by Jon Lackman | 16 August 2010 | Books
In a recent column titled “Don’t do Art History,” Mary Beard explains why she spends untold hours hunting down images and permissions for her books:
The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show — well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image … [T]he editorial rules, as usual, expressly forbid just scanning one from another book; and almost anything on the web already does have enough DPI … You start to love those electronic archives that offer free, publishable out of copyright images; and you look especially keenly at old out of copyright books with clear plans and line drawings. But even that is not hassle-free … The next thing I write is going to have NO pictures.
by Jon Lackman | 13 August 2010 | Architecture, Books, Renaissance
In caa.reviews, Roy Eriksen considers Christoph Luitpold Frommel’s 2007 book The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance:
The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true … He channels into the volume a lifetime of in-depth studies of Italian Renaissance architecture, and presents an account that is stunning in its amassment of fact and fact-based interpretations and proposed solutions … The volume provides a much-awaited bridge between continental and European or Europe-based research on the inner principles and particular dynamics producing the variegated forms of Italian Renaissance edifices … Frommel’s work is impressive, stunning, overwhelming, yes, but also non-definitive, limited, and technical in the sense of being less than open to the evidence of the exchanges between architecture and other arts and artists working alongside architects in Early Modern Italy. This avoidance is deliberate. For Frommel does not mince his words; his is a full-frontal attack on the architectural historians who have focused on historical and cultural contexts in their approaches … According to Frommel, “architecture does not narrate”
by Jon Lackman | 12 August 2010 | Books, Theory
Christopher Kul-Want has just assembled a new anthology Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists that includes:
Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh’s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud’s postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art.
I’m a sucker for books like this. I call myself a sucker because they usually frustrate me more than they inspire, and yet I seem to be compelled to read each new one that appears. In Kul-Want’s, the postmodernists get more than half the book to themselves. The full list of authors: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Adorno, Kofman, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Agamben, Nancy, Badiou, and Rancière. Not a particularly surprising list, although he doesn’t necessarily pick the most conventional text from each author. (Not that the point of such a collection is to surprise.) The least familiar to me was Sarah Kofman, who, according to Kul-Want,
… proposes that the image is essentially lacunary: an image of loss. The image of loss does not possess a referent — the object of (repressed and envied) desire, such as that of the Oedipal Mother — since signification is composed of an infinite series of substitutions between one signifier and another … [T]he referent does not haunt representation in abstentia, since it exists only as an outcome of the structure of representation. In other words, the fiction of a referent is understood outside of a dialectical relationship to truth or idealism, a position traditionally occupied by the Oedipal Mother … [Unlike Lacan] Kofman believes that the language of representation inevitably reveals its own structure through the processes of condensation and displacement that, as Freud proposed, primarily work through fantasies, dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, and works of art.
This for me falls into the frustration category, I’m afraid.
Kul-Want includes no Marx, de Saussure, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Irigaray, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Said, or Spivak – all of whom appear in Jae Emerling’s similarly sized 2005 volume Theory for Art History. Emerling in turn has no Hegel, Nancy, or Rancière, and I assume the selections are generally shorter, considering the longer list of authors. For a volume that includes art historians alongside theorists, try the 2009 edition of Donald Preziosi’s assuredly surprising The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. On the theory side, you only get Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Benjamin, because the majority of the book is given over to figures such as Vasari, Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg, Wind, Gombrich, Panofsky, Schapiro, Baxandall, Bal, Bryson, and Summers, as well as a host of other names, many of them lesser known.
There’s one thing worse than hearing a psychoanalyst prattle on about art – a philosopher prattling on about art!!
Hopefully this won’t dissuade actual Historians, or even Art Scholars like Andrew Graham Dixon and Martin Kemp from keeping up their great work.
H
philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy …
words about art have nothing to do with art
I’m not opposed to philosophers or psychoanalysts writing on art and have enjoyed some of both at times. For me Kant and Barthes have been particularly stimulating. But there seems to be something about the anthology format that makes them seem particularly impenetrable and unlovely. Remove their words from their original context and something essential is lost — particularly when an entire book is being reduced to a short excerpt. Similarly, I rarely become enamored with a poem upon finding it in an anthology, or even in the poet’s own collected poems — the original chapbooks are the only way to go for me.
Regarding the idea that “words about art have nothing to do with art,” I have to disagree. No art arises from vision alone. Artists are inevitably affected by their reading of and conversation with friends, patrons, critics, historians, and theorists and psychoanalysts, at times. So too is the artwork’s reception affected by language.
I sometimes think we give too much credence to philosophers’ writings on art -if for no other reason than that most of the time these thinkers are writing about beauty and aesthetics, not necessarily art, though they project ideas of beauty onto art. The history of art and the history of beauty are not the same thing. Eco wrote about this in the introduction to his History of Beauty.
“philosophers on art should get no more credence than they give artists on philosophy … ”
So much for an interdisciplinary approach.
I have to agree with Jonathan. When thoughtful and intelligent people write about a topic you love (and is the foundation of your professional activity), even if it is out of their primary field, it is worth paying attention.
by Jon Lackman | 11 August 2010 | Americas, Books
The hefty new book The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History by Aldona Jonaitis and Aaron Glass appears to be the definite take on this fascinating subject. Exploring the pole’s origins along the Pacific Northwest coast as well as its afterlives in aboriginal and popular culture, this book “is situated comfortably within the transdisciplinary field of visual culture studies,” melding history, art history, anthropology, and media studies:
[F]or the Native chief who erected a pole originally, the totem pole is a material record of the privilege that his extended family has to depict certain images, and of the lavish potlatch – a feast at which valuables are distributed by the hosts to the guests – that celebrated the pole’s raising and enhanced the host’s standing in his community … Although aesthetic sophistication may confer additional prestige on a pole’s carver or owner, totem poles were and are not typically objects of artistic contemplation, much less worship, for the communities from which they come … The inhabitants of the [Pacific] Northwest Coast developed cultures quite distinct from those of aboriginal people elsewhere in North America … It was among these hierarchical societies blessed with abundant, easily carved cedar that the totem pole developed … They likely developed in one particular region, around Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) … There were and are variants … “memorial poles” … “mortuary poles” … “welcome posts” placed at the entry points of villages, and “shame poles” or “ridicule poles” erected to humiliate or challenge rival chiefs …
[P]oles generally depict heraldic crests representing beings that, in the past, had interacted with an ancestor and given him the privilege to portray their identifying image … However, in the contemporary popular imagination … totem poles have become signifiers of a great nation, inspirations for poetry and song, symbols of generalized indigeneity, exoticisms appropriate for fashion, strange elements in advertisements, and props for the most unlikely of film scenes … Many misconceptions have followed these poles … [P]oles do not tell narrative stories that can be “read” from top to bottom or bottom to top like a comic strip or hieroglyph … [P]ositions of figures on the pole have little bearing on their significance, despite the cliché “low man on the totem pole”: in fact, some groups put the most important family crest on the bottom, at eye level. Neither are poles suffused with spirituality, despite repeated attempts to portray them as such … Even the name “totem pole” is based on a misunderstanding … [Anthropologists] defined the totem as a particular lineage group’s protective animal that cannot be slain or eaten … However, animal images on Northwest Coast poles represent family crests or narrative characters that are neither protective nor subject to culinary taboo.
by Jon Lackman | 9 August 2010 | Books, Renaissance
Diane Wolfthal, author of the widely reviewed books The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400-1530 (1989) and Images of Rape: The “Heroic Tradition” and its Alternatives (1999), now has a new book out – In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe. “This book explores images whose sexual content has all too often been either ignored or denied,” examining canonical and obscure art as well as material culture. “[It] demonstrates that the insistence that sexual intercourse should be confined to marriage, performed in a particular manner and reserved for the purpose of procreation was subverted and undermined both in the visual culture of the period and in reality.”
In the Renaissance, much like today, viewers were confronted with a growth in the number and variety of sexual images. One finds an abundance of same-sex desire, adultery, prostitution, and violence. The images made and consumed by certain individuals of that era reveal them to have been more frank and open-minded sexually than many 21st-century westerners. One drypoint etching she discusses, from 1485, depicts a man and a woman, an engaged couple most likely. It contains several traditional symbols of love – the touch of the hand, the turning of the head, the walk together, the wreath, the falcon. This same artist produced, at the same time, in the same style, an etching of two men hunting. They walk, they touch, one turns his head toward the other, he wears a wreath, there is a falcon. This is also an amorous couple. There are minor differences between the two images, but the artist’s intent is clear, Wolfthal says – to depict the two couples as identical, and therefore equal. This is a powerful visual statement, and she strikingly compares it with the events of September 1, 2002, when the The New York Times began including in its Weddings pages notices of same-sex marriages (and commitment ceremonies). The image that these pages presented – photographs of gay and straight couples in identical poses and outfits – inspired double takes in readers and energized supporters and opponents of gay marriage alike.
[...] Another book I can’t wait to read (what a title, ahem), via an indispensable blog. [...]
by Jeremy Miller | 5 August 2010 | Museums, Renaissance, Teaching, Theory
A show at the Yale University Art Museum points to an issues that many graduate programs seems to be addressing in one way or another. Laurence Kanter says:
“Original works of art have been forgotten. They’re being used as data, without any sense of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.”
He added: “No one wants to turn art history back 150 years. But we’re lacking an important tool that we threw out the window 70 years ago.”
In my graduate program (graduated in 2007), post-1950s theories of methodology were emphasized, even while we were encouraged to maintain an object-centered approach. Our initial assignment in my first graduate seminar was to perform a roughly ten-page formal analysis from a work of art actually viewed (not from reproductions). As mundane as that may sound, I believe we all learned much from performing the analysis and hearing others do so.
I’m curious to hear from those with recent graduate school experience regarding the approach in their programs concerning the relationships between theory and object / post-disciplinary approaches and traditional methods such as iconography and conoisseurship.
The goals of the graduate program are a factor. Some work in close proximity to local art museums and require museum internships, some do not or cannot.
Faculty reputation and background is a factor. Do the faculty publish a lot of theory, or are they from a museum background?
Geography and money are factors. There are some excellent art history grad programs in Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, and Georgia, but they do not have as many immediate opportunities to see comprehensive collections as a programs in Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. Programs at urban campuses like the IFA at NYU, or well-funded research centers like the MA program at Williams, are in a unique position to be object-focused.
Academic trends are a factor. Many programs discourage traditional methods because departments push grad students to produce professional (that is, *publishable*) work. The rule of thumb is ‘don’t write anything you can’t publish.’ Suffice it to say: your methodology has some bearing on whether or not this will happen.
My MA program worked closely with local museums, my PhD program emphasizes social history (the TJ Clark variety). In my opinion, ideally one should be exposed to both the museum world and the academic world. Also, if you are a masters student in art history, you haven’t *mastered* the discipline without at least being made aware of ‘outdated’ or unpopular methods such as connoisseurship or iconography.
I think the formal analysis assignment is widely used but flawed as a tool for developing visual judgment.
True expertise a la Feigen would have to come from intensely studying not just the single example at the local museum, but scores or hundreds of examples such that you are able to pick up on the details that matter, and ignore the ones that don’t. I believe this 10,000 hour rule (as cited by Gladwell) would be indispensable for the connoisseurial skills in many fields — whether Morelli, a surgeon, a police detective, a golfer, etc., etc.
Plenty of bright sophomores can describe a painting in painfully exact detail and at stupefying length, but lack the base of visual experience to know what counts and what doesn’t.
I would also doubt whether, as long as fakes and fakers exist, connoisseurship could ever be “outdated.” That so many “advanced” academics think it is, is just a testament to profound irresponsibility. Presumably, their reasoning is, why bother to teach a useful skill when you can instead teach students complex pseudoscientific “theories” that allow them to buttress their youthful emotional reactions and left-wing reflexes with a scaffolding of pretend “evidence”?
Some might reasonably argue that it is hard to say whether anything like connoisseurship could ever exist for the entire, dispiritingly vast post-Duchampian school of readymade art. On the other hand, it could also be argued that deep familiarity with the whole artistic persona of a Gabriel Orozco or a Felix Gonzalez-Torres could allow “connoisseurial”-type skills to come into play even when deciding whether a particular pile of yogurt lids, dish rags, Twinkie wrappers, single-serving Dorito bags, Yoo-Hoo bottles, etc., did in fact bear a plausible claim to originate in the “artist”‘s “studio,” in the absence of determinative documentation one way or the other.
One of the seminar courses offered during my master’s program was actually on connoisseurship. In addition to reading the work of connoisseurs (and detractors of connoisseurs) from the last several centuries (Morelli, Berenson, Wollheim, Riegl, Bosse, d’Argenville, Richardson, Friedlander… to name a few), we also put the connoisseurial skills we acquired into practice on objects of questionable attribution in the collection of the museum to which the program is attached. (Well, to a point, since of course we only had a semester to develop our ‘eye.’)
While it’s not an accepted methodology in and of itself, I found the connoisseur’s eye (or more specifically the emphasis put on physically looking at the object) to be a rather novel experience. It’s been my experience–and while perhaps I’m alone in this, I rather doubt it–that it can be easy to forget art starts with the object. The entire discipline of art history exists to demonstrate it doesn’t stop there, of course, but I think it’s quite easy to go off on some tangent about an object and forget to look at it again. Sometimes when you do it’s surprising to see how far (off) you’ve gotten.
This evolution was inevitable. As a scientist with an interest in Art History, the gulf that exists between Science and connoisseurship was made evident to me first hand in a recent experience regarding a Botticelli piece.
Art schools can only benefit from incorporating awareness of the scientific method on top of their education about symbolism, aesthetics and allegory.
Empirical study looks at data gaps with consternation, whereas connoisseurship can brush over ambiguities with florid language and leave us none of the wiser.
As long as people are clear on why they are taking a scientific approach -eg. attributions, dating, as opposed to interpretation of meaning, then the two modes of analysis will have no problem co-existing, and strengthening the factual foundation of Art History knowledge.
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
Connoisseurship on art history courses in the U.K. is a rare thing. I can think of only a few people who would teach it, including me- and probably under the guise of something like ‘Art History Methodologies’ or similar. Now, the connoisseurship issue seems to have relocated to the public museum where it was in the 19th century. It seems to centre on the debate between “scientific connoisseurship” and traditional connoisseurship, although intuitive describes the latter better. During his tenure as director of the London NG,, in the mid 19th century, Sir Charles Eastlake wrote:
“The term connoisseur “indicates an acquaintance with facts rather than with truths, with appearances and results rather than with their causes. In its general acceptation it comprehends a familiarity with the characteristics of epochs, schools, and individual masters, together with that nicer discrimination which detects imitations from original works. The chief distinction between the connoisseur and the amateur is that the knowledge of the first assists the exercise of judgment while that of the latter tends to kindle the imagination.”
At times in its history, the amateur type has influenced purchases and shaped acquisition policy at the NG, which was evident to me on visiting the Close Encounters show in London a few weeks ago with its parade of fakes, misattributions etc based on personal whim and imagination, rather than judgement. Inevitably, scientific connoisseurship has reacted against the amateur ethos with a vengeance; but as I’ve said before, we do need the intuitive side of connoisseurship to intervene when scientific connoisseurship is used to “validate” fakes, often purchased with public funds.
Although connoisseurship should be taught more to foster visual acuity, it now impacts on moral, economic and political topics, my point being it has greater relevance for other disciplines as well as art history itself. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.
@David Packwood.. I would imagine that a 19thC definition of the term is no longer representative of the bigger picture. Given the increasing reports of difficulties faced by Art History as an institution, I would hope there is a concerted move to make the syllabus something that combines the strengths of both the Humanities and Sciences. If getting an Art History degree entailed some type of scientific or achaeological qualification back in my day, I would have jumped at it. The only thing on offer to me at local institutions was almost entirely dedicated to appreciation of style and allegory, with a pinch of history thrown in. It was quite dismaying!
Hiyaz- Don’t hold your breath where modern art historians and the scientific method are concerned.
I think the only place you’re likely to see a convergence of art analysis and an empirical approach is on curatorial and conservation programme.
But it just occurred to me there’s art crime too- forensics etc, but we know how well that’s going down with traditional art historians!
@David Packwood – it’s a shame these traditional Art Historians are so resistant! You would have a better idea than myself about how well populated and funded art history courses currently are – surely things must be going sufficiently well for them to close themselves off like that?!
funding is drying up fast in the U.K. i think the economic meltdown and re-structuring of universities- forced by govt- might result in greater working across the disciplines. my research is becoming more interdisciplinary, e.g. baroque anatomy and art.
@David Packwood! Everything is becoming interdisciplinary! We’re experiencing this in the Health Sector too! I personally welcome it – I have learnt a whole new set of skills which increase my knowledge and ability to work in different types of jobs. By multi-skilling art history students, I would hope they would become more employable than the present perception is. Did you see this about US college degrees: http://2.ly/cjtn It’s a shame! I hope something can be done about it.
by Jon Lackman | 5 August 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Last February, a conference convened to discuss the “Art History of Games.” This February, a CAA session will address “Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga.” And now on view in Paris is “MuseoGames: Une Histoire à Rejouer” (“MuseoGames: A Story to be Replayed”), as ARTINFO reports:
This multimedia exhibition chronicles three decades of rapid technological advance along with the new role that video games have taken on in the home. In the “Collection” area, Atari consoles, first-generation synthesizers, and other such fossils are displayed on stands like pop-art objects … Video screens place each game into its historical context, with captions and commentary. Supported by critical and sociological analysis, the exhibition also shows the significant influence of video games on contemporary art.
by Jon Lackman | 4 August 2010 | Uncategorized
The Los Angeles Times has written an interesting profile of Getty Research Institute director Thomas Gaehtgens. It seems unfortunate to me that they decided to bill this article as a demonstration that Gaehtgens has “quietly gained acclaim” and “gained the admiration of his staff,” when the only proof of this in the piece is two admiring quotes from people who report to him. Some outside perspective would have been nice. But it makes good reading anyway:
[In] early 2009 … he had to define priorities and slash his budget by 25%. (His annual budget is now $20 million, with a yearly acquisition budget around $2 million.) … [He] took the opportunity to make sure that most of his 175 employees — about half of whom have advanced degrees beyond college — had the chance to do real research, not just shelving books or shepherding other scholars’ projects … One example is the launch of the Getty Research Journal, an annual arts publication that includes articles by Getty staff … [A] dozen or so projects now underway are all over the map, including the history of alchemy in medieval Europe, a look at German art sales from 1920 to 1945 and a study of Latin American Surrealism.
by Jon Lackman | 3 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Rosalyn Deutsche’s new book Hiroshima after Iraq (based on her Wellek Library Lectures) examines three contemporary video works whose subject is the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Its press release announces that Deutsche “reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.” In her introduction, she writes:
Two years ago … the journal October … asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?” … October’s impatience with current antiwar activity in art – and its paternal demand that younger generations identify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics – is symptomatic of a more longstanding mood in art criticism, a mood that emerged in the late 1970s and that I have elsewhere called, following Walter Benjamin, left melancholy … [M]elancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide the subjective and the material, the public and the private, and the social and the psychic as though war has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no work of the psyche in the waging of war. In this, antiwar criticism mimics dominant discourse about the war.
Deutsche has identified three works that she believes represent “the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war”:
[B]ecause contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers; because, in so doing, art has developed strategies for what Theodor Adorno called turning toward the subject; and because these strategies question the rigid forms of identity and triumphalist fantasies whose maintenance helps cause war, there is, I think, a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis … I want to use these essays to explore art’s ability to combine a concern for subjectivity with a concern about the problem of war and therefore to resist both dominant and left melancholic discourses.
According to Deutsche, After Hiroshima mon amour, by Silvia Kolbowski, “challenges the myth of pure identity – individual, racial, ethnic, and national … [T]he multiplicity and uncertainty of the characters’ identities … block spectatorial identification and disidentification, which work to fix identity.”
OfLet Me Count the Ways, by Leslie Thornton, Deutsche says:
[A]s Jacqueline Rose writes about [Sylvia] Plath, Thornton, too … ‘forces the viewer to enter into something which she or he is often willing to consider only on condition of seeing it as something in which psychically no less than historically, she or he plays absolutely no part.’ In the case of Let Me Count the Ways, this disavowed something has to do with group behavior, from which no individual is immune’ …it is [an] important function of the group to shield individuals from guilt feelings by sanctioning aggressive impulses.
She turns finally to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection:
Insisting on inadequate vision, the Hiroshima Projection belongs within a feminist practice of contemporary art that produces what have been called critical images, images that undo the viewing subject’s narcissistic fantasies, fantasies that blind us to otherness, either rejecting it or assimilating it to the knowing ego or the Same .. [C]ritical images trouble the visual field, promoting non-indifferent vision and contributing to the transformation not only of the blind eye but also of the deaf ear. Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection increases this transformative potential by engaging viewers in a kind of seeing – and listening – known as witnessing, an act that is crucial in our time of collective, human-inflicted, traumas, such as war and torture, that call out for witnesses … [It] also facilitates the emergence of a public sphere in which the appearance of others is prized because, questioning the social order, it keeps democracy from disappearing.
I find myself buoyed by the subtlety of her analysis, the breadth of her erudition, and the optimism of her vision. I wonder if there’s any chance that these artworks will actually do the things that she imagines they can. I wonder if her (and my and October’s) hopes – that art could stand for something, do something, make itself useful – are misplaced. It’s not that I believe that “poetry makes nothing happen” or in “art for art’s sake.” It’s that I am perpetually reminded how slippery, unpredictable, and chameleon-like artworks are. How easily the pacifist’s emblem become the tyrant’s trophy. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, perhaps it’s enough that I enjoyed the book, that it could “teach the free man how to praise.”
Thank you for your review of this text. I’m currently researching Deutsche’s work with regard to the public and private experience of wearable art and found your presentation of her latest text very interesting.
by Jon Lackman | 2 August 2010 | Uncategorized
There are of course other kinds of diversity besides those of academic background.
When completing the U.S. government’s “Survey of Earned Doctorates” today, I noticed that it asked about race/ethnicity, and so I went online to see what the latest data was on that for art history.
Of the 207 people who received PhDs in art history, art criticism, or art conservation in 2008, 161 were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. These are the only people SED tabulates ethnicity on. Of those 161 people, zero reported themselves to be American Indian, six Asian, three Black, two Hispanic, three Other, three Multi-race, and 144 White. That adds up to 89% white.
By contrast, the PhD recipients in “Letters” (English/American literature & classics) who were citizens or permanent residents were 71% white. In philosophy, the figure is 69%; in history, 65%.
By the way, among humanities fields, only German literature and Musicology/Ethnomusicology are more white (94% and 91%).
by Jon Lackman | 30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop out, but the rest of the students seem to fare as well as conventionally trained applicants, and they help diversify the nation’s pool of doctors.
I think the art history field would benefit similarly were its graduate programs to recruit and admit a greater number of unconventional students. Admissions committees everywhere seem to focus on the same criteria — g.p.a., test scores, the number of college art history courses taken, and recommendations from respected figures in the field — as the best predictors of how well students will do in coursework and how likely they will be to stick around for the PhD. These criteria have validity, but they exclude some highly creative individuals who don’t score well on traditional measures and don’t have extensive background in art history but have the capacity to make a big impact on the field.
Note that many undergraduate institutions have anemic art-history departments (that may or may not even offer a major in art history). Even undergraduates with access to a good department may not discover it until late in their college career, particularly when their high school education and hometown museum offerings did little to ignite their interest in art history.
Art history graduate schools are going to have to get creative if we’re to have any hope of diversifying the field. As things stand, the population of graduate students seems to be composed overwhelmingly of wealthy white students who grew up with regular access to art and/or attended the private high schools that offer (or even require) art history courses — a population that, despite its merits, doesn’t have the widest possible set of experiences and perspectives.
Thanks for this great post.
The PhD program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine has some of this diversity in its grad students. Students come in with Art History and Film and Media Studies backgrounds, but also Sociology, Science Studies, American Studies, Gender Studies, and others.
The Irvine PhD program is interdisciplinary in nature (the faculty sit in the Art History and Film and Media Studies departments), which helps. But, visual studies is also a discipline more open to such diversity than art history has been traditionally.
I would imagine this diversity may also be found in Rochester’s Visual Culture program.
Thank you for this comment, Mary. It is very informative? Are you currently involved with University of California, Irvine?
by Jon Lackman | 29 July 2010 | Contemporary
On The Huffington Post, Daniel Grant writes:
For some time, the ground has been shifting, moving the line between what is and is not considered acceptable for artists to pay for … Critics, museum curators and art historians regularly are approached by artists to write catalogue essays; for some of them, it is a lucrative sideline, since the going rate is one or two dollars per word and essayists often require a minimum of 1,000 words (critic Peter Frank claimed that also may be “an extra charge if the writing needs to be turned around quickly”). The New York City-based artist career development company, Katharine T. Carter & Associates, has formalized his process, placing on retainer a number of New York area art critics who for two dollars per word, 600 words minimum, will write catalogue essays … Artists need to keep their hopes and expectations in check, when hiring a noted critic. Just because Richard Vine, the managing editor of Art in America and another of Katharine T. Carter’s critics, wrote about a given artist does not mean that artist has any “in” with the magazine — in fact, none of the artists he has written up as part of his association with Katharine T. Carter has ever been reviewed or profiled in Art in America. “You have to realize that you haven’t bought this person body and soul for the price of an essay,” Eleanor Heartney said, adding that “all of us who write these catalogue essays are trading on our reputations.”
I’ve heard the rumor, several times, that some art critics accept free or discounted works from artists (or their galleries) whom they review favorably, although I’ve never seen the proof to back it up.
Can critics, who offer services for hire, still consider themselves critics? What then is the distinction between writing a critical essay, and getting paid $2/word to write about an untalented artist?
Although there is no real means of enforcement, art historians accepting works of art from artists about whom they have written are breaching professional ethics. Here is what CAA’s Standards and Guidelines says on the matter:
C. A more difficult situation is one in which an art historian is offered the gift of a work of art by an artist who is a friend, or about whom he or she will be writing or has written. There is no question but that in most cases the art historian’s publication about the artist will contribute to the increased value of his or her work, as well as of the art historian’s gift. The art historian is then placed in a situation where questions of conflict of interest can be legitimately raised. The tactful but outright refusal of gifts from artists may be frustrating, but such practice insures integrity of the process and should not incur loss of respect from the artist. To have works of art given by artists to members of your family similarly creates a conflict of interest.
by Jon Lackman | 28 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The Art Newspaper editor Anna Somers Cocks writes:
[In 1944 London University agreed to] “maintain and preserve the Warburg Library in perpetuity, provide it with a suitable building near the university centre and keep it adequately equipped and staffed” … So why is the Warburg fighting for its life against London University? … There are now fears that the University plans to move the Warburg’s library from its building in Woburn Square and put it with its own library in its headquarters. In 2007 it squeezed the Warburg by raising its space charge by £500,000, which eats up half the Institute’s £1.3m annual grant so that it now has an annual deficit of half a million … The University is also trying to curtail the Warburg’s independence after “converging” the administration of the Warburg library into London Research Library Services, which will be appointing the Warburg’s next librarian, who will no longer be a scholar-librarian, as has been the case from Fritz Saxl onwards. There is no money to appoint a successor to the head of the Warburg’s photographic archive, the essential complement to the books in the integrated Warburgian approach to ideas … All this suggests that the University does not acknowledge its obligations under the 1944 trust deed, but what is almost more serious is that in its bureaucratic way the University seems to have lost sight of the human reality of what makes a place of learning and intellectual creativity. Administrative synergies will not do it; money and a fine building do not necessarily do it, as the Getty Research Institute has shown. Despite all its facilities, that has never stirred people’s minds much or aroused affection. The Warburg, on the other hand, attracts scholars from all over the world and from many fields. They congregate around its books, each floor with its own theme: basement and first floor, Image; second floor, Word; third floor, Orientation; fourth floor, Action. Action, for example, embraces social history, political history, magic and science, while Orientation is western and eastern religion and philosophy. Ideas seem very accessible, almost tangible here.
The description of the idiosyncratic arrangement of the books by theme reminds me somehow of the Barnes Foundation’s eccentric curatorial vision — more evidence for the unique value of individual judgment.
Hypothesis: institutions and collections created by quirky millionaires are more interesting and valuable than equally well-funded institutions created by armies of sober nonprofit employees.
by Jon Lackman | 28 July 2010 | Architecture
From The Telegraph:
Professor John Burland has spent the last two decades striving to save – and understand – the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After defying gravity, Italian bureaucracy and accusations of corruption, it seems he’s finally cracked the case … By a quirk of local geography, Pisa’s water-table rose higher on the tower’s north side, often reaching within one foot in rainy season, and this gave the tower an annual ratchet southward. Armed with this vital information, in 2003, Burland introduced a new drainage system beneath the piazza’s north side, one that lowered and stabilised the water-table, so there’s no kick in either direction. Problem solved. The inclination continues to be monitored daily by the OPP and new figures reveal that the tower didn’t move at all between 2003 and 2009. ‘It’s stopped leaning completely …’ says Burland with a mixture of pride and relief. The Pisans, though, are a hard people to please. Some accuse Burland et al of sterilising their tower – for, part of its old mystique had been the possibility it might collapse at any moment, the frisson that a voyeuristic visitor might witness such a fall. ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ Burland shrugs … ‘It’s amazing that the Tower of Pisa should remain so fashionable, even at 800 years old,’ Burland smiles. Not bad for a building that was never meant to lean to begin with.
by Jon Lackman | 27 July 2010 | Contemporary
From The Moscow News, an update to the story of the censored curators:
Moscow’s Tagansky District Court convicted prominent museum curators Yury Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev of “inciting hatred and denigrating human dignity” by staging a controversial art exhibit – but allowed them to avoid a jail term, ordering them instead to pay 350,000 roubles ($11,500) in fines. The verdict held that the exhibition subjected Christians to “psychological trauma,” “moral suffering” and “denigrated their human dignity”. Judge Svetlana Aleksandrova also slammed the curators for their “cynical, reckless attitude toward the religious feelings of Orthodox believers” in knowingly selecting artwork previously banned from public display.
by Ben Lima | 27 July 2010 | Architecture
The architect Günter Behnisch, who designed the 1972 Olympic Park in Munich together with engineer Frei Otto, died July 12th in Stuttgart, at the age of 88. (more…)
Deconstructivism seems to be the word of choice whenever we come across a building with a twisted order. You can’t help it but to wonder why DERRIDA him self didn’t reject the association between Deconstruction in Philosophy and what has come to be known as Deconstructivism in Architecture. He knew that his word is capable of prompting Morphological impressions, not only that, some ugly ones too. That’s why he always insisted that Deconstruction is not Destruction. I can say that it’s an attempt to distinguish between the interest in the Exteriority of a Phenomenon, which what the word Destruction denotes, and his deconstructive method which is purely historical.
Deconstruction is a method by which one can grasp Phenomenon; be it an Object, a Text or even Human Subjectivity. The method starts from the presumption that every Phenomenon has a history. In order to grasp any of that one has to read through the different layer that might have constructed this history in the first place. In Deconstruction reading takes various strategies mostly derived from various conflicting philosophical doctrines. What Deconstruction does is to reconcile such conflicts by presenting the various strategies as affirmative rather than dismissive of one another.
In Architecture the method was supposed to be used not just for reading but also for writing; that is the making of Architecture. I don’t see anything wrong with that because in Deconstruction oppositions are affirmative and not dismissive. This is to say that reading in some ways is writing. But what I find unsettling is the linking of Architectural motifs such Ordered Chaos or Fragmentation with Deconstruction. Being deeply entrenched in Methodology I See that as far as Architecture is concerned Deconstruction is to do with the Program of Architecture and not the straight forwardness in negotiating Morphology. As a matter of fact I can see no reason why can’t a Bauhaus building be based on Deconstructivist Methodology. Now if we are so interested in labeling styles and in this particular incident the work of GÜNTER BEHNISCH I suggest why not try Expressionism, I believe to large extent this is a theory of Morphology. And maybe a comparison between HANS SHARON and GÜNTER can be the relevant thing to do in this respect.
by Jon Lackman | 23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice:
As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best of all possible worlds … Although from the 1960s onwards so-called “underground” artists did explore styles – abstraction, surrealism – condemned by the party as decadent, true liberty of expression came only with the fall of communism. It is rare to see this poignant history mapped out in a single exhibition. That Russians! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary achieves this feat with clarity and grace is partly a credit to the curators, Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, and partly a testament to the diverse yet complementary passions of two Italian collectors, Alberto Sandretti and Alberto Morgante, on whose holdings the show is based … Numbering a staggering 22,000 works and encompassing avant-garde, socialist realism and unofficial styles, Sandretti’s collection is indicative of a breed who had indiscriminate enthusiasm for all things Soviet … Alberto Morgante’s collection has different ideological origins. Concentrating on avant-garde and underground art, it was purchased almost entirely through Franco Miele, an art critic.
However, an article in ARTnews by Konstantin Akinsha argues that “many of the works attributed to Russian masters … are not what they’re claimed to be”:
[B]oth collections were previously unknown, and scholars and experts in the field of the Russian avant-garde are puzzled by the avant-garde art on view. The names are familiar: Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Lissitzky, Tatlin, Goncharova, Larionov, and so forth, but the pictures in many cases don’t match the labels. Experts in the Russian avant-garde, a field in which fakes abound, are particularly concerned with provenance and are suspicious of any work that was not exhibited or published during the lifetime of the artist said to have created it … [One] previously unknown work is Girl with Goat, attributed to Marc Chagall and dated 1911. ARTnews brought this picture to the attention of the Paris-based Marc Chagall Committee, which branded it an “obvious fake” (faux évident).
This Alibi Online review has images.
by Jon Lackman | 22 July 2010 | Awards, Books, Renaissance
A Virginia newspaper, The News Leader, profiles UVA professor Cammy Brothers, whose book Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture recently won the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians:
Michelangelo stands apart from his contemporaries. But is he a genius, as his historical legacy would have us believe? … Brothers counters the commonly held notion of genius as a function of spontaneity, which Michelangelo himself set forth. He encouraged the idea that he never studied with anyone, and that his gifts just came to him naturally. Brothers argues, “What we see in his drawings – and the same can be said about Leonardo – is that there is actually evidence of tremendous labor. There is a huge amount of work that goes into anything he comes up with and the drawings document that in a way that the finished works cannot.” The drawing evidence also counters the idea of genius as having an endless supply of ideas that “crop up in a spontaneous manner.” Michelangelo kept his drawings as an archive “from which he keeps drawing. He goes back to old ideas revising them and repurposing them,” she said. In the book, Brothers focuses on two aspects of Michelangelo’s work – the relation between the drawings he made of the human figure and his architecture, and what these drawings, considered together, reveal about Michelangelo and his way of thinking. Looking at different aspects of an artist’s work together is rare for art historians. In Michelangelo’s case, that means they would be examining either his paintings, sculptures or architecture, Brothers said, but rarely two or three of those genres together. Another rarity is to study architectural drawings removed from the investigation of what they reveal about the built architectural work … “What is unusual about my work is that I was interested in the drawings for their own sake, in terms of what they reveal about Michelangelo’s way of thinking,” she said … Brothers’ next project will focus on the work of Giuliano da Sangallo.
by Jon Lackman | 21 July 2010 | Conservation
The L.A. Times recently did a piece on the ongoing diagnosis of the Ghent Altarpiece:
Anne van Grevenstein, an art conservator who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, along with Ronald Spronk, an art historian from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, head a team of art experts and trainees conducting a detailed technical analysis of the work, a project funded by a $230,000 grant from the Panel Paintings Initiative of the Getty Foundation … Eventually, the material collected will be put online for other scholars to study. “It seems logical to do,” says Spronk, “but I don’t think it’s ever been done” … At the end of 2008, the foundation launched the Panel Paintings Initiative and set about identifying projects in need of funding — both to help the conservation of noted work but also to help train a new generation of conservators. Conservation of paintings on wooden panels is a highly specialized field, restricted to perhaps a dozen people in the world. “We realized that most of those current experts will retire within the next decade,” says [Getty Foundation director Deborah] Marrow.
Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer tells a story of conservator training paying off:
“An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing ‘The Gross Clinic’ Anew,” an exhibition featuring the just-restored painting, opens at the [Philadelphia] Art Museum’s Perelman Building Saturday … The Gross Clinic, now owned jointly by the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has received the most extensive and informed restoration in its history, an astonishing effort led by [Mark S.] Tucker, now 55, the museum’s vice chair of conservation and its senior painting conservator. The restoration was made possible by a massive public effort in 2006, led by the academy and the Art Museum, to raise $68 million and buy the work when Jefferson [Medical College] announced its intent to sell it to a pair of out-of-town museums … Julie Berkowitz, former university art historian at Thomas Jefferson University, said she was “dazzled by the conservation” work done by Tucker and his team … It has taken decades to accumulate the experience and information to bring off the feat, and no one has had more experience with Eakins than Tucker.
by Jon Lackman | 20 July 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums
Tolu Ogunlesi’s review of Art Basel alerted me to a recent provocative essay by professor and Aachron Editions publisher Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “The Curator as Culture Broker (A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art),” which he recently presented at a UC-Santa Cruz conference The Task of the Curator: Translation, Intervention and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice:
Enwezor’s curatorial focus is … African artists who live and work in the West … [He] produces ahistorical interpretations of contemporary African art in general … advancing a very self-referential narrative of contemporary practice using limited number of artists recycled in closed-loop exhibitions. Enwezor’s curatorial intervention is also built on a notion of globalization that assumes the free flow of cultural producers: however, this notion is patently false … Consider [the] ongoing transformation of African studies in the American academy: almost all academic positions focused on African art history are now being offered to scholars of the African Diaspora, and the field faces an increasing reluctance by researchers to conduct “Africa-focused” research in Africa. Consider also that museum collections devoted to contemporary African art are primarily filled with artworks from African artists based in the West … Enwezor came to curating from a rather undefined background with negligible training in African art history but with an active engagement with New York art of the 1990s … Enwezor’s various publications show large gaps in his understanding of art history and African art history in particular. Furthermore, Enwezor’s elevation (and in fact, the elevation of African curators in general within the American discourse of contemporary art) served to displace African American artists and art activists who were, at the beginning of the 1990s, starting to demand greater representation at the table. Shifting attention to African curators allowed the mainstream art establishment to completely cut out these bothersome African Americans. The fact that Enwezor has largely not collaborated with these African American curators and critics speaks volumes about his own complicity in this process of marginalization … Africa is also being renewed in response to the challenges of modernization and globalization. We must try to understand its unique responses to these processes rather than try to impose the aesthetic preferences of contemporary Western art on it. Enwezor has clearly failed on this front and his curatorial practice should now be subject to a formal criticism that is so far lacking.
Along the way, Ogbechie also has some choice words for contemporary curators generally:
In the run up of the economic bubble, hedge fund managers in particular became star figures of pop culture by leveraging financial brokerage to stratospheric levels and manipulating financial information to create newer and more esoteric financial instruments that yielded greater levels of profit. The move away from the “basic labor” of banking and money management into this rarefied field of financial information brokerage provides a parallel to the rise and role of the curator in contemporary practice … [W]hereas artists in the era of modernism claimed an avant-garde status and the authority to define the horizon of meanings of their work, contemporary curators have by and large usurped this role … [T]he contemporary curator is a culture broker in pretty much the same way a hedge-fund manager brokers financial instruments … It suggests that curators benefit from their work in a manner completely out of proportion to the value of their input.
His essay appears to be attracting notice.
As far as I know, Enwezor has not (yet) responded.
For a review of Ogbechie’s talk and the conference generally, read this account by PhD student Johanna Gosse.
After reading Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie’s analysis I was left with the feeling that he is angry about something that went unstated. It is legitimate to debate the merits of continental versus diasporic definitions of Africa, and I agree that Enwezor has often focused on the diaspora. I don’t, however, think it is fair to scapegoat Enwezor’s work as a regime that disempowers both African artists and African American scholars. No one curator or scholar has that much power. Instead I see Enwezor as someone who is to be commended for his work to open up dialogues across cultures. The claim that Enwezor is “legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispenses with the continent itself as a historical theater of contemporary art and visual culture engagements” seems particularly hollow to me, given that one of his major exhibitions was the Johannesburg Biennale of 1997. Similarly, the idea that Enwezor focuses almost entirely on the west is dubious, given that his innovative approach to Documenta 11 was to host conversations about contemporary art across the world—including in New Delhi and Lagos. Full disclosure: I took two courses from Enwezor in graduate school, but I have only heard Ogbechie speak once.
I know what Mary is referring to, but what does that have to do with Art History per se?
There is definitely something hugely broken with imaging rights.
As much as having a book with no pictures would be easier – it would also make something considerably less appealing to many.
I was going to do a post on this because I have similar problems; although with me it’s not so much about tracking down the image- more about chasing people up in museums, orgs that hold the image rights.That can be frustrating and time-consuming.
Little did I know that an art history career wasn’t about coming up with original research, but negotiating the mine field of publishers, copy right agencies and other wolves lurking in the forest.
Can’t help thinking this is all wired up wrong.
David
The print publishing industry as a whole is widely joked as still as stuck in the distant past.
I imagine Mary Beard was being flippant with her blog post title, but this really affects everyone, not just Art Historians. I imagine writers, legal types and publishers should work together towards a more robust solution to suit the modern publishing climate. The EFF.org exists to outline and protect bloggers, surely writers and academics have a similar body they can call upon to affect change in this area? If such a body doesn’t exist – then people need to stop lamenting and start the ball rolling on it. Waiting for the publishing industry to make the first move is no going to happen!
H
Mine is due out this fall from a major univ press — my budget around $8000 for images, fees, permissions, fed ex. Contracts with museums, VAGA, ARS. In one case, 16 mos. to receive important rights. Careless editing and frustrating communication. If I had realized, I wouldn’t have. I agree; next book no images. But also one step further — straight to Kindle!
Question:if reproducing text for the purpose of criticism is protected as “fair use”, why does a similar protection not exist for images?
I have been reading Susan Bielstein’s book, Permissions: A Survival Guide. Incredibly useful, and not (often?) taught in graduate school.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226046372