by Jon Lackman | 29 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Economist:
It was bad enough that an art exhibition attracted the attention of Russia’s criminal-justice authorities. It was worse that the exhibition was in Moscow’s Sakharov centre and museum, one of the few institutions in Russia that stands squarely behind the tradition of human rights, exemplified by the saintly physicist and dissident for whom it is named. Now prosecutors have said that they want the organisers of the 2007 “Forbidden Art” exhibition, the director of the centre, Yuri Samodurov, and Andrei Yerofeev, an art historian, to be sentenced to a three-year jail term for “debasing the religious beliefs of citizens and inciting religious hatred”.
by Jon Lackman | 28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video).
He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript:
1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the moment it is no longer either modern or contemporary.
2. There is a profound shift that is occurring at many art museums, a move from being repositories or treasure houses to social spaces where the relationship between what is seen and who is seeing it and with whom becomes as important as what is on the wall. This is a shift away from the idea of the aura of the object, as Walter Benjamin might have understood it, to the idea of the aura of the public, and successful museums will figure out how to navigate this shift without losing the ability to foreground the experience of the public in the works of art they believe in.
3. A concomitant shift away from passive experiences to interactive or participatory experiences, from art that is simply hung on the wall to art that literally invites people to become a part of it.
4. The idea of a center, Paris in the 20s, New York in the 60s, is simply a untenable idea today … Every museum of modern art is going to have to develop a strategy for dealing with this problem, how to know about what you don’t know, how to cover the world … in the kind of depth that’s appropriate … There is no periphery.
5. A consequence of operating in the global environment is that the scale and cost of doing so will compel museum to experiment with a whole range of practices … from setting up satellite institutions to forming partnerships and alliances with existing ones to inventing entirely new models of collaboration. A second consequence of this will be a search for art that is meaningful and authentic, to use Andreas Huyssen’s terminology, that is, art that is grounded in local experience but that can speak at a universal or global level.
6. Art museums must learn to deal with the fact that their audiences are going to increasingly come from the world wide web and may never actually set foot in their physical space. MoMA in fiscal year 2010 will have 3 million visitors who actually come in our door and 18 million discrete visitors who connect to us on our website … You need to have literally a parallel space on the web. It’s no longer simply a means of providing information about what’s taking place inside the museum. The web itself has become a central space for any museum that takes its mission seriously.
by Jon Lackman | 28 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From Variety:
Sam Waterston and Brian Murray will play an art historian and an art dealer, respectively, in the American preem of Simon Gray’s 2004 play “The Old Masters.” Production runs Jan. 19-Feb. 13 at New Haven’s Long Wharf theater … Script revolves around a 1937 meeting between Bernard Berenson (Waterston) and Joseph Duveen (Murray) and focuses on the authenticity of a painting.
According to the Telegraph‘s review of its original production, the play “offers an examination of the fraught relationship between the aesthetic and spiritual value of art and its cash worth in the market place, as well as exploring Berenson’s own integrity.”
by Ben Lima | 28 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval, Renaissance
In the Wall Street Journal, Jay Pridmore considers Florence’s Ponte Vecchio:
When the morning sun reaches across the Arno and hits the varied ochre tones, the whole bridge glows as one in the hazeless Florentine light. Visually, distinct elements weave together like immutable strands— genius, commerce and tyranny, to name three big ones—of the Florentine character.
by Kelly Presutti | 25 June 2010 | Theory
Bruno Latour is currently hosting Selon/Salon at the Centre Pompidou, a series of conferences with contemporary artists, filmmakers, curators and intellectuals. The French theorist has taken up the themes of Eloquence and Demonstration in an effort to gauge their roles within the arts, the sciences, and politics, and to forge a path for a new assessment of political arts as an amalgam of the three. Latour suggests that while eloquence and demonstration may appear to be opposed, both employ strategies of articulation and composition and thus have a relationship to representation in all three disciplines. He has chosen subjects who play with these disciplinary boundaries – last night, for example, British artist Rod Dickinson discussed his re-enactment of Milgrim’s 1961 psychology experiment as a “theater of proof”, a performative copy that revealed the depths of information concealed behind the stark scientific results of the original. Previous sessions included artist Olafur Eliasson, philosopher Elie During, and historian Jimena Canales re-enacting the 1922 debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein, and artist François Hers’ experimental work with citizen-driven art commissions.
The series will culminate on July 1 with the launch of the Ecole des Arts Politiques de Sciences Po (SPEAP), a project founded by Latour and supported by the Centre Pompidou and The Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
The school’s aim is to provide artists with a high-level training in the social sciences (methods for empirical inquiry), and, conversely, to confront social scientists and public or private sector professionals with the qualities and methodologies of the arts. These two fields will not be studied side by side; but rather will converge through teaching experiments and an innovative curriculum grounded in common objects of study. The public sphere will be taken as the focal point of this convergence. For, indeed, the question at the heart of this project is the crisis of representation (in the largest possible sense). This crisis can only be overcome by associating three practices of representation that have as yet been relatively separated: political representation, scientific representation, and aesthetic representation.
by Jon Lackman | 25 June 2010 | Theory
A propos of our recent discussion of Ruskin, I recently discovered a new article on Ruskin’s views of art and morality in the Jan 2010 Modern Language Review (105:1) by Jeremy Tambling. He contrasts Ruskin with Nietzsche:
Ruskin wishes to believe that art reveals morality, or that morality shows itself in art; in other words, he accepts that art in some way can be predicated on the moral sense, and that a morality can be derived from good art. Nietzsche, however, has no such sense of a basis for art. No morality generates art; rather, because there is no morality, no justice at work in life, art becomes the more necessary. Nietzsche is postmodern in not believing in any basis which makes art possible; Ruskin, despite his unconversion of 1858, and consequent refusal of a formal religious basis to life, cannot think of art as being baseless, or rather, he does not wish to think it.
by Kelly Presutti | 24 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA reports on an agreement between the Getty Research Institute and ProQuest, a database service that also publishes ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index, and the International Index to Music Periodicals, to take over indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA, the successor to BHA).
ProQuest will distribute IBA content created by GRI—covering the years 2008 through 2009—and build on it by adding new index records going forward. ProQuest will retain the editorial policies that made IBA a trusted and frequently consulted source in the field, continuing to provide full abstracts and subject indexing for its wide international and multilingual range of periodicals, monographs, and catalogues. Over time, ProQuest intends to expand coverage of art from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, in response to requests from art librarians and researchers.
This answers several of the questions raised in the Getty’s April meetings, including expansion to include non-Western art and continuing to provide full abstracts. Further, the historical data (BHA and RILA) that has been freely available on the Getty’s website will continue to be accessible to researchers.
by Jon Lackman | 23 June 2010 | Books, Theory
According to the Guardian:
Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”. Now that experiment – conducted by Paul Bloom, a Yale academic, and psychologist Susan Gelman – has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. Bloom’s study, How Pleasure Works, which will be out this week, argues that there is no such thing as a pure aesthetic judgment.
The Sunday Times writes:
[Bloom's] most important point is that humans are “born essentialists”. We see everything as possessing “an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly, and it this hidden nature that really matters”.
Bloom discusses his book with Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind author Peter D. Kramer in Slate.
by Travis Nygard | 22 June 2010 | Uncategorized
Sir Adam Roberts of the British Academy has issued a report titled Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities and Social Sciences that is sure to be useful for art historians wishing to bolster the credibility of our discipline. As was discussed in Art History Today, the report emphasizes “public” rather than simply “economic” value to show the innumerable benefits of studying the humanities, including the stimulation of creativity and strengthening of identity. As such, “Sir Adam’s report is extremely timely: a ringing endorsement of the arts and humanities in a society that needs them more than ever to combat the malaise of the banker mentality.” Should you also have tips for demonstrating the non-monetary value of art history, please leave a comment.
by Jon Lackman | 22 June 2010 | Contemporary, Theory
In an article in the Dec. ’09 journal of visual culture (8:3), “Apart from Sex,” Adrian Rifkin writes:
“[Andres] Serrano’s dildo picture reminds of Butler’s Derridian theses of the origin-like quality of the copy, insofar as it is quite impossible to figure the boy’s penis without his a priori penetration by the rubber or silicone simulacrum attached to the otherly performed gender; not only does it – the strapped-on dildo – visually come before the boy’s own member, but in its always and already state of erection, it precedes his potential pleasure that can only come to imitate its form — on condition that the copy does not simply reduce the original to anxiety or to the entropic comfort of keeping his penis in the presence of the girl’s acquiring hers – that he feels but does not see.
by Ben Lima | 20 June 2010 | Uncategorized
The Economist alerts its readers to the enduring Portuguese tradition of azulejos, “glazed ceramic tiles that were fashioned into narrative scenes.” (more…)
I know that at least one contemporary Brazilian artist, Adriana Varejão, appreciates azulejos for its strong connections with the colonial period in Brazil. Varejão uses the imagery of azulejos to comment on Brazilian colonialism and slavery. If anyone is interested, Varejão’s website is found here: http://www.adrianavarejao.net/site#/
In my opinion, azulejos are also important in history surveys (and upper-level courses) because they can be easily examined through a postcolonial lens. In addition to the Brazilian/Portuguese history of azulejos, such 17th/18th century tiles are closely connected Portuguese trade and the Orient. Azulejos are seen as a prime example of European chinoiserie.
Very cool. Any recommended readings?
Like you mentioned, there aren’t many English sources that discuss azulejos in much depth. There is some discussion of azulejos in this museum catalog by the National Gallery of Art (Washington):
Levenson, Jay A., ed. The Age of the Baroque in Portugal. National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C., 1993.
I am aware of two publications which discuss Adriana Varejão’s art:
Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (This book ties Varejão’s work into postcolonial themes.)
Rina Caravajal, “Travel Chronicles: The Work of Adriana Varejão,” in Lia Gangitano and Steven Nelson, eds., New Histories, Boston: Instutite of Contemporary Art, 1996. (Exhibition catalog)
Super – many thanks.
by Jon Lackman | 18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”:
[T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before … [I]t was certainly time for a long-overdue reassessment of this persistently stereotyped and often maligned powerhouse of modern culture. For example, one lingering popular fixation is the very notion of “Bauhaus architecture,” which has become a misnomer for Modernist building design … Another entrenched fallacy about the Bauhaus is that it was somehow responsible for the lamentable global proliferation of boring corporate Modernist architecture after World War II … What made the Bauhaus such a truly revolutionary undertaking was not so much its departure from prevailing aesthetic norms—specifically its rejection of historical styles—but rather its systematic recasting of the way in which the fine and applied arts were taught.
by Jon Lackman | 17 June 2010 | Contemporary
In a recent issue of October (n. 130), thirty-two contributors responded to a questionnaire on “The Contemporary” written by Hal Foster:
[M]uch present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment … At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, ‘contemporary art’ has become an institutional object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and programs, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but from most postwar practice as well … Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple effect of the end-of-grand-narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to ‘the market’ and ‘globalization’?
Julia Bryan-Wilson responded:
They have cut off the hot water in the building where I teach. The rumor is that we will soon lose our office phones, as the Women’s Studies department already has. In this underfunded public university [UC-Irvine] … I cannot help but think about the problem of ‘the contemporary’ in relation to the urgencies of the troubled future.
Other respondents: Grant Kester, James Elkins, Miwon Kwon, Joshua Shannon, Richard Meyer, Johanna Burton, Pamela M. Lee, Michelle Kuo, Mark Godfrey, Okwui Enwezor, Anton Vidokle, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Terry Smith, Alexander Alberro, Tim Griffin, Yates McKee, James Meyer, Vered Maimon, T.J. Demos, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrew Perchuk, Blake Stimson, Kelly Baum, Rachel Haidu, Juliane Rebentisch, Jaleh Mansoor, Siona Wilson, Judith Rodenbeck, Helen Molesworth, Suzanne Hudson, Isabelle Graw, Tom McDonough.
When “The” stands first, time to move on.
by Ben Lima | 16 June 2010 | Architecture, Medieval
Designboom posts a blurb and excerpt from David Stephenson, Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). (See also a review by Marcus Bunyan of the 2009 exhibition at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond, Australia; 2007 show at Julie Saul and Brian Sholis review.)
What appeals to me about this project is 1) seriality as a way of clarifying the logic of a type, and promoting comparative judgments, and 2) the dramatic flattening of the vaults into the photographic frame, in eliminating an entire dimension of information (i.e. verticality), focuses attention on just the secondary details that are unique to each building.
It would be interesting to compare these images with an aerial survey of the same structures. From the ordinary, human’s-eye view, they are quite familiar; the camera eye brings out their striking strangeness.
by Leslie Thompson | 15 June 2010 | Museums
I recently ventured to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to view the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, the first museum retrospective of her drawings. Immediately upon entering the gallery, I felt uncomfortable. What is bothering me about this show? Is it the layout, the work, the theme? Then it dawned on me: it’s the lighting! When exhibiting drawings, museums must use very low lighting. All of the windows and ceilings (which is basically one large skylight) were covered. I am accustomed to the bright, open spaces at the Nasher. In a way, it had felt like life had been eradicated from the galleries.
Environment has such a large impact on how the viewer experiences a work of art. Just as Whiteread uses her drawings to help her “choreograph a space,” a museum uses the gallery space to facilitate one’s reception of an exhibition. Should my appreciation be unwavering? Or do we all succumb to the power of the museum?
“Should my appreciation be unwavering?”
Absolutely not.
“Or do we all succumb to the power of the museum?”
Yes, if we want to see the art.
I love museums. I visit them often.
I’ve once seen the same show at two separate museums and noticed the difference between my experiences with each space. I enjoyed the exhibition at one museum but could do without at the other.
by Jon Lackman | 15 June 2010 | Africa, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Nka (n. 25), editor Salah M. Hassan writes:
In gesturing toward a theoretical framework with which to comprehend the breadth and depth of the work of this generation of African diaspora artists, several art critics have referred to them as “Afropolitans,” which could serve to embody a sense of cosmpolitanism in regard to their existential experience … The term, as I understand it, speaks to a new, morphing identity, fluid enough to encompass a new breed of diasporic, culturally or ethnically mixed Africans who came of age or grew up outside Africa but continues to move in and out of the continent. It speaks of cosmopolitanism and a sense of belonging to the metropolis. At the very least, it foregrounds the Western metropolis as a key site for the expression of African concerns. At the same time, Afropolitan has taken on a life of its own and become part of the language of fashion and advertisement … Yet I wonder whether, by using the term Afropolitan, we restrict ourselves to the middle class and the offspring of well-to-do Africans. Also, how can we distinguish them from their counterparts in older black communities … who were in the Western metropolis before the rise of the Afropolitans? As historian Earl Lewis reminds us, the entire Atlantic world, including the United States, is constituted by “overlapping diasporas” … Exploring the works of contemporary artists continues to afford us a fresh look at the renewed importance and changing practice of exodus. Indeed, their works, as they tie to their constant mobility in and out of Africa, hold out the possibility of circular, rather than only unidirectional movement.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 June 2010 | Architecture
Historians of contemporary architecture (and television) will find interesting this essay by Daniel Harris, “Celebrity Houses, Celebrity Politics,” in the winter 2010 Antioch Review:
Elegance in the eyes of many celebrities is bound up with the concept of hugeness. Size and quantity are the key tenets of their aesthetic. Their houses are not prettier and more comfortable than ours: they are simply twenty – and in some cases, fifty, even one hundred – times larger … [The television show] Cribs provides an inadvertently cruel exposé of the ghetto fabulousness of rappers who fill their pools with sea water imported from the Bahamas … Although they would like us to believe that they embrace and celebrate their impoverished upbringing, virtually nothing in their houses, aside from the almost universal meretriciousness of their décor, suggests that hip hop stars genuinely respect their roots … Their décor is a blank white page suitable for self-invention, which is why the austere modernist cube is so appealing to the rich and famous, allowing them to project onto its featureless walls any image of themselves they care to create. Not surprisingly, their houses have no history, no narrative, no patina of age.
by Jon Lackman | 13 June 2010 | Career
I asked the Getty again if they planned to update “PhDs in Art History – Over a Decade Later” and heard back this time:
[W]e are not considering any funding in this area at this time.
Please feel free to view information about our current work http://www.getty.edu/foundation/message_director.html .
by Jon Lackman | 8 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA managing editor Christopher Howard reports on the recent art bibliography summit:
With internet research ever increasing, especially among undergraduate students, the popularity-driven results of search engines must be countered with reliable sources of knowledge, said Elizabeth Mansfield of New York University … Since BHA covered only Western art—the founding editor Michael Rinehart noted that H. W. Janson’s survey textbook was the original model—inclusiveness is key to moving forward … Collaboration and sustainability are also necessities, as single organizations like the Getty, CAA, the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), or the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) can no longer host and maintain a bibliographic database on their own … Questions that remain open for discussion ranged from practical issues (“Do we need full abstracts or just subject headings?”) to philosophical inquiries (“Does an art bibliography best facilitate art-historical research, or do other methods need exploring?”) … In the face of the increasing instrumentalization of the humanities in higher education, perhaps the most pressing concern is how to more strongly articulate the need for a comprehensive art bibliography.
In the end, the meeting’s only resolution was to convene more meetings, understandable I suppose given its wide purview and short duration:
After intensive discussion, the task force did not come to consensus on an immediate plan of action. Some members believed that the BHA model should be adhered to and expanded, and others felt a wholly new approach to art bibliographies is needed. Therefore, within the next six months the task force plans to seek funding for two things. First, it will create an international working group, which will include an outside specialist, to scan currently operating art bibliographies, which in addition to BHA include artlibraries.net, arthistoricum.net, the Avery Index, Arcade, and Kubikat, among others. The task force will also examine what can be retooled or repurposed from these sources for improved bibliographic functionality. Second, the task force will establish another group, again with an outside consultant, that will conduct focus groups with librarians, scholars, publishers, and nonprofit and commercial vendors to determine their professional needs. The task force also plans to explore different business models and more clearly identify the technological and financial challenges that can sustain BHA or something like it.
The Getty also issued a short statement (pdf).
by Jon Lackman | 8 June 2010 | Books, Modern
Modern Art Notes is recommending summer reading on art. I’d add to his list Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, which has just been re-issued in paperback. (Published in 2008, the book substantially revised the author’s original 1995 French version.) Writing in the Burlington Magazine in Nov 2008, Caroline Levitt called it “a pleasure to read”:
His characteristically lucid style, combining astutely told anecdotes with careful archival research and profound scholarly observation, paints a vivid and cogent picture … The result is at once erudite and accessible … It remains relevant and fresh, while retaining a sense of authority and makes an important contribution … Essentially a specialist in literature, Read shows himself once again to be an equally engaging and authoritative art historian … Exacting and witty, Read’s book is as multi-faceted, penetrating and truthful as a Cubist painting.
In a Chronicle column, Michael Ruse offers a defense for those of us in the humanities: “we are a lot cheaper than the sciences.” But he doesn’t think that argument will get us very far. He argues (among other things) that art museums such as Washington’s NGA will need to figure out how to thrill schoolchildren as well as science museums do. The National Gallery is, he says, a mausoleum. “Nary a kid to be seen … all of those little Americans [visiting D.C.] are going to have their minds filled with the excitement of science and technology, and the other side to human learning and experience won’t have had a look in.” (Link via Chris Howard.)