Posted on July 18, 2025, 8:53 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
Perhaps this is why Alpers is befuddled by today’s disciplinary confusion in which art, the master, is subjugated by art history, supposedly its emissary. Consider the following remark she made in a 2022 follow-up to the earlier conversation with Ziegler: “I agree with my great, late art historian friend Michael Podro, who said that painting has self-substance that insulates it from events and changes in the world of things—political, religious, or personal. Painting just goes along.”
Posted on July 18, 2025, 8:44 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
“Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,” which opened at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco on March 22, is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and curated by Timothy Anglin Burgard. Its premise, spelled out in the title, is straight forward enough and firmly based on the […]
When British sculptor Thomas J Price explains that his “strategy of inclusion” will counter the “endless stream of limiting tropes and identities for Black people,” he is inadvertently mimicking totalitarian injunctions.
A sad reminder of that newer does not mean better, as illustrated by the Getty Center exhibition “Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men.” The organizers of “Painting Men” which aims to address the shortcomings of Caillebotte scholarship’s “blinkered view” concerning his purported “male bias” and alleged “questioning of masculine identity that seems freshly relevant today” were not deterred […]
Posted on October 17, 2024, 12:28 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
My latest article for Quillette is an update of sorts on Robert Hughes’ writings from three decades ago about the “therapeutic fallacy” and the “censorious right.” Now it is the censorious left that is swinging the bat.
Posted on April 5, 2024, 5:35 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
This article published in Quillette is a cautionary tale about what happens when while looking at a painting one only sees their own reflection. As the historian Christopher Lasch pointed out four decades ago, disproportionate concern with “identity” is directly linked to the difficulties of establishing the boundaries of selfhood. And without the certainty of […]
Tags:
Art History,
Christopher Lasch,
Claude Gellée,
Greek mythology,
Instagram video,
museums,
Narcissus and Echo,
National Gallery,
Ovid,
painting,
QueerArtHistory Comments Off on I Me Mine |
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Posted on March 20, 2024, 12:07 PM, by jfriedman, under
art history.
The April issue of the New Criterion has my article about the Santa Barbara Museum of Art debacle—the eleventh-hour cancellation of the “Three American Painters: Then and Now” exhibition, and the firing of its curator Dr. Eik Kahng. Read and weep.
Tags:
Amada Cruz,
Art History,
Eik Kahng,
Frank Stella,
ideology,
idiocracy,
Jules Olitsky,
Kenneth Noland,
Michael Fried,
museums,
Santa Barbara Museum of Art,
Scholarship Comments Off on Art History cancelled |
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