by Jon Lackman | 7 June 2010 | Uncategorized
In a recent issue of the journal of visual culture (8:2), “The Obama Issue,” the editors posed six questions to various contributors: Is Barack Obama the most “visible” U.S. president? What role did visual media play in the 2008 election? Why do commodities with Obama-inspired imagery sell so well? How did racial tropes influence depictions of Obama, and vice versa? What image from the 2008 election “had the most visual, critical, satirical or politically motivating impact, and why?” And why did the media obsess over the physical appearance of Barack Obama (and Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin)?
The 27 respondents include W.J.T. Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who writes, “It is surely his uncanny offhand seriousness that makes his slim beauty so engaging … One of [the] chief arguments [in the 1996 Stathis Gourgouris book Dream Nation] is that there is no nation and therefore we must dream it – the lost object argument. And what better way of empiricizing the lostness of the object than through physical beauty”?
by Leslie Thompson | 4 June 2010 | Contemporary
Last night the Dallas Museum of Art presented a talk with Luc Tuymans. The DMA recently opened the first US retrospective of the artist (organized by the Wexner and SFMOMA). I enjoy how the subdued palette of his work combined with the paintings’ subject matter produces a feeling that lingers, or haunts the viewer (like a memory).
Something from Tuymans’ talk that resonated was in his discussion of referencing the horrors of history in his paintings (whether it be the effects of WWII, post-colonial Congo, the global aftermath of 9/11, etc). As an artist working with these subjects, he paints not as a way to come to terms with the events. One can never come to terms; that’s not the point- he says. The point is not to obliterate these emotional events of history, these inhumanities, from culture. We cannot choose our history.
While Tuymans doesn’t think art should be full of political content (propoganda), his paintings definitely become politically charged (so many examples: Lumumba (2000), The Secretary of State (2005) and Gas Chamber (1986) to name a few).
by Jon Lackman | 4 June 2010 | Ancient
The Dec. 2009 Antiquity cover bears an unusually alluring set of teasers:
Royal purple found at Qatna, Syria
The Bishops of Whithorn and their diet
Cannibalism in Neolithic Germany
Clubbing and stabbing in Bronze Age Spain
The eventful story of some Chinese trousers
Also in this issue, Bisserka Gaydarska analyzes the Theoretical Archaeology Group and N. James writes on the new Acropolis Museum and Greece’s hopes for recovering the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum:
Much more pressing than the issue of the Elgin Marbles is the scandal of the visitor experience on the Acropolis itself. In more than two decades, there has been no significant improvement [to the bottlenecks and noise created by large crowds] … The [Acropolis] Conservation Committee was right to fret about how much visitors understand the Acropolis. To face that challenge is the most urgent priority. And incidentally, to meet it would further enhance the case for restitution.
Having recently been to the Acropolis, I have to say I agree with the problems the visitor faces in attempting to view the site as, perhaps, they would have imagined it after an art history survey course: a pristine example of mathematical perfection, ideal proportions and beautiful harmony. However, the new Acropolis museum more than makes up for this – and in fact, counteracts the rather limited perception of the hill we tend to have. The museum, of necessity, presents a much broader view of ancient Greece than the strict classicism we are familiar with from the sculptural examples in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, etc. In the museum, the Acropolis is linked to the civilizations at its base, the daily experience of Athens’ citizens, their rituals and beliefs, and the rather violent evolution of the site over time. While the crowds and noise deny an experience of purity and isolation, they are perhaps more exemplary of the reality of the panathenaic festival than we care to acknowledge.
by Jon Lackman | 3 June 2010 | Modern
Classiques Garnier Numérique (formerly known as Éditions Champion Électronique) has released a new online database (subscription required), “Writings on Art from the 18th to the 20th Century“:
It brings together 61,000 pages, going from 1741 to 1927, gathering 72 authors and containing 169 titles. Esthetics, philosophy, art history, texts by painters and writers, but also novels and artists’ journals … The Writings on Art are essentially centred on art criticism, i.e. on the salons and on literary monograph[s] devoted to painters … [from] Father André’s Essay on the Beautiful [to] the first real salon … composed by La Font de Saint Yenne [to] the last volume of Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu.
This searchable database is tremendously useful for anyone studying modern French art, but especially for someone like me studying modern French art criticism. For example, one thing I’m writing about is the use of the words cadavre and sale (dirty) by critics. This database turns up 488 and 258 examples respectively. Long hours of traditional research in the library would have turned up a tenth as much.
The full list of writers included in the database:
Edmond About
Yves-Marie André
Guillaume Apollinaire
Georges Albert Aurier
Honoré de Balzac
Théodore de Banville
Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly
Maurice Barrès
Charles Baudelaire
Léonce Bénédite
Charles Blanc
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Argens
Charles de Brosses
Jules-Antoine Castagnary
Anne Claude Philippe Caylus
Champfleury
François-René de Chateaubriand
Charles-Nicolas Cochin
Abraham Constantin
Eugène Delacroix
Étienne-Jean Delécluze
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Fernand Desnoyers
Denis Diderot
Maxime Du Camp
Alexandre Dumas
Louis Émile Edmond Duranty
Théodore Duret
Étienne Falconet
Eugène Fromentin
Paul Gauguin
Théophile Gautier
Edmond de Goncourt
Jules et Edmond de Goncourt
François Guizot
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Dominique Ingres
Auguste Jal
La Font de Saint Yenne
Jules Laforgue
Alphonse de Lamartine
Marc-Antoine Laugier
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Stéphane Mallarmé
Guy de Maupassant
André Mellério
Prosper Mérimée
Jules Michelet
Octave Mirbeau
Alfred de Musset
Gustave Planche
Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Marcel Proust
Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy
Ernest Renan
Auguste Rodin
George Sand
Victor Segalen
Paul Sérusier
Armand Silvestre
Théophile Silvestre
Stendhal
Hippolyte Taine
Adolphe Thiers
Théophile Thoré
Rodolphe Töpffer
Émile Verhaeren
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
Louis Vitet
Alexandre Weill
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Émile Zola
by Jon Lackman | 2 June 2010 | Uncategorized
British art historians are concerned that proposed changes to the system by which their universities are classified and evaluated could diminish the reputation of art history there. Incidentally, the 2008 evaluations are available online (scroll to page 97). The quality of these rankings and their methodology are of course up for debate. That said, see below for the universities with the highest percentage of their “history of art, architecture and design” research activity judged to be of “world leading” quality:
1. University of East Anglia
2. University of Sussex
2. University of York
2. University of Glasgow
5. Courtauld Institute
5. University of Manchester
7. University of Birmingham
7. School of Oriental and African Studies
7. University College London
Meanwhile, American academics are still waiting for the National Research Council to release its now years-and-years-late report on its now thoroughly outdated (congressionally mandated) ratings of graduate programs.
In its defense, the NRC asserted recently in a powerpoint presentation, “There is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. We spent a lot of time trying to get universities to provide comparable data and developing our model. In most fields, and especially now, doctoral faculty change relatively slowly, as do patterns of publication. We would like to update the study in the next two years. Now that we have developed the statistical machinery, it is a data updating task, which could be carried out on-line. But, we will need to obtain funding.”
New “history and history of art” rankings out now from The Guardian.
by Linnea Wren | 1 June 2010 | Museums, Pre-Columbian
Art Daily has just announced that nearly 100 prehispanic objects deposited by the Mexica (often called the Aztecs) in the ceremonial precinct of in their capital of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) will be on display in Mexico City. The exhibition will open in the later part of June 2010. The objects, which include wooden masks and scepters, flint knives, golden ornaments and the remains of marine animals, were placed as offerings to the deity Tlaltecuhtli at the foot of the Templo Mayor.
by Ben Lima | 30 May 2010 | Uncategorized
Can art history be published, reported on, or otherwise communicated through the medium of the podcast? In logging many hours of commuting time, I have had reason to ponder this question. (more…)
It’s hard to read on the go! Were it not for podcasts and audiobook version of media I would never have got through as much as I did over the last 2 years.
Librivox.org is an audiobook repository that produces free audiobook versions of public domain works. I love it! Currently listening to The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini when I go hiking!
The Smarthistory podcasts can be subscribed also via RSS, for those that dislike iTunes ;)
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
Incidentally, Rosalind Krauss called T.J. Clark’s National Gallery lectures “the greatest intellectual stimulation and the most superb rhetorical skill I experienced in 2009.”
Partway through the first lecture (I was wrong, they are on iTunes), I completely agree about “rhetorical skill.”
(In my opinion, reviewers in the field do not always sufficiently distinguish between 1) said skill, 2) logical coherence, and 3) correspondence with objective reality.)
by Jon Lackman | 29 May 2010 | Teaching
As I was listening to this interesting “On the Media” segment recently, I became intrigued when I got the impression that everyone but me had read this article (pdf), “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” by Kathleen Hayles. (In fact, it’s not all that well known.)
This is a topic I’ve thought some about, while teaching. I admire Hayles’s willingness to sidestep the bias among academics against “ADD generation” habits and examine it afresh. Too many academics seek only to create students in their own image, a point that Ken Robinson made eloquently in a 2006 talk:
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement … If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
Now, here is what Hayles has to say about “deep attention” and “hyper attention”:
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom … Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations. Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response. Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem.
Hayles goes on to argue that, like it or not, college students are increasingly drawn to hyper attention. What are the consequences of this for teaching?
… educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment, or change the environment to fit the students … How can the considerable benefits of deep attention be cultivated in a generation of students who prefer high levels of stimulation and have low thresholds for boredom? … [In an] interactive classroom at the University of Southern California … Fourteen large screens span the walls, providing display space for input controlled by wireless laptop computers scattered around a large conference table. One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”; while a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the Web for appropriate content to display on the screens, for example web sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views. Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the material being presented … [Or] Imagine a course that begins by studying strategies of self-presentation at the wildly popular Facebook.com, including naiveté, deception, ironic juxtaposition, competition, cooperation, betrayal, and compelling narrative. This provides a rich context in which the sly and subversive self-presentations in The Education of Henry Adams can be analyzed, including an assignment that asks students to compose Facebook entries for the book’s ironic persona.
Hayles writes that these experiments have so far produced mixed results, but I found them inspiring nonetheless. After all, trying to respond creatively to the new wave of students seems much more interesting than simply trying to bludgeon them with the old, decreasingly effective methods, at ever higher volumes, which, I’ll admit, has been my instinct in the past.
Fascinating study. I’m proud to say that the institution where I teach practices Learner-Centered education. I agree with Hayles that both hyper and deep attention have their merits, and should be cultivated. It’s true that most of our students seem to be fairly adept at hyper-attention while struggling with deep attention (with exceptions of course). One of my goals as an instructor is help students realize the value of deep attention, which many regard with great suspicion. If I can produce a moment for a student which reads something like “I really can learn and understand more by studying a work of art in great detail, and I like it!”, I feel I’ve done my work well.
by Jon Lackman | 28 May 2010 | Teaching
The March-April 2010 issue of Le Débat prints a talk that Pierre Rosenberg gave at a September 2009 colloquium (pdf):
My career has been in museums, at the Louvre mostly, where I’ve spent almost 40 years. I love museums, all museums. Alas I didn’t discover them in school, but rather from my parents … Many don’t get that opportunity, that privilege … [Our educational] system, I say with regret, is antidemocratic, profoundly unjust, profoundly antiegalitarian, and perfectly elitist in the worst sense of the term.
Isn’t it to remedy this grave injustice that art historians have long fought for art history to be a required course in high school and college? … School teaches us to read and to write, but it doesn’t teach us to see … Art history is nothing other than learning to see. Art is not transparent …
Art history has had its great figures, from Aby Warburg to Erwin Panofsky, from Bernard Berenson to Roberto Longhi, from Anthony Blunt to John Pope-Hennessy, from Robert Rosenblum to Michael Baxandall, not to mention our compatriots who made 19th-century France one of the two great countries for art history alongside Germany and our more recent Henri Focillon, Émile Mâle, Élie Faure, Louis Grodecki, Antoine Schnapper, Daniel Arasse. My list is not exhaustive …
[Yet it is] a misunderstood discipline. The sentence that has enraged art historians, here it is. You can read it in the 2008 Bulletin Officiel of the national education ministry: “A teacher of French literature [can also] teach the arts … To do so, he has no need for specialized education.”
“He has no need for specialized education.” The jaw drops.
I confess I knew next to nothing about Antoine Schnapper and Daniel Arasse until Rosenberg inspired me to look them up. And I study French art! As of this writing, Arasse doesn’t even have a Dictionary of Art Historians page.
by Jeremy Miller | 27 May 2010 | Museums, Teaching
Walking through the Birth of Impressionism exhibition at the De Young Museum, I realized that Kenneth Baker got basically one thing right in his sparse review: it builds anticipation for coming Fall exhibit.
What I noticed about this well-executed exhibition was its genuine interest in teaching us something about the relationships between mid 19th-century painting and French socio-political developments, and that its narrative seems to be drawn largely from Ross King’s book on the topic. I also realized that my students would almost certainly learn more about this topic by spending two hours here than in any series of lectures I could offer them.
by David Packwood | 27 May 2010 | Renaissance
Plants in renaissance paintings usually have religious associations, but seldom if ever connections with mind-expanding drugs. Now, David Bellamy of Sotheby’s has decided that a plant held by a satyr in Botticelli’s canonical ‘Venus and Mars’ has hallucinogenic properties.
After consulting with horticultural experts at Kew Gardens, Bellamy maintains that it is Datura stramonium – sometimes known as devil’s trumpet. According to the Telegraph, the drug makes you “hot and disinhibited”, which may be why Mars has stripped off his clothes. The famous clothed Venus could, if we accept the drug theory, represent a warning against such intoxicated abandonment.
I’ve taught courses on pictures and reception theory in which I’ve pointed out that something in the painting is being offered to the viewer, but if Bellamy is right, the viewer of the picture is being offered Datura, sometimes known as ‘poor man’s acid’.
Can a picture get you high in this sense? I’m thinking that if this is true, it’s going to be a case of move over Panofsky and Wind to make way for Timothy Leary.
Sorry, it should be David Bellingham. I confused him with David Bellamy, the famous TV botanist!
Same vein as Caravaggio’s Bacchus offering wine.
I wonder if Botticelli or other artists of the period had some first-hand knowledge of the substance. There was an excellent book published a few years back, “The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs,” but I know of no similar volume for artists.
Three Pipe Problem has a great article on this, with a reproduction of the hallucinogenic plant Datura.
http://threepipeproblem.blogspot.com/2010/05/misrepresenting-botticelli-for-modern.html
Fascinating article! I wonder if the nicknames for the plant (“thorn apple” and “Devil’s trumpet”) exist in Italian, and if those names were extant in in the 15th century. It certainly would support the Tree of Knowledge theory that is suggested in the article.
Datura Trombo Del Diavolo is the common Italian term for this plant. Indeed, upon Monica’s suggestion, further research suggests that the term ‘Thorn Apple’ is an English one.
I wanted to point out one puzzling thing about the link that Hasan included above. The link mentions that the plant was introduced in Italy after 1500 (and Botticelli’s Venus and Mars was painted c. 1483). That’s a discrepancy of about 17 years. I wonder if the post-1500 introductory date for the plant is inaccurate, or really a rough estimate? Or, perhaps humanists like Botticelli were aware of the plant before it was actually introduced into the country (since its hallucinogenic effects were recorded by ancient Greeks). On the other hand, perhaps Venus and Mars could be seen as visual evidence that the plant existed in Italy before 1500?
Perhaps I’ll need to contact David Bellingham to hear his opinion (and get more answers!)
(David Packwood – I’m pretty sure that you meant to credit David Bellingham of Sotheby’s, not David Bellamy.) Cheers!
Wow. Off on a tangent: reviews of Botticelli books by Dombrowki, Bredekamp, Rehm, on the 500th anniversary of SB’s death
Dioscorides famous 1st century text Materia Medica contained a description of stramonium datura. We know Cosimo de Medici acquired Materia Medica well before Botticelli executed Mars and Venus in the 1480s.
What have I started!?
Much has happened since those entries in May! With the help of some Botanical friends, we’ve crossed out the Daturas and found a enchanting new candidate for the plant in the painting. See the images and decide for yourself:
by Jon Lackman | 26 May 2010 | Film
At Artnet, David D’Arcy reviews the recent International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal:
The fest featured no less than six films on Picasso, including Arne Glimcher’s unlikely Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies [which argues] that Cubism was inspired by early movies … Views on Vermeer – 12 Short Stories … weighs Johannes Vermeer’s influence on contemporary artists, writers and others … The “Vermeer effect,” it turns out, is rather widespread today … Oeke Hoogendij’s The New Rijksmuseum provides an inside look at what apparently was a dispute-plagued renovation of Holland’s venerable art repository. Who would have thought that the sensible Dutch, in their effort to make the famous museum “more than a labyrinth” would produce a Tower of Babel, as the museum’s director asks before he quits in frustration.
More on Glimcher’s movie from The Wall Street Journal.
by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2010 | Books
Want to get the finger? I reviewed a new book on its role in art, literature and history by Yale Center for British Art senior curator Angus Trumble.
By the way, Trumble blogs.
by Jon Lackman | 25 May 2010 | Books, Modern
In a recent issue of History of Photography (34:1), Jonathan P. Eburne reviews several recent books on surrealism and dada. He’s most taken with George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris:
Baker’s mannered yet often luminous [book] represents a major contribution to the study of avant-garde art … the project harbours ambitions that lie beyond the monographic … [It] unfolds around a central problematic first voiced by the poet Apollinaire, the project of ‘artists who want to become inhuman’ … What is ultimately most impressive about Baker’s book, in spite of its occasional excess, is its consistent pursuit of the conceptual work of the Dada movement … It is for this reason that Baker’s book will be of interest as much to scholars of photography as to theorists and specialists in other media … Baker unfolds what comes close to a unified field theory of Dada art.
by Jon Lackman | 24 May 2010 | Books
Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher has founded Artifex Press, “the first publishing company dedicated to the creation of comprehensive, publicly accessible, online catalogues raisonnés”:
Artifex Press has been named publisher of the digital catalogues raisonnés of the estates of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin along with contemporary artists Chuck Close, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The catalogues of twenty-five other artists and estates are slated to follow … Artifex Press ensures that each catalogue raisonné will be regularly maintained and, therefore, accurate and current … In addition, Artifex Press will make issues integral to artist intent – including the understanding, exhibition, installation, site-specificity, and conservation of contemporary works of art – a central focus of its digital catalogues raisonnés.
Its first catalogue is due out this fall. You can view online two symposia it sponsored: “Best of Intentions: Artists Speak on Preserving Artists’ Intent” and “Can History Repeat Itself? Reenactments and the Preservation of Performance Art.”
By the way, Artifex is hiring an assistant editor, who “will work on researching and compiling information for a few specific catalogue projects, as well as various activities pertaining to the startup publisher, from organizing public symposiums to performing administrative tasks.” Apply to [email protected], subject line: Artifex Press.
Please let me know when the catalog of Sol Lewitt is available. Will it be available free on the web?
According to the New York Times, “The public will at a later date be able to access each catalogue raisonné for a fee. ‘I don’t know what it will cost,” Mr. Glimcher said. “Probably a few hundred dollars a year.’ ”
by Linnea Wren | 24 May 2010 | Teaching
I am one of those art historians who is a digital alien (see L. Rusch’s comment to Jon Lackman’s post of 13 May). But even if I were a digital native, I might still be perplexed by the pedagogical applications of the new technology that will work best in the classroom. I am wondering how I can move beyond what I currently do — having my students utilize PowerPoint in classroom presentations. I would like to pose some questions:
And does the group collaboration possible through these techniques help students to learn? Can these media help create a model for art history research and writing that is dynamic and relevant?
If any of you have used these techniques, I would love to hear your experiences. Please comment below.
The Art Historians At Work blog was good while it lasted — and it’s still interesting to read if you’ve never seen it before.
Hello :)
There are myriad tools beyond powerpoint and flow charts, which are wonderful ways to bore humans of any age to death!!
I remember with physical dismay my art history lecturers heaping us with photocopied notes with tiny black and white images of an exquisite Bottcelli, Durer, Tintoretto etc… How can a lecturer expect to inspire a student with THAT!
Some tools:
*Google wave has just gone public – its like a message board and email and collaboration tool all in one. I have been using it with tute groups since to wonderful effect.
As for visual presentations, augmented reality(AR) browsing is steadily becoming widespread and will revolutionise the way art images can be presented and info supplemented.
The Getty museum has completed some AR displays, to wonderful effect:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/north_pavilion/cabinet/index.html
Also, dont forget smarthistory.org, which essentially aims to be an online art history textbook.
Feel free to contact me if you would like more detail on this and how I use it with my students.
Art is one of those subjects where VISUAL stimuli is vital to making it interesting. Becoming digitally versed will benefit student and demonstrator alike and can make the process of learning an enjoyable and inspiring one.
Cheers
H Niyazi
threepipeproblem.blogspot.com
I’m a student in a well-respected purely online program in museum studies. A major part of my “discussion” work is done online through message boards. I find that this does improve my writing and analytical skills, as I am forced to answer questions clearly and thoughtfully through my writing.
I have used all of the above technologies and others as both a graduate student and instructor. While fascinating, and potentially useful for engaging otherwise unengaged students, none of them seems to me as effective at developing analytical and methodological skills as a good group discussion. It’s that “good” part that can be tricky. I’m also concerned about how much we might cater to students cultural ADD (as opposed to pathological ADD, which we should cater to).
by Jon Lackman | 24 May 2010 | Modern
Kline was born May 23, 1910. As far as I know, no exhibition was held or publication released to mark his centennial. Nor does he yet have a catalogue raisonné, apparently.
Good question: Why isn’t this artist’s 100th birthday being celebrated with an exhibition, installations and so on?
MOCA LA does have five Kline paintings on view in the Permanent Collection.
by Jon Lackman | 21 May 2010 | Journals, Modern
The CAA’s Art Journal has a new editor, Katy Siegel. I haven’t had a chance yet to look at her first issue, which is now out and apparently focuses on artists’ projects. Siegel has said, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also represents the vitality and vicissitudes of the real life of art and artists.”
This got me curious about the original intent and early life of Art Journal, which has in recent years seemed to me to lack a coherent mission. I went and had a look at the journal’s first few issues. Its first issue appeared in November, 1941. It was then called College Art Journal. A year’s subscription cost $1, the equivalent of about $15 today. Its founding editor was CAA vice-president Myrtilla Avery. CAA President Sumner McKnight Crosby wrote the issue’s foreword and stressed its potential as a venue for discussing pedagogical innovation.
In the inaugural issue, Elizabeth Wilder (Weismann) plumped for more study and teaching of Latin America: “There is literally no book at present available in English on Latin American art in general”. Harry D.M. Grier published “Television: A New Means of Art Education”: “The combination of aural and visual material in television has the advantage of provoking in the audience a concentration of attention closely parallel to that of an actual gallery visit.”
The most influential contribution to the inaugural issue was “Modern Art Makes History, Too,” by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., which ignited a debate that then preoccupied the early issues of Art Journal. In his essay, Barr urged the university to let modern art past its gates:
[When] I was a student between fifteen and twenty years ago … I heard all told three professors in three leading college art departments lecture to undergraduates on modern art. One was querulously resentful, a second wittily condescending, the third dismissed painting from Cézanne to 1925 with a glib retelling of the donkey’s tail legend. All three knew several times as much about Sano di Pietro as Picasso. About the art of the previous fifty years they were either complacently superficial or profoundly ignorant … Up to a decade ago, so far as I can recall, the learned magazines such as The Art Bulletin and Art Studies published between them only one article on modern art and that was hostile … I can’t help but feeling that college art historians are not even now generally and deeply interested in modern art. Isn’t far more tiem given in their undergraduate courses to the early fifteenth or seventeenth centuries than to the early twentieth? … Even more obvious and urgent is the need for graduate work in modern art. The field is wide open and crying for scholarly research but how many candidates for Ph.D. or M.F.A. are doing these in twentieth-century art? Or even in the late nineteenth century? … I intend not a rebuke, but a challenge—and a cry for help.
Barr’s exasperation now seems quaint, considering the vogue today for contemporary art history. But the present trend may be helpfully illuminated by an examination of its origins in the controversy Barr generated.
W.M. Ivins, Jr. of the Metropolitian Museum promptly protested Barr’s suggestion in the following issue in a letter to the editor. And Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., responded at length:
I have much sympathy with my friend Alfred H. Barr’s opinion … It is a suggestion that has earlier been made by Dr. Lionello Venturi. Yet there are reasons for confining our study of human values generally to those values that are established, hence really teachable … In short, in any balanced curriculum of liberal studies the present must always have a standing rather marginal than central … [As for graduate research on modern art] Does Mr. Barr think that his imaginary graduate student is likely to provide from this endeavor anything but documentation of a somewhat dubious sort? … I simply shudder at the results even our best graduate students are likely to gain from pumping, say, Marin, Benton, or Dali.
In the following issue, Laurence Schmeckebier agreed with both sides, though rather more than Barr, noting that a dose of modern art might help re-engage undergraduates with the humanities at a time when, he lamented, they were becoming increasingly pre-professional in their outlook. James Thrall Soby and Robert. J. Goldwater defended Barr strenuously. And MoMA’s Beaumont Newhall made a related argument for “Photography [Studies] as a Branch of Art History.” (MoMA film curator Iris Barry recommended “Motion Pictures as a Field of Research” soon thereafter.)
(I wonder by the way where Venturi made his suggestion – Mather doesn’t say. Parnassus perhaps? The magazine was cited in a later report by Goldwater as the other major venue for this debate.)
Barr would return to Art Journal in the May 1945 issue, to advocate for more attention to be paid to American art, noting that since 1918 the Art Bulletin had published just one article on American painting and that one professor had asked him “half seriously whether after all there was any American art worth studying.”
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
From Las Vegas Weekly:
They were adored, fawned over, hated, respected, energizing and revered. They brought hope, insulted the city and loved the city. They were negative, positive, cherished and polarizing. And now they are leaving. Love or hate them, there is no arguing that Dave Hickey, famous art critic and genius-grant recipient, and Libby Lumpkin, art historian and curator, will go down in Las Vegas history. There was Hickey’s controversial stint in UNLV’s art department, where he nurtured talented artists and aggravated colleagues. There was Lumpkin’s role in the first fine-art gallery on the Strip — Steve Wynn’s collection at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art — which helped expand the perception of what could be a tourist attraction. There was her leadership of the Las Vegas Art Museum, bringing it national attention with important contemporary exhibits — suddenly, major collectors and museums were sharing their work with Las Vegas … Now they’re off to New Mexico; Lumpkin has been made a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico. Hickey will teach art there.
by Jon Lackman | 20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
On the lighter side, the Santa Barbara Independent reports that a recent debate at UCSB asked
the audience to imagine that a zombie outbreak has taken society to the brink of extinction and UCSB, the only remaining safe house, has room to admit only one more member. Seven professors [from the departments of Education, Philosophy, Film and Media, Art History, Mechanical Engineering, Geography, and Mathematics] were then required to argue that their discipline is the most valuable to society, making them best equipped to rebuild civilization and earn them that coveted last spot … An audience vote determined the winner …
Art historian [Laurie] Monham argued for the importance of the visual. “There is no purpose in using language to talk about something that makes no sense,” she said. “The irrational needs a place here.” She went on to say that an art historian is needed to provide avant garde stratagems to work through problems and to “tell us what we’ve done and what we haven’t tried…because the education system is working hard to make us all zombies” …
In the end, the philosopher won.
The art historian didn’t even make the top three.
Great This American Life story about a similar debate at Montevallo University in Alabama:
Tuymans’ views on these historical tragedies seems to reflect my own. I would have enjoyed this event. Sorry I missed it, but thanks for reporting!