventh bottle of wine giggling to each other like schoolgirls. “Take that, art theorists! We give you a book with all art and no theory. We give you a book that says nothing and simply is what it is. We give you description and description alone. Its subject matter? The entirety of the history of art. Take that!”
There is some evidence for my interpretation. Art historians and the theorists of art have been at quiet war with one another for a long time. The theorists, per their nature, accuse the historians of “mere” scholarship. The historians, per theirs, accuse the theorists of airy speculation. But it is difficult for the historians to be vocal in their accusations. The central problem is that once you enter into the verbiage you’ve already given up a good deal of ground to the theorists. You’re fighting them on their turf and they’re going to get you tangled up in a morass of “whys.” It is as if entering into the debate at all is already to concede it. Silence, the mute labor of the scholar, is thus a potent weapon in itself. Plus, it drives the theorists to distraction, like dealing with a lover who returns your letters unopened.
Other reviewers tackle 30,000 Years of Art here, here, here, and here.
