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Philosophy Of Language, Aesthetics, Ancient Philosophy, Art History, British art, Nineteenth-century Art, and 21 morePhilosophy of Mind, Greek Theatre, Neoclassicism, History Painting, Henry Fuseli, Art Theory, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Art, Logic, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy Of Mathematics, Philosophy of Logic, Gottlob Frege, Plato, Bertrand Russell, History of Philosophy, Bernard Bolzano, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ugliness, Anselm of Canterbury, and Philosophy of perception edit
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I am interested in the link between pictures, fiction, and unasserted thoughts (in hypotheses, questions, games, drea... moreI am interested in the link between pictures, fiction, and unasserted thoughts (in hypotheses, questions, games, dreams, etc). The immediate goal is to vindicate social art history by showing how objective content outruns the egocentric meaning found in art by spectators. The distant goal is to vindicate Platonism by clarifying what thoughts are. edit
A study of symbolist art and literature connecting these aesthetic phenomena to some theoretical sciences of the late nineteenth century (logic, mathematics) which were also particularly concerned with the studying their means of... more
A study of symbolist art and literature connecting these aesthetic phenomena to some theoretical sciences of the late nineteenth century (logic, mathematics) which were also particularly concerned with the studying their means of representation. The shared goal of many of these thinkers and artists was to overcome the privacy of experience, and an empirical worldview that made such privacy and skepticism absolute (psychologism).
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A new classicism was afoot in the second half of the eighteenth century. The rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum challenged European assumptions about ancient life; just as influential, if slower-acting, were the translations of Greek... more
A new classicism was afoot in the second half of the eighteenth century. The rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum challenged European assumptions about ancient life; just as influential, if slower-acting, were the translations of Greek tragedy. Art of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries dealt with the seemingly irrational violence of tragedy, be it ancient or Shakespearean, as a means of understanding the habits and beliefs of alien cultures. This had aesthetic as well as political implications: in recognizing tragedy as an foreign cultural form, modern Europe recognized its own historical status as one culture among many.
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In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence... more
In this key text in the history of art and aesthetics, Karl Rosenkranz shows ugliness to be the negation of beauty without being reducible to evil, materiality, or other negative terms used it's conventional condemnation. This insistence on the specificity of ugliness, and on its dynamic status as a process afflicting aesthetic canons, reflects Rosenkranz's interest in the metropolis - like Walter Benjamin, he wrote on Paris and Berlin - and his voracious collecting of caricature and popular prints. Rosenkranz, living and teaching, like Kant, in remote Königsberg, reflects on phenomena of modern urban life from a distance that results in critical illumination. The struggle with modernization and idealist aesthetics makes Aesthetics of Ugliness, published four years before Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, hugely relevant to modernist experiment as well as to the twenty-first century theoretical revival of beauty.
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
Translated into English for the first time, Aesthetics of Ugliness is an indispensable work for scholars and students of modern aesthetics and modernist art, literary studies and cultural theory, which fundamentally reworks conceptual understandings of what it means for a thing to be ugly. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aesthetics-of-ugliness-9781472568878/#sthash.ABAx8SlQ.dpuf
Review: “The great value of the concept of ugliness is dialectical. The contrast with the beautiful can be a distinct way of illuminating that notion, and with it the ideal of art as such. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics of Ugliness, here carefully edited, lucidly introduced, and elegantly translated by Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, shows us in detail how one might understand this contrast, illuminating fundamental issues in aesthetics and in the self-understanding of modernity along the way – a very valuable contribution to any discussion.”
Robert Pippin, Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA
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ed. Mechtild Widrich and Andrei Pop. A collection of essays on ugliness in art and life. Featuring an introduction and annotated bibliography by the two of us. A preview is available by clicking (I am all for sharing, but not other... more
ed. Mechtild Widrich and Andrei Pop. A collection of essays on ugliness in art and life. Featuring an introduction and annotated bibliography by the two of us. A preview is available by clicking (I am all for sharing, but not other people's work). You may read my essay above under papers.
Here is the table of contents:
Introduction:
-Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Rethinking Ugliness
The Politics of Ugliness:
-Gretchen E. Henderson, The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity
-Suzannah Biernoff, The Face of War
-Brandon Taylor, Picasso and the Psychoanalysts
-Mechtild Widrich, The ‘Ugliness’ of the Avant-garde
The Experience of Ugliness:
-Edward Payne, Ribera’s Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity
-Frédérique Desbuissons, The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France
-Kathryn Simpson, I’m Ugly Because You Hate Me: Ugliness and Negative Empathy in Oskar Kokoschka’s Early Self-Portraiture
-Adele Tan, From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice – the Ugly in Teo Eng Seng’s D Cells
The Theory of Ugliness:
-Andrei Pop, Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist?
-Kassandra Nakas, Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous: The ‘Liquefying’ Rhetoric of Ugliness
-Odeta Žukauskienė, Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds. Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Contribution to Art History
-Three Definitions of Ugliness (Diderot 1765, Bolzano 1843, Lee 1882)
-Annotated Bibliography
Here is the table of contents:
Introduction:
-Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Rethinking Ugliness
The Politics of Ugliness:
-Gretchen E. Henderson, The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity
-Suzannah Biernoff, The Face of War
-Brandon Taylor, Picasso and the Psychoanalysts
-Mechtild Widrich, The ‘Ugliness’ of the Avant-garde
The Experience of Ugliness:
-Edward Payne, Ribera’s Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity
-Frédérique Desbuissons, The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France
-Kathryn Simpson, I’m Ugly Because You Hate Me: Ugliness and Negative Empathy in Oskar Kokoschka’s Early Self-Portraiture
-Adele Tan, From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice – the Ugly in Teo Eng Seng’s D Cells
The Theory of Ugliness:
-Andrei Pop, Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist?
-Kassandra Nakas, Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous: The ‘Liquefying’ Rhetoric of Ugliness
-Odeta Žukauskienė, Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds. Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Contribution to Art History
-Three Definitions of Ugliness (Diderot 1765, Bolzano 1843, Lee 1882)
-Annotated Bibliography
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A practical guide to writing art history papers for newcomers to the field. I am still fond of the intermezzo called "What is Art?"
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One way to formulate the question of a "long" eighteenth century, one not just stretching to include the Napoleonic Wars, but to claim eighteenth-century influence on later history, is not in terms of quantity (what's a good stopping... more
One way to formulate the question of a "long" eighteenth century, one not just stretching to include the Napoleonic Wars, but to claim eighteenth-century influence on later history, is not in terms of quantity (what's a good stopping point?) or explanatory power (is this an "eighteenth-centuryish" development?) but of explanatory justice: what right have we to think in terms of an eighteenth century, given a host of complex and in some cases urgent demands on scholarship? Geopolitically, we may ask whether there is even an eighteenth century outside Western Europe and its American colonies.[1] What makes it such, locally or globally? These questions deserve specific answers that diverge in specific cases, but the fact that they are even worth asking is meaningful. If art historians insist on the conceptual coherence of the eighteenth century, it is because of the eighteenth century's connection with Enlightenment as an ideology and, more controversially, a real historical or social process. We implicitly transpose the question of a "long" eighteenth century into that of a "long" Enlightenment. This essay will try to do so explicitly, drawing the consequences of treating an artifact not usually regarded in Enlightenment terms, the portrait of a presently unidentified Black man, less as a product of than as itself productive of Enlightenment.
Open access: https://www.journal18.org/issue12/enlightenment-as-thought-made-public-joshua-reynoldss-portrait-of-a-black-man/
Open access: https://www.journal18.org/issue12/enlightenment-as-thought-made-public-joshua-reynoldss-portrait-of-a-black-man/
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The first person represented as a subject’s field of vision, as opposed to first-person language, has only been around for a century and a half. Yet the claims advanced by its philosophical inventor, Ernst Mach, are momentous: nothing... more
The first person represented as a subject’s field of vision, as opposed to first-person
language, has only been around for a century and a half. Yet the claims advanced by its philosophical
inventor, Ernst Mach, are momentous: nothing less than the dissolution of the self into a world of sensations.
A closer look at his images reveals less an elimination of the self than a reflection of the connection
between subject, world, and others.
language, has only been around for a century and a half. Yet the claims advanced by its philosophical
inventor, Ernst Mach, are momentous: nothing less than the dissolution of the self into a world of sensations.
A closer look at his images reveals less an elimination of the self than a reflection of the connection
between subject, world, and others.
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Since Gert Schiff's magisterial publication of 1973 on Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), a print identified as representing the enslaved prince Oroonoko has raised unsettling questions about the complex implication of even liberal, abolitionist... more
Since Gert Schiff's magisterial publication of 1973 on Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), a print identified as representing the enslaved prince Oroonoko has raised unsettling questions about the complex implication of even liberal, abolitionist eighteenth-century artists and intellectuals in the world system of enslaved labor. But problems of fit with Thomas Southerne's 1695 play Oroonoko, popular throughout the eighteenth century, and with Aphra Behn's 1688 eponymous novel demand a reattribution, placing the print in a debate about not only slavery in the Americas but also race, classicism, and the merits of Indigenous and European civilization in South Africa.
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A translation of Alois Riegl's classic essay on the art of his time and how it fits into the grand scheme of human intellectual and aesthetic development. The original layout and illustration program from Die graphischen Künste were as... more
A translation of Alois Riegl's classic essay on the art of his time and how it fits into the grand scheme of human intellectual and aesthetic development. The original layout and illustration program from Die graphischen Künste were as closely reproduced as possible, given the continuity needs of its new venue, Grey Room. NB: We academia.edu "authors", Andrei Pop and Lucia Allais, are in fact the translators of Riegl's text into English. It only took 120 years!
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I argue on the basis of Auguste Rodin's curious illustrations to Octave Mirbeau's Garden of Tortures (1898/1900)--line drawings and watercolors, which relate to the text very subtly and indirectly, and are printed lithographed in... more
I argue on the basis of Auguste Rodin's curious illustrations to Octave Mirbeau's Garden of Tortures (1898/1900)--line drawings and watercolors, which relate to the text very subtly and indirectly, and are printed lithographed in overlapping sets of three sheets of paper per motif--that Mirbeau could not have been as opposed to symbolism in the arts as he let on. That is in part because symbolism need not be a turning away from reality as much as a kind of making legible of it formally: in this case, the reality of human pain, cruelty, injustice and lustfulness, which are the themes of Mirbeau's prurient novel and are transformed into something far more lyrical in Rodin's nudes. Text is in French: if there is interest, I may add an English version.
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In considering the birth of the modern political and scientific discourse on sexuality, I contrast several theorists (Wollstonecraft, Sade, and E. Darwin) and one visual artist (James Gillray) applying Enlightenment ideas of natural human... more
In considering the birth of the modern political and scientific discourse on sexuality, I contrast several theorists (Wollstonecraft, Sade, and E. Darwin) and one visual artist (James Gillray) applying Enlightenment ideas of natural human behavior and drawing moral conclusions from them. I argue that not only is a polemical medium like the political cartoon able to keep pace with the subtlety and complexity of contemporaneous writing on the subject, but that it can explore the weaknesses of those theoretical positions (esp. Sade's and Darwin's) in ways their authors might not have expected.
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Starting with Goya's Caprichos and ending with Charlie Hebdo's offensive cartoons (and the outraged reactions both sets of images elicited), this essay considers satire less as an attack on others than an opportunity for self-reflection.... more
Starting with Goya's Caprichos and ending with Charlie Hebdo's offensive cartoons (and the outraged reactions both sets of images elicited), this essay considers satire less as an attack on others than an opportunity for self-reflection. Especial attention is paid to the relation between Goya's etchings and their captions, and to the iconoclastic reaction to Goya of a major nineteenth-century art writer, John Ruskin.
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In this German-language essay, I argue that the sublime is theorized by Kant too subjectively to account for our aesthetic experience and use of the predicate, and that resources in ancient art theory (Aristotle and Longinus) allow us to... more
In this German-language essay, I argue that the sublime is theorized by Kant too subjectively to account for our aesthetic experience and use of the predicate, and that resources in ancient art theory (Aristotle and Longinus) allow us to conceive the sublime in a more robustly realistic manner as inhering in objects regardless of their being perceived. That the sublime nevertheless manifests itself in mismatches between a perceiver and an object is reconciled to this by considering a case of the 'extremely-small' sublime, an ignored detail (of a pair of spectacles) in a more conventionally large-sublime painting by Pieter Bruegel.
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In this German-language essay, I compare Walter Benjamin's ideas about religion and love within (capitalist) modernity to a famous, if not infamous poem handling similar themes of private commitment and public disenchantment, Matthew... more
In this German-language essay, I compare Walter Benjamin's ideas about religion and love within (capitalist) modernity to a famous, if not infamous poem handling similar themes of private commitment and public disenchantment, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach".
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I argue that Fuseli's Nightmare, like Lady Hamilton's Attitudes, attempts to convey the experience of dreaming rather than the propositional content of a dream. This ersatz experience, which can only be conveyed analogically, makes both... more
I argue that Fuseli's Nightmare, like Lady Hamilton's Attitudes, attempts to convey the experience of dreaming rather than the propositional content of a dream. This ersatz experience, which can only be conveyed analogically, makes both phenomena ancestors of the modern liberal view of social life as a collection of inscrutable privacies that interact in public.
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I argue that Fuseli's paintings and drawings of Greek tragedy, like his work on Shakespeare, do not consist in failed attempts to provide legible examples of virtue, but in attempts to make legible moral codes not shared by his... more
I argue that Fuseli's paintings and drawings of Greek tragedy, like his work on Shakespeare, do not consist in failed attempts to provide legible examples of virtue, but in attempts to make legible moral codes not shared by his spectators. This is linked with the 'passionately detached' theatrical practice of David Garrick and with Herder's defense of cultural pluralism.
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I track the titular phenomenon (denied by most theoreticians but affirmed by others, e.g. William James), to the distinction between form and content, and then, more promisingly, to Plato's theory of ideas as presented by Alexander... more
I track the titular phenomenon (denied by most theoreticians but affirmed by others, e.g. William James), to the distinction between form and content, and then, more promisingly, to Plato's theory of ideas as presented by Alexander Nehamas, according to which all concrete things participate both in beauty and its opposite. I distinguish this from the flawed relational thesis of Denis Diderot, and end by affirming the value of logical work to history and criticism.
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I argue that Ensor's perceiving masks and skeletons, as well as his opaque paint application, point to the problem of solipsism and its practical attendant, egoism, in fin de siècle art and culture. I connect this to the use of masks in... more
I argue that Ensor's perceiving masks and skeletons, as well as his opaque paint application, point to the problem of solipsism and its practical attendant, egoism, in fin de siècle art and culture. I connect this to the use of masks in the Symbolist theatre of Maeterlinck, usually thought to promise a mystical release from modern problems.
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I attempt to free Panofsky's iconology of its meaning-holism (problematic because it is circular about evidence) by attending to propositional attitudes accompanying iconographic content. I then examine Anselm's Chapel decoration at... more
I attempt to free Panofsky's iconology of its meaning-holism (problematic because it is circular about evidence) by attending to propositional attitudes accompanying iconographic content. I then examine Anselm's Chapel decoration at Canterbury, arguing that like Anselm's first ontological argument, it makes crucial play with the distinction between believing and not believing what is thought.
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Despite a long title, this is a short introduction to Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of meaning, from the point of view of an art historical distinction between writing and images, which Wittgenstein's distinction between "saying" and... more
Despite a long title, this is a short introduction to Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of meaning, from the point of view of an art historical distinction between writing and images, which Wittgenstein's distinction between "saying" and "showing" does not support. After writing this I came to think that Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a piece of epistemology (which, as he says, is the philosophy of psychology), and that the showing/saying distinction does not concern logic or meaning but the experience of understanding. If what is understood is logically simple, the explanation cannot further explain it, but only repeat it, hence the proclaimed impossibility to say what is shown. This seems neither a "metaphysical" nor a "resolutely nonsensical" reading. On it, we can see a lot of things not literally visible, such as, in my interpretation of three Tractatus diagrams, disjunctive, impossible, and unimaginable states of affairs. I have rewritten and expanded the essay in (English) manuscript and am grateful for criticisms.
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A precis of my book on Fuseli's pluralist classicism, sketching my method and applying it in brief to one wonderfully histrionic painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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Somewhat modern philosophical approaches to antiquity, one textual (Adorno), one painterly (Fuseli), are compared. A methodology is sketched for the study of antiquity in modern political thought, through a reading of two interpretations... more
Somewhat modern philosophical approaches to antiquity, one textual (Adorno), one painterly (Fuseli), are compared. A methodology is sketched for the study of antiquity in modern political thought, through a reading of two interpretations of the same episode in Homer: the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus.
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Not a work I consider published, but, given that the website of my winter 2002 Stanford course in The History of Video Games (Science, Technology and Society 145) was incorporated into the ample and interesting How They Got Game, an... more
Not a work I consider published, but, given that the website of my winter 2002 Stanford course in The History of Video Games (Science, Technology and Society 145) was incorporated into the ample and interesting How They Got Game, an open-source resource on the history of digital media, I append the paper here too. It may amuse historians of creative platform gaming and early 3D polygonal graphics.
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Against some familiar sociological approaches to LA architecture, which I criticize as overly automobile-dependent (notably Reyner Banham), I offer a 'lived' analysis of one LA Victorian house, including autobiographical comments on two... more
Against some familiar sociological approaches to LA architecture, which I criticize as overly automobile-dependent (notably Reyner Banham), I offer a 'lived' analysis of one LA Victorian house, including autobiographical comments on two years spent there.
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This is one of a group of catalogue texts attending the Kunsthaus Zurich exhibition of Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih. He combines new materials and technologies with themes from the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and, in the case... more
This is one of a group of catalogue texts attending the Kunsthaus Zurich exhibition of Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih. He combines new materials and technologies with themes from the early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and, in the case of Solar Limb, as it seems to me, prehistoric motifs, all with a pleasingly rational attitude. The text is in parallel German and English.
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I argue, with reference to works ranging from an antique pelike with a sphinx motif to Max Klinger's fin-de-siècle retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth, that a large part of the attraction of the classical comes not from aesthetic... more
I argue, with reference to works ranging from an antique pelike with a sphinx motif to Max Klinger's fin-de-siècle retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth, that a large part of the attraction of the classical comes not from aesthetic rules and exemplary works, but from the gaps in our knowledge of both artworks and their meaning. A more evocative strain of classicism thus becomes visible, together with a critique of art historians' reluctance to admit they are stumped by an artwork.
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I argue that psychic complexity, and attempts to reduce it to mechanism, are typical not only of philosophy of mind but also of narrative art, whether visual, literary, or filmic, when it aims to portray minds. It is no surprise then that... more
I argue that psychic complexity, and attempts to reduce it to mechanism, are typical not only of philosophy of mind but also of narrative art, whether visual, literary, or filmic, when it aims to portray minds. It is no surprise then that monsters and automatons are among narrative art's most distinctive products: representation is fated to produce ersatz consciousnesses, whether its object is to depict real or artificial minds.
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I argue that sculpture since the 90s, having weathered both monumentalism and the literalism of avant-garde art, has vigorously returned to illusion and narrative, and with them, the conceptual and imaginative functions and relations to... more
I argue that sculpture since the 90s, having weathered both monumentalism and the literalism of avant-garde art, has vigorously returned to illusion and narrative, and with them, the conceptual and imaginative functions and relations to spectators always at work in sculpture.
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Basim Magdy's retro-futuristic paintings and films combine humorous, detached allegories and fragments of urban Cairo in ways that conform to and stretch the tradition of allegory stretching back to the Renaissance.
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“Am Anfang war das Aug”—in the beginning was the eye. This biblical motto, in fact a witty play on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whose Faust tried to improve on Genesis), was Austrian art historian Otto Pächt’s rationale for looking at... more
“Am Anfang war das Aug”—in the beginning was the eye. This biblical motto, in fact a witty play on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (whose Faust tried to improve on Genesis), was Austrian art historian Otto Pächt’s rationale for looking at artworks carefully. Susanne von Falkenhausen, who was Pächt’s student in Vienna in the 1970s, confesses in her recent book that it took her many years to absorb Pächt’s ideas on vision and its place in research. That is the very topic of Beyond the Mirror, pursued, as the subtitle indicates, in art history and visual culture...
Open access at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrei_pop_reviews_beyond_the_mirror/
Open access at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrei_pop_reviews_beyond_the_mirror/
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In an era characterized in the humanities by strident commitments to vibrant matter and antihumanisms of every stripe, a polemic in the guise of disciplinary history qualifies as a subversive gesture. But a polemic this is, more than a... more
In an era characterized in the humanities by strident commitments to vibrant matter and antihumanisms of every stripe, a polemic in the guise of disciplinary history qualifies as a subversive gesture. But a polemic this is, more than a textbook...
open access at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrei_pop_reviews_a_history_of_art_history/
open access at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andrei_pop_reviews_a_history_of_art_history/
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Research Interests:
My review of great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's posthumously published College de France lectures and incomplete manuscript on modernist painter Edouard Manet, a provocative but inconclusive work that should particularly interest... more
My review of great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's posthumously published College de France lectures and incomplete manuscript on modernist painter Edouard Manet, a provocative but inconclusive work that should particularly interest art historians and aestheticians.
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A very brief review of the English translation of Schaeffer's Les Célibataires de l'Art. Pour une esthétique sans mythes (1996), a fine piece of French analytic philosophy of art.
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Reviews of Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History and Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905. I argue that Alois Riegl has more to teach current art historians, and others, than these two worthy and quite... more
Reviews of Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History and Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905. I argue that Alois Riegl has more to teach current art historians, and others, than these two worthy and quite different books lead one to believe.
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A review of Robert Bagley, Gombrich among the Egyptians and Other Essays in the History of Art (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2016). I praise Bagley's encyclopedic reach and questioning of the basics of art writing and periodization, while... more
A review of Robert Bagley, Gombrich among the Egyptians and Other Essays in the History of Art (Seattle: Marquand Books, 2016). I praise Bagley's encyclopedic reach and questioning of the basics of art writing and periodization, while criticizing his combative stance toward earlier art historians, especially Gombrich.
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[Draft originally entitled "Philosophical Objects"] My review of Charles Ray's work of the last two decades, work of a pronounced 'classical' flavor, which I interpret less as a citation of antiquity than as a philosophically realist... more
[Draft originally entitled "Philosophical Objects"] My review of Charles Ray's work of the last two decades, work of a pronounced 'classical' flavor, which I interpret less as a citation of antiquity than as a philosophically realist commitment to objects that sculpture represents in three dimensions.
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A review of Kimberly A. Smith, ed, The Expressionist Turn in Art History (2014), a selection of articles and translations from "expressionist art historians". With some methodological scruples on identifying art historians with art... more
A review of Kimberly A. Smith, ed, The Expressionist Turn in Art History (2014), a selection of articles and translations from "expressionist art historians". With some methodological scruples on identifying art historians with art movements.
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My review of Eva Kernbauer's interesting book on the eighteenth-century French and British art public and its uses, with much detailed archival work and a novel approach to eighteenth-century art as "contemporary art" (naturally from the... more
My review of Eva Kernbauer's interesting book on the eighteenth-century French and British art public and its uses, with much detailed archival work and a novel approach to eighteenth-century art as "contemporary art" (naturally from the eighteenth-century point of view). My review focuses on her treatment of Hume on taste, whereon I also hazard some views.
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A review (in German) of the catalogue to the recent Anton Graff exhibition in Berlin and Winterthur, with substantial essays on German Enlightenment and commentaries on many portraits. While praising its breadth (from friendship temples... more
A review (in German) of the catalogue to the recent Anton Graff exhibition in Berlin and Winterthur, with substantial essays on German Enlightenment and commentaries on many portraits. While praising its breadth (from friendship temples to philosophical anthropology) I point out that more detail on the international careers of Swiss artists, and the differences in audiences of portraiture between industrializing Britain and still-princely Germany, might tell us still more about these pictures.
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A transcription of some handwritten notes in my copy of Russell's Problems of Philosophy, which I believe to be by idealist philosopher Timothy Sprigge. I welcome any confirming or disproving thoughts. For lovers of books, sense-data, and... more
A transcription of some handwritten notes in my copy of Russell's Problems of Philosophy, which I believe to be by idealist philosopher Timothy Sprigge. I welcome any confirming or disproving thoughts. For lovers of books, sense-data, and outre-tombe.
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A conversation between the first three Field Editors for Theory and Historiography at caa.reviews, the online reviewing organ of the College Art Association. We discuss developments over the two decades we served, the relevance of theory... more
A conversation between the first three Field Editors for Theory and Historiography at caa.reviews, the online reviewing organ of the College Art Association. We discuss developments over the two decades we served, the relevance of theory in art writing and of reviewing books generally and specifically in art history.