CAA News Today
March 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — April 04, 2013
The March 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, launches the celebration of its centennial year. Gracing the cover is a photograph by the artist Martha Rosler that depicts the installation of her traveling library at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2007. Karen Lang, the journal’s editor-in-chief, writes of this image: “These days … it remains unclear whether a ‘library user’ would hunker down with a book or nestle in for a session on a laptop…. Rosler invites us to consider how we interact with books. Her artwork makes us conscious of this activity and of the status of the book itself.”
In a brief essay, Craig Clunas ponders the conditions of seeing and description in “Regarding Art and Art History.” This issue’s “Notes from the Field” features short essays on the topic of materiality by Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. The March interview brings Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, into conversation with her fellow scholar Stephen Melville.
In the opening essay, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Sarah M. Guérin uncovers the strategic use of microarchitectural frames in sacred ivory carvings of thirteenth-century Western Europe. Next, in the evocatively titled “Ingres’s Shadows,” Sarah Betzer demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French artist’s depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication Museé français relate to philosophical considerations of sensory experience, revealing the distinctly modern terms of its allure for the artist.
Paul Smith examines the perspectival distortions in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, that is, the rejection of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life. Yi Gu’s essay “What’s in a Name?” studies the appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911 to trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art. Finally, Leora Maltz-Leca explores relations between William Kentridge’s ambulatory animation process and local imagery of striding figures as allegories of political regime change in South Africa.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Robert H. Sharf examines Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache, a collection of lectures delivered by the late scholar Helmut Brinker at the Spencer Museum of Art. An-Yi Pan assesses The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-nin D. Lee, the first book-length study on a well-known handscroll, and Leo G. Mazow evaluates Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturalism in American Art, 1890–1915. John Ott’s review considers three recent books on race and art: Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject; Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller; and Jacqueline Francis’s Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in June 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of H. W. Janson’s classic survey text History of Art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — April 03, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
ARTstor to Help Launch the Digital Public Library of America
ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America to provide access to more than ten thousand high-quality images from six leading museums. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open ARTstor, a new ARTstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public-domain images. (Read more from the Digital Public Library of America.)
The Etiquette of Accepting a Job Offer
The academic job market is overcrowded, but departments are hiring, and each year thousands of graduate students and other candidates will get phone calls offering them tenure-track positions. It is typically a moment of mutual giddiness. The department heads are excited at the prospect of a terrific new colleague; the job applicants now know that their immediate future is assured. Then, well, complications may ensue. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Juried Shows
I am a painter who recently graduated from art school but haven’t had much gallery experience, and I was interested in submitting work to some juried shows as a way of gaining some experience and making some new connections. Could you offer some advice on finding reputable juried shows to apply to? (Read more at Daily Serving.)
Having “The Talk”
Anyone considering joining the alt-ac job market will eventually tell his or her academic colleagues that he or she might be jumping off the tenure-track train. For graduate students this will often mean having “the talk” with their advisers. There are several reasons why it is important to seek your adviser’s support, even for an alt-ac career. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
How Can We Reimagine Arts Schools?
Perhaps what was most thrilling and unexpected about the meeting of 250 arts leaders at the “3 Million Stories” conference was an emerging sense of urgency and excitement about the need to think seriously about how arts schools and training institutions—especially at the collegiate level—might reimagine themselves and respond to changes in how creative work is done and the nature of creative careers. In short, who will invent the twenty-first-century arts school? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)
STEM and Liberal Arts: Frenemies of the State
When I was getting ready for college, I knew I was going to pursue a degree in some area of science; I never even considered a liberal-arts degree. To be honest, I did my best to not take any liberal-arts courses I didn’t need to. These classes were at odds with my science, and I didn’t want to waste my time on something I wasn’t going to use. (Read more at Plos.)
Sotheby’s Controversial Sale of Precolumbian Artifacts Yields Low Sales Figures and Highlights the Increased Efforts of Countries to Repatriate Artifacts
Last week’s sale of Precolumbian artifacts predominantly from the Barbier-Mueller collection, conducted at Sotheby’s in Paris, proved an anticlimactic end to a controversial story. Though estimated to bring in $19 to 23 million, the sale only made $13.3 million, and 165 of the 313 lots were unsold. An unwelcome spotlight had been fixed on the sale, as four countries—Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Costa Rica—demanded return of artifacts that were allegedly stolen from their borders decades before. (Read more at the Center for Art Law.)
Managing Your Online Time
Over the course of a teaching day, most faculty members find themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard (or its competitors), blogs, and email. We manage a steady stream of online demands. Yet one of the most frequent complaints from students is that their instructors have “no online presence.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction
posted by Lauren Stark — April 02, 2013
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction. Please review the guidelines below to become familiar with the nomination process and to download, complete, and submit the requested materials.
CAA will name the recipients of the 2014 awards in January and honor them in a special ceremony during Convocation at the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago.
General Guidelines
In your letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. We also urge you to contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters; no more than five letters are considered. Letters of support are important for reference, but the awards decisions are the responsibilities of the juries based on their expert assessment of the qualifications of the nominees.
Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013. Books published posthumously are not eligible. Letters of support are not required for the Morey and Barr awards. All submissions must include a completed 2014 nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book-award nominations do not require a CV (see below for the appropriate forms for the Morey and Barr awards and the Porter Prize).
Please send all materials by mail or email to: Lauren Stark, 2014 Awards for Distinction, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: July 31, 2013, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards; August 31, 2013, for all others.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Morey nominaton form
- Letters of support are not required
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Barr nomination form
- Letters of support are not required
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
To determine eligibility, authors of articles in The Art Bulletin must complete the Porter nomination form.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Please submit copies of critical writings, which may be website links and printouts, photocopies or scanned pages of newspapers or magazines, and more. If the writing is contained in a single volume (such as a book), please provide the publication information.
Distinguished Teaching of Art and Art History Awards
Letters for these two awards are particularly important for the juries because of the personal contact involved in successful teaching.
Contact
Please write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information about the nomination process.