Previous Posts: March 2013

I have read your article in The Art Newspaper about Sotheby's Institute MA Program and agree with you completely.

My MA in Lisbon has a partnership with Sotheby´s and I have also participated in other of their courses - Could not be more pleased with the Institute. 

Like you mentioned the school is, indeed, very good - Well-structured programs, high quality classes, really good teachers and so on.

Nevertheless, I would like to add the following, regarding to the expensive fees:

• Sotheby´s Institute students have many visits and lectures outside the school. Also many visits to museums, auctions, exhibitions, galleries... (Which is fantastic!) Usually the school take care of all expenses (tour guides, entrance tickets, trips - Last time I was at Sotheby's we had a bus and a boat trip that were totally organized by the Institute) This, facilitates students lives and solves logistics problems, but it is an additional economic burden to the school - Not sure if other schools do the same (in Portugal, certainly not).
• Sotheby´s Masters students have access, during (I think) a week, to personalized support in order to help them to develop a plan on how they should approach the job market. I suppose this help includes: tips on how to write resumes; motivation letters; approach on interviews. To decide which type of job position is best suited for them to start and to pursue their professional goals. They provide a "guide" with places where to look for jobs and (I guess) they even make the first approach for you. They care and want to help their students to find a job, which is, obviously, good for the school as well. 
• Sotheby´s Institute have one of the best networks in the art world. Certainly, their employability rate is quite high and, I guess, that is also included in the $ 75,000 fee.

Sometimes I wonder if instead a Postgraduation in Art Connoisseurship + a Master in Art Business (a total of 4 years + 5 in college!!!) I should not have gone for a one-year course at Sotheby's... The answer is, probably, yes...

I work at the Getty Research Insititute [...] and we attend these very obstruse lectures by the various residential scholars [...] and the people that can understand the presentations might be five or ten other scholars throughout the world. So I think that art history, also because of its apparent hesitation at embracing digital technology, really risks being left behind, and becoming marginalised or obsolete. It's also being dropped in a lot of academic programmes.'

The literature studies field was actually really early to adopt [digital means], by digitising texts and making it really easy to analyse vast quantities of data. And it really transformed the literature field, so in the past a scholar who would have to spend his entire career learning all of the classical texts, for example, in order to analyse and create meaningful analyses of the text, now, through something like the Perseus digital library [...] within hours can do the research today that it would take a scholar, forty years ago, his whole career [to do].

Yes I quite agree about digital art history - brilliant, but binary. Either you find what you are looking for, or you don't; nothing else.

It's like my beef about music. No one listens to albums any more, just cherry-picks tracks they've already heard elsewhere. In the old days your favourite song on an album would often be one you'd discovered on it, not the ones they played on the radio.

But as you say, digital benefits are vast.

Access to digital articles and research is fantastic, especially when thirty students get set the same essay title and there are limited library books…and book hoarders! 

But as Annelisa Stephan points out, art history needs to find ways of getting the full use of digital scholarship. Surely Your Paintings has already made huge headway with this, after all where would art historians be without art, especially art in excellent digital quality that can be pasted and referenced easily into essays! Even more excitingly, with the increased development of 3D scanners and digital microscopy, perhaps at some point in the future someone in, for instance, China will be able to digitally tilt/rotate a painting in, say,  Hawaii, every direction to analyse brushstrokes in minute detail. Or, if the painting has been conserved, to see the paint layers and therefore be able to analyse the artist’s technique, date the painting etc. This would obviously be 10x more awesome for sculptures and other three dimensional art and artifacts. 

In the first place, as I mentioned above, I believe that we are in the midst of a “re-establishment”—not the beginning—of digital art history, in which, obviously, we have to take into account the specifics of our time: the new knowledge economy, new technical tools, and the changes brought about by the evolution of the Web, which has become an enormous data warehouse waiting for us to analyze it.

In the second place, I think that digital art history, without losing its ties to the digital humanities, needs to establish itself in accordance with its own idiosyncrasies, basing itself on the preceding decades of research, analysis, and exploration, which should in no way be devalued in comparison with the digital humanities.

In the third place, I believe that it is crucial that we focus our attention on the specific epistemological and methodological problems of our discipline, and that we include not only academic art history but also museums, art publications, art criticism, artistic creation, the reception of works of art by the public, and so on, under the rubric of digital art history.

I read with great interest (and amusement) your internal monologue on the idiosyncrasies mentioned in the Getty piece!  If anything, Nuria Rodriguez Ortega is perhaps guilty of some of the wordy banter that makes some forms of written art history inaccessible as much as it is idiosyncratic. 

To attempt to de-guff , I propose this synopsis of these somewhat valid{?} points

i. art history as a discipline, and individual art historians are adapting to using technology in their work (some obviously better than others)?

ii. art history as a discipline, and individual art historians are wondering if use of technology will mean they will lose something they value?  note: this point does seem very ambivalent. What element being preserved do art historians have a vested interest in? eg. particular methods of teaching or modes of analysis? or the dependence on print publishing as a marker of academic reputation and success etc?

iii. Many different people are interacting with and commenting on art. These relationships are being studied more closely than ever before. It would be good for art historians to be involved in this as well ?

Thanks for sharing the Getty article - it's an absolute gem!  I love every word of it.  The attempted informality that degenerates into ponderous sub-clauses.  The ignorant reference to the 'new knowledge economy' (a novel term back in the 1970s), which we're supposed to realise is 'obviously' related to art history.  I've read a fair amount on the new knowledge economy, and quite a lot of art history, but I have no clue here.  I guess I'm just dim.  The plea for equality with the 'digital humanities' - is there some hidden debate about the status of digital art history?  Are the digital geographers dissing the digital art historians?  Oh, and then of course it's "crucial" that we consider epistemology.  We need to think differently in art history.  And we need to think especially differently in digital art history.  Finally she makes an unarguable case for the importance of digital art history by asserting that everything connected with art is part of digital art history.  I definitely prefer analogue.

Thanks for discussing the piece we published yesterday on the Getty Iris. I enjoyed your inner monologue!

I'm the editor of the Iris and wanted to add my $0.02 to "translating" Nuria's three points into simpler wording. Yesterday I attended day 1 of the Digital Art History Lab convening this week at the Getty, so can bring the background of that discussion to this clarification.

1. Digital art history got off the ground in the 1980s and '90s and then stalled. So rather than talking about launching a digital art history, let's instead talk about picking it up where we left off. (This relates to points made earlier in the piece, as she notes.) Side note: the knowledge economy isn't new in Internet time, but in art historical time, it is.

2. Digital art history is part of the broader digital humanities field, but art history shouldn't slavishly copy models of digital scholarship adopted in other fields, such as linguistics or history. We need to consider art history's methods, history, and subject matter to come up with our own path.

3. Art history has its idiosyncrasies just as any field does, and rather than pretending that it doesn't, we should acknowledge them. Moreover, we should take this moment to explicitly affirm that art history isn't just about critiquing individual objects, but about analyzing visual culture more broadly. (The Mona Lisa image search became a meme of sorts in yesterday's discussions of this theme, which is why I used it in the post.)

If you’re not quite ready for an interview, ask someone at the museum for an informational interview. See if you can take someone in the department you’re interested in to coffee in order to hear about their job and give you advice. People love to talk about themselves and their job, and it’s likely they would love to feel important enough to share their story and advice with you. You will learn a lot about the many paths people take to work in arts institutions, and you will almost definitely gain a connection. (And, although you should try to pay for the coffees, they will probably treat you, because they were once a broke college student too.)

One thing that is super important about the informational interview: DO NOT try to weasel a job out of it. Seriously. They know you’re looking to break into the museum world–everyone understands the underlying reason for informational interviews–you don’t need to put it out there. Be subtle by not mentioning it at all, graciously thank them for their time, and there’s a good chance they will say something along the lines of “feel free to contact me if you have any other questions, and I’d be happy to keep you in mind for any internships if they come to my attention.” If they don’t offer something like that, don’t bug them to do so–it puts them in an awkward position if they didn’t really connect with you.

[...] key works by the artist amidst paintings by such famous predecessors as Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens [...]. This extraordinary confrontation of old masters is essential to the understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters often produced their works in response to one another, seeking to outdo the other artist and create something exceptional. The best way to assess the results of their efforts is to look at comparable works side by side. Visitors can see for themselves the artistic challenges Hals must have faced and what makes him unique. The paintings come from some of the world’s greatest museums, among them the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris, and from various private collections. 

Through iconographic comparisons - particularly emblematic, among the many that the exhibition will be hosting, is a comparison between the Crucifixion from the Dominican church in Ancona, the Crucifixion for the Escorial in Madrid, and the fragmentary Crucifixion now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna - visitors will be able to gain a direct perception of the master's innovative approach and compositional structure, in an exhibition designed to convey not only his crucial role as a religious painter but also his complex career as portrait-painter extraordinary to the nobility and aristocracy of his day. [...]

The exhibition will be accompanied by the results of an extensive campaign of scientific analysis which has encompassed a large part of the artist's output.  Conducted by the Centro di Ateneo di Arti Visive at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo, the campaign has achieved results of the utmost importance in defining the relationship between autograph works and workshop products, and in fully documenting Titian's technical development from the earliest days of his apprenticeship.

 Art history is more nervous and self-doubting than any other humanities discipline. The reason is obvious. Literary, political and social historians all use words to analyse other words – texts, documents, archives. But art historians grapple in the rational tool of language with material far less ordered. It will always be an uneasy mix.

Art history is also young. It lacks foundational texts like Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria or Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Until the 20th century, writers on art offered partisan, if sometimes brilliant, commentaries on their own or recent times – Vasari on the Italian Renaissance, Ruskin on Turner. The Books that Shaped Art History, a path-breaking volume emerging from a series in The Burlington Magazine, explores through a focus on 16 works how the discipline evolved after 1900.

Hands are ­notoriously difficult to get right, even for the finest Old Masters (stand up, Peter Lely, I’m thinking of you), but Barocci emerges as something of a digital specialist.

Im sorry what planet are you on? The example of hands painted by Lely are awful, no knuckle structure, white and lacking tone, elongated and curved in all the places they should be straight and straight in all the places their should be curved. Resultantly they look like flat, fat sausages squeezed out of a casing machine by someone attempting to do so for the first time. 

I have several family members who are doctors who always berate my interest in art because they believe so much of it to be anatomically inaccurate and unbelieveable, I try to argue against this for all the reasons that I hope you would agree with with but im not going to go into it here.. However the example you give..just wont stand up and you dont need a medical degree to see that.

sorry first and last AHN rant over!

If I may Leave  aside the previous contributor's enquiry regarding the cosmological location of Mr Grosvenor for one moment, it is patent nonsense to say that the hands are badly executed according to shape and anatomical correctness - Doctor or no doctors..

Look a little harder and you might see the marvellous subtlety of his skill. He is painting the hands of a gentlewoman who never did manual work, and most probably cultivated a fashionably desirable skin tone of lucid paleness, hence the milky lightness. As with his predecessor Van Dyke, the slight suggestion of lucidity and purply vein under the skin is also beautifully hinted at if you look hard enough (not that difficult, surely?). Not being a cadaverous spinster of seventy, or a bruising farmer's wife used to a loamy prehensile grip year in year out, her hands therefore tend towards a slight plumpy sub-cutaneous sheath over the knuckles, surely a common physical trait the world over amongst folk still near enough to youth? The index finger of the top hand is the correct length in relation to the metacarpal area, and if you measure the whole length of the hand it is approximately the same as the distance from chin to brow, which is as it should be in anatomical study. I can see no 'straight lines'.. indeed, there are no straight lines in the human form.. every painter worth his salt in the academic tradition of the 17th C would have been taught this anyway. As for the curves... well they are Eve's blessing after all...

Your "contender for comment of the year" addendum inspired me to take a closer look at the hands, and I have to agree with him.

The index finger of the right (upper) hand has an unnatural curve to it and is spread an uncomfortable distance from the middle finger, the middle finger looks unnaturally stiff - as though it had been broken and badly set so that the middle joint can't be bent - and the third and fourth look deformed, as does the joint at the base of the little finger. And where is the thumb? There is nothing to indicate that the the sitter has one.

The left (lower) hand looks much more 'loosely' painted (studio assistant?), so its defects are in a way less glaring, but the angle of the wrist makes it look sprained and feels uncomfortable to even look at, the index finger is clumsy, the middle finger again looks deformed, and the poor sitter  is apparently missing both her third and fourth fingers as well as her other thumb.

Perhaps, since you run a hands-on* blog,  you could share some close-ups of some of Van Dyke's (and others') hands for comparison purposes.

*groan - so you won't have to :)

Increasingly museums want to be more explicit about improving people’s lives and strengthening communities. In the UK this has led to two different approaches emerging: social justice and wellbeing. [...]

Social justice museums and wellbeing museums aim to do pretty much the same things and achieve the same ends. They use their assets of collections, buildings, knowledge and networks to help create a fairer society, in which people live better lives. But there are some philosophical differences.

Social justice focuses on areas such as human rights, inequality and poverty. It believes the state should strongly intervene in communities. With origins on the left, it is perhaps red.

Wellbeing prioritises concepts such as self-help, local organisation and relationships. It stresses the role of civil society organisations, such as charities and community groups, to complement the work of the state, whose main role is to help local communities flourish so they can find their own solutions. It has its recent origins, at least in part, in the green movement.

Personally, I may be colour-blind, but I can’t see very much difference between these versions of red and green. Yet in my work on Museums 2020 I sense rumbling disagreements between the groups, with social justice people thinking wellbeing people are a bit wet and naïve about the realities of disadvantaged people’s lives. Conversely, wellbeing people think social justice people are a bit too top down and doctrinaire.

It’s worth being cautious about restoration when it comes to auction rooms. The leading auction rooms, particularly as they develop their rapidly growing private sales (dealing) business, go to considerable lengths to advise their clients that buying at auction is so easy that they shouldn’t feel the need to seek any independent advice before buying. They are wrong.

In the Daily Telegraph in October, Orlando Rock, deputy chairman of Christie’s, offered up a detailed guide on how to buy art at auction. It is all very reassuring to know that, despite any misgivings you may have had about the art world, it is in fact a nice cosy place and the leading auctions are a ‘transparent and fair platform’ that offer goods at fair prices with the ‘stamp of long-term quality and value’. And that buying art at auction is ‘accessible, affordable, personal and fun’. I would add ‘nerve-racking, opaque, confusing and often expensive’.

Rock does mention that condition is an issue and suggests that, if you feel the need, you can ask for a condition report from one of the in-house experts. However, these should not be relied on. A good restorer can make a painting that is in bad condition look fine to all but the trained eye. They can also be very good at disguising their work. The old expression that you do not find out what you have bought in the art world until you try to sell it is never truer than when it comes to condition.

If experienced dealers always feel the need to seek the advice of an independent third-party restorer before they buy, then that should tell private clients what they should be doing. Restorers are mainly generous with their time and often have to attend the major sales on behalf of clients. By seeking such advice, collectors will save themselves plenty of expensive mistakes, and it is sound practice to take the time to get to know a good restorer and make him part of your team.

[...] art-historical books and publications. Here, what is striking is not so much the cliché but the inventiveness of the language used, the reckless extensions and elaborations of words, the adverbial decor, the nifty transformation of noun into verb, the plain sentence got up in grotesque academic drag. We have recently witnessed ‘the narrativisation of subversion’ and ‘the spatiality of viewership’, among other portly neologisms. And the more the argument concerns art’s inclusiveness, the collective memory or the demotic gaze, the more the language seems to retract into hermetic exclusivity. Critical and historical writing must in some way be shaped by an intended audience. Style – whether it be complex or succinct, expository or descriptive – is a writer’s personal expression inflected by a sense of that audience. In a good deal of recent art history, felicitous style is rarely a consideration, but the imagined reader is there, drawn from a restricted circle of fellow academics (who will, incidentally, nod knowingly at the fashionable names quoted and cited that give the writer a spurious authority). Articles are couched in a careerist language to be peer read for renewal of tenure. An initial distrust of plain English turns into a positive fear of it, in case of reprisals.

How many of them are out there I wonder? Sitting on comfy stipends in faculties and institutions around the globe, writing impenetrably cryptic books, papers, monographs and theses that nobody but their identical  peers or hapless undergraduates will read?

Since Sotheby's said it must continue to eat into its commission to woo top sellers, the auction house said it plans recoup some losses by charging buyers more for winning artwork. For the first time in five years, Sotheby's said it would raise its buyer's premium from March 15; an artwork's winning bidder will be asked to pay a fee of 25% of the work's gavel price up to $100,000, plus an additional 20% of its price up to $2 million, plus 12% of anything above that.