The Art History Newsletter

The 2011 College Art Association conference will be in New York, February 9–12, 2011. CAA has just released the Call for Participation. Paper proposals are due May 3. Session titles include:

• What’s in a Name? Reconsidering Tibetan Stylistic Taxonomies
• The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces
• Art Music and Other Paradigms for Nineteenth-Century Art
• Fight the Power: Open Source, Free Software, and Critical Digital Practice
• Cel-Culture: The Hybrid Intersections of Art, Video Games, and Manga
• Data as Art Medium
• Bio-Art, Boundaries, and Borders
• Dark Matter of the Art World
• Skin: The Confluence of Art, Culture, and Fashion
• Imagining Art History in Proximity of Race
• Resistance Begins at Home: Anticolonialism and Visual Culture
• Beyond the “Other”: New Paradigms for a Global Art History?
• The Ethnographic Ruse: Early Erotic Photographs of Non-Western Women
• Feminism and the Cooperative Model in the Art World
• High Heels and Leather Masks: When Fetish Becomes Art and Art Becomes Life
• Capitalist Art about Capitalism
• The New Agit-Prop: Artists Expose Political Fictions
• What Is Visual Studies? An Open Forum
• Narcissism

The 2011 College Art Association conference will be in New York, February 9–12, 2011. CAA has just released the Call for Participation. Paper proposals are due May 3. Session titles include: What’s in a Name? Reconsidering Tibetan Stylistic Taxonomies The Aesthetics of Sonic Spaces Art Music and Other Paradigms for Nineteenth-Century Art Fight the Power: Open Source, Free Software, [...]

In caa.reviews, Kjell Wangensteen considers Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, a new book by David Summers:

In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with representational forms is a phenomenon unique to Western art that has been gradually refined over the course of Western figurative painting with the invention of other optical devices such as foreshortening, modeling, and the portrayal of shadow and highlights. While the development of optics is the principal unifying theme of the book, some of Summers’s most interesting insights stem from his discussion of the metaphysical dimensions of vision and perspective … Vision, Reflection, and Desire is an original and important contribution to the growing body of literature on the relationship between optics and art. Readers looking for an exhaustive treatment of the subject may be disappointed: originating from a series of lectures, Summers’s book provides a well-researched but somewhat disjointed collection of case studies … Vision, Reflection, and Desire nevertheless offers several compelling arguments for the ways in which Western art has been shaped by more than two millennia of inquiry into vision and optics.

In caa.reviews, Kjell Wangensteen considers Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, a new book by David Summers: In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, [...]

We recently discovered the scholarly book review Metapsychology which covers a fair number of art-related books. Recently reviewed:

Art/Porn, A History of Seeing and Touching, by Kelly Dennis. “This is an unusual book, far removed from the writings of conventional art historians whom the author dubs ‘patriarchal’. She is anxious to make clear that hers is not a survey history but rather ‘an attempt to understand a constellation of discourses on aesthetics, representation, femininity, and class, and the ways they impact and are impacted by technologies of vision’. This formulation at once points to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and feminist theorists as the inspiration for her radical ideas, though she does not use these sources uncritically … The writing is densely packed, but not obscure. The work sparkles with fresh ideas, many of them admittedly speculative; and the overall drift of the argument is readily accessible to non-specialists. Moreover, it is lavishly illustrated and can be recommended to anyone interested in the historical context of the fuzzy boundary between erotic art and pornography.”

Beauty by Dave Beech (Editor). “Beech’s excellent anthology examines what he now considers to be the tense and estranged relationship between beauty and art in contemporary society. As he notes in his introduction, the collection is concerned with the politics of beauty after the development of Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in which the subject of beauty, along with its subjective nature, has become dangerously controversial. The controversy that gives to rise to this collection, then, is that of beauty’s politicization; a controversy embedded in the relationship between an individual’s subjective response to beauty and the idea that their very own subjective response to beauty is socially inscribed by the higher powers of capitalist society … This is well-edited, rich, collection by an artist who is not only aware of the current complexities surrounding the beauty debate, but also the historical context from which they arose … I highly recommend it as an accessible and well-structured survey of the contemporary debate, with numerous thought provoking and controversial articles.”

Lacan at the Scene, by Henry Bond. “Henry Bond’s Lacan at the Scene blazes a welcome trail into the intersection of photo theory and post-Freudian, ostensibly Lacanian, psychoanalysis. The volume handles an engagement with several series of crime scene photographs of murders committed between 1955 and 1970 using the lens of Lacanian diagnostic criteria: perversion, psychosis, and neurosis … Lacan at the Scene comes in the form of five chapters buffeted by a brief introduction, afterword, and a foreword by the series editor Slavoj Žižek … Lacan at the Scene is a fascinating and sometimes gruesome read. Although some of the photographs Bond chose to include retain abject depictions these always remain objects of a most critical and tasteful engagement … [I] highly recommend Lacan at the Scene for psychoanalysts, philosophers, legal theorists, criminologists, photographers, art historians, theoreticians, and any other reader that is looking for a new take on murder, psychoanalysis, and the history of photography.”

We recently discovered the scholarly book review Metapsychology which covers a fair number of art-related books. Recently reviewed: Art/Porn, A History of Seeing and Touching, by Kelly Dennis. “This is an unusual book, far removed from the writings of conventional art historians whom the author dubs ‘patriarchal’. She is anxious to make clear that hers is [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments”:

The teaching work force in the humanities is tilting more and more toward the nontenured … Survey results indicate that a low turnover rate among faculty members, combined with hiring freezes at many institutions, mean fewer academic career opportunities for graduate students … And now for the good news: The great majority of the humanities departments surveyed—87 percent—said that their discipline was included in the core requirements at their college or university. The survey collected numbers on undergraduate concentrations and found that the enduring appeal of the humanities translates into minors as well as majors.

According to the survey’s report on art history departments (pdf),

The 329 departments that award a degree in Art History employ about 2,830 faculty members … Overall, about 60% of the faculty members … are women, about three-fourths are employed in a full-time position, and 70% are either tenured or in a tenure-track position.

These 329 departments award about 5,400 bachelor’s degrees in art history each year. Another 4,030 will graduate with an art-history minor. There are 3,920 graduate students in art history. Upper-division undergraduate course sections average 24.8 students per section; graduate sections average 7.1 students. Every year, about 80 tenure-track professors receive tenure, while 35 are denied or leave prior to coming up for tenure.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about a “new cross-disciplinary survey of humanities departments”: The teaching work force in the humanities is tilting more and more toward the nontenured … Survey results indicate that a low turnover rate among faculty members, combined with hiring freezes at many institutions, mean fewer academic career opportunities for graduate students [...]

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From The Independent:

There is a new star rising in the Paris art world, still relatively little known to tourists but already a favourite with Parisians. The Pinacothèque, a privately run, wholly unsubsidised exhibition space has come from nowhere to lead the field in just over two years. In the last 12 months, it has outdone all other Parisian exhibition halls in the number of visitors attracted to temporary art shows … How has the fearsome, and much-feared, French state cultural bureaucracy reacted to the competition? Rather badly. The director and founder of the Pinacothèque, Marc Restellini, 45, told The Independent … “When we announced the Munch exhibition, someone very senior from the Centre Pompidou rang the Munch museum in Norway and said ‘Don’t work with this man.’ How do I know that? Because the Munch museum rang me and said: ‘What’s the matter with you French? Why do you behave like this?’ Something very similar happened with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam which agreed to loan us most of the paintings for the Dutch [17th-century] exhibition. Someone very senior in the Paris museums world rang them to say: ‘Don’t do it’.” Mr Restellini is disliked by the French state cultural establishment for several reasons. He is an art historian (and an expert on Modigliani) but he has never taken the official French examination for museum curators. He is young and brash and speaks his mind publicly in a world that prefers discreetly poisonous intrigue … Above all, Mr Restellini believes, he has broken down the walls which fence off different genres and periods of art in Paris (pre-19th century at the Louvre; 19th century in the Musée d’Orsay; modern art in the Pompidou, etc) … “[A]rt does not fall into neat periods. Artists don’t think that way. The public doesn’t think that way.”

From The Independent: There is a new star rising in the Paris art world, still relatively little known to tourists but already a favourite with Parisians. The Pinacothèque, a privately run, wholly unsubsidised exhibition space has come from nowhere to lead the field in just over two years. In the last 12 months, it has outdone [...]

From Artforum.com: IN HINDSIGHT, I suppose it was inevitable that this year’s SITAC would be controversial. Titled “Blind Spots,” the eighth edition of the annual art-theory conference in Mexico City was organized by Americas Society’s visual-arts director Gabriela Rangel and dedicated to “an analysis of radical discourses and practices such as feminism, cinema, and performance that [...]