Roger Hilton, *January* (1957) in the Tate Modern collection.

Weekly Musings + Round-Up... And A Few More Things

January 16, 2022

My round-up this week is short and sweet (all links and no substantial musings) as I attempt to find my footing with changes to our spring semester, but it is anchored by a powerful Roger Hilton abstract painting that takes inspiration from the toughest month of the year for many of us. As Hilton expressed, "Art, if it is anything, is a blood and death battle, into which you throw everything you've got." That pretty much sums up my feelings about.a lot of things the past two weeks!

"The Year Ahead: the best exhibitions to look forward to in 2022"

theartnewspaper.com

"Here’s Our Up-to-the-Minute Guide to All the Art Fairs Taking Place Around the World in the First Months of 2022"

artnet.com

"A Pandemic Historian Warns Us All to Stop Looking at the Past"

wired,com

"Four Italian Collectors on Instagram Have Been Unmasked as Catfish Accounts."

artnet.com

"‘Me Watching Y’all Cry Over a Robot Scooping Red Paint’ Bizarre Viral Hit on Social Media"

artnews.com

"‘Me against the world’: why superheroes are so often orphans"

theguardian.com

"Exhilarating Dreamlands of the Unconscious at the Met Museum"

hyperallergic.com

"Artist Johnny Bandura’s mural of residential school victims becomes tool for teaching Canada’s colonial legacy"

theartnewspaper.com

"The End of Burnout (PODCAST)"

teachinginhighered.com

"Jeff Wall: The Space of Photography | Gagosian Quarterly (VIDEO)"

gagosian.com

The Year Ahead: the best exhibitions to look forward to in 2022

Here’s Our Up-to-the-Minute Guide to All the Art Fairs Taking Place Around the World in the First Months of 2022

A Pandemic Historian Warns Us All to Stop Looking at the Past

Four Italian Collectors on Instagram Have Been Unmasked as Catfish Accounts.

‘Me Watching Y’all Cry Over a Robot Scooping Red Paint’ Bizarre Viral Hit on Social Media

‘Me against the world’: why superheroes are so often orphans

Exhilarating Dreamlands of the Unconscious at the Met Museum

Artist Johnny Bandura’s mural of residential school victims becomes tool for teaching Canada’s colonial legacy

The End of Burnout (PODCAST)

Jeff Wall: The Space of Photography | Gagosian Quarterly (VIDEO)

Theo van Doesburg with Kurt Schwitters *Kleine Dada Soirée* (1922) via MoMA Collection

Weekly Musing + Round Up... And A Few More Things

January 09, 2022

I take great comfort in being a historian entering the third year of the pandemic. There is something very grounding in looking to the past and seeing that what we are living is not necessarily unprecedented nor without parallels and knowable outcomes. Back in 2020 when news of the first wave was upon us, I devoured Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (ironically enough written in 2018 before Covid was on the world’s radar) to remind myself that this often neglected moment in twentieth century history—the one that also has shaped my own research interests— would shepherd in one of the most significant decades of artistic, avant-garde, and cultural developments the world had ever seen.

Over the past two years, teaching my film and art history students about the significance of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-1933), and the rise of art movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism, has taken on an especially relevant meaning. Take for example my featured artwork—Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters’ Kleine Dada Soirée—a poster created one hundred years ago in 1922 to introduce an art movement that, as the Tate Modern aptly describes, reveled “in the destruction of all traditional values in art and to create a new art in its place.”

Raoul Hausmann, *The Art Critic* (1919–20), a perfect example of the Dada ethos to question and undermine traditional conceptions of art, art institutions, and the authorities policing art's boundaries. Via Tate Modern Collection.

Asking young creatives to think about what it means for an entire generation of artists to look at the chaos in their world and go on to reshape and reimagine all manner of art, cultural, and ingrained social and political traditions is profoundly affirming. Change, at all levels, is what we are looking at in the decade to come post-Covid.

One of the other things I have been inviting students in my classes to do over this past year is to explore city (local and international) and art museum archives from around the world and examine the photo-documentation and art works of the period immediately before, during, and after the 1918 pandemic to look for traces and evidence of these transformations. I have heard back through many reflective assignments from these same students about the hope, new perspective, and sense of living through a historically significant period they gain through this kind of exercise. Seeing the visual and creative evidence of earlier cultures surviving and living through a global pandemic is both humbling and encouraging. Recognizing the past mirrored in our present provides reassurance and a sense of resolve.

So, as we kick off a new year and a new academic semester in a world filled with fear and doubt, I want to find more moments of grace, as a historian and as an educator, to focus on where the possibilities lie.

A Few More Things Before the Round-Up…

This past semester was one of the most demanding and difficult of my career for a whole host of personal and professional reasons. On many levels, I was left feeling quite exhausted and at my limits, but I also know I was not alone. Listening to The Professor Is In’s last podcast of the year “Your Breaking Point” was revelatory and provided a moment of grounding and recalibration to set out for a new year. Educators and students alike will find lots of valuable ideas in this resource.
On a much lighter note, I binge watched all four seasons of Yellowstone over the holidays (it’s like HBO’s Succession, but out in Montana), and I cannot recommend it highly enough for all of the relevant themes around capital expansion, environmentalism, income inequality, and fight over Indigenous rights. I am now watching the prequel to the series, 1883, and it is equally compelling.

"The ‘Meta-emptiness’ of Emily in Paris"

theatlantic.com

"Art is now accepted as a financial asset, but it is still a questionable investment"

theartnewspaper.com

"It Is Time for International Museums to Sever Ties With China"

hyperallergic.com

"Should I Take an Unpaid Internship at a Gallery?"

elephant.art

"Resolutions for a Life Worth Living"

themarginalian.org

"IMAX to Hollywood: Time to rethink what a movie is"

fastcompany.com

"From Venice to Documenta, Here’s a List of All the Major Art Biennials and Triennials Scheduled to Return in Force in 2022"

artnet.com

"Andres Serrano on his Capitol attack film: ‘I like that word, excruciating’"

theguardian.com

"against shock"

3ammagazine.com

"The Pedagogical Legacy of bell hooks"

chronicle.com

Danish artist Morten Lasskogen aka MOTEH created this crypto artwork *Lost (Nothing Lasts, but nothing is lost)* in 2020 to be traded as an NFT. It last traded for $18,592.89 earlier this year. See two of my links in this week’s round-up below related to how NFTs create value, and how crytoart is changing the relationship between artists and collectors.

Weekly Round Up... And A Few More Things

November 14, 2021

"Fab abs, trauma videos and a big pile of sweets: the art and artists of TikTok"

theguardian.com

"Beeple is changing the relationship between the artist and the collector"

qz.com

"How NFTs Create Value"

hbr.org

"How Much Do You Know About Art Criticism? See If You Can Answer These ‘Jeopardy!’ Questions"

artnet.com

"Skateboarders fight back against Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie ban"

theartnewspaper.com

"‘We are in need of a new beauty’: Pope opens new contemporary art gallery in historic Vatican library"

theartnewspaper.com

"Melbourne art critic reviews melting Murdochs without noticing Rupert or Lachlan"

theguardian.com

"$450M Salvator Mundi Likely Not by Leonardo, Claims Prado"

artforum.com

"Colleges shouldn't require faculty to record their lectures (opinion)"

insidehighered.com

"How chance can bring unexpected delights | Marcel Duchamp | UNIQLO ArtSpeaks (VIDEO)"

moma.org

Alex Katz, *3PM November* (1997) in London’s Tate Modern Collection. Katz, a figurative painter who first rose to prominence in the 1960s with his large scale portraits and landscapes, is described by the Tate as creating works that possess “bold simplicity and unmodulated colours” that are now seen as “precursors of Pop Art.”

Weekly Round Up... And A Few More Things

November 07, 2021

Recently, I have gone through a complete update of all of my office technology, including my home and office computers, laptop, and printer. It has been over eight years since I updated most of this hardware, and I had made do for as long as possible until my trusty iMac began to act up in early October and finally pack it in just ahead of a synchronous Zoom class. It was time. I had held off making the updates as long as possible, fearing the process of backing up and transferring all of my work, but the whole process was actually pretty easy and seamless and it forced me to really evaluate, edit, and focus closely on what I actually used and needed the most in my day-to-day computer workflow. I was also able to delete and rid my computer of A LOT of unused productivity and organizational apps that I had tried out and abandoned over the years.

From a late 2013 iMac to a new M1 chip 2021 iMac…. a world of difference in terms of speed and performance, and aesthetics too. My other upgrade was to a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro from a 2014 11 inch MacBook Air, and the addition of an HP Envy 6055e home printer, replacing something I had since 2010.

In speaking with a few of my students this past week about my computer transition, I decided to share some of the essential apps/tools that I use daily and may be of interest to both students and others working remotely. The core of my daily planning and everyday existence is managed on Google Calendar. I have been using it since the mid-2000s (!), but my extension bar reveals my most used apps/tools/software besides the calendar.

LastPass:

I use this tool to store, change, and constantly update all of my passwords across my computers and phone. What I love about this app is that I can quickly look up sites and passwords with the search function and opt to self-generate passwords and/or change many site passwords with a few clicks. Security is super important, especially if you teach online.

Evernote

I use this app to capture and collect any web content, bookmarks, emails, conference calls, recipes, images and anything that I want to screen grab for filing and sorting in my task manager and archives. Again, I have this app synced across all of my devices, linked to my calendar and email, and the home landing page on my computers also keeps my scratch pad, lists, most important notes, project notes, and any “to-do” items all together. It is the first place I look at each morning, and the last place I go before finishing my day. I cannot live with this app!

Pinterest

An oldy but a goody, Pinterest is essential for art historians when collecting, arranging, and making sense of art works, images, and other visual materials. I also create Pinterest boards for many of my classes when assigning art works and creating mini galleries. In my personal life, Pinterest is what I use to collect and organize all of my recipes, reading lists, and where I sort and organize things I would like to purchase for my home or wardrobe.

EndNote

I have been using EndNote, much like Google Calendar, since the mid-2000s as my main reference manager for all of my research projects. Back in my Ph.D. days, I started using EndNote to collect all of my bibliographic entries from the different libraries I would visit around the world, and later when most libraries adapted exporting tools for citations, I started saving all of my citations with the online tool, along with downloading and attaching PDF files of journal articles, books, and book chapters with the app. Today, I have the online PDF grabber in my menu bar so that EndNote can automatically open and offer to save any PDFs that pop up on my screen. I cannot imagine researching without this tool and I have all of my various projects sorted on my computer like a mini library, ready to access, share, and reference/footnote in my papers and publications.

Feedly

I have experimented with many RSS news and blog aggregators over the years, but Feedly is my go-to and also helps me capture, organize, and sort the weekly round-up. I love being able to clip and copy anything that I find quickly and seamlessly with this app, along with adding and categorizing any discovered news source, blog, or content creator to my main Feedly account.

Droplr

This is the newest addition to my daily workflow, but it is a tool that I find myself reaching for when teaching online and needing a quick way to explain a concept, art work, and/or show someone how to use a course tool or offer quick instructions via video. Unlike other screen capture apps, this one allows you to make a quick screencast that automatically opens in a window with a generated link that can be sent in a text or email. I have also been experimenting with grading online papers and ePortfolios with this tool—it allows for a more direct and personalized audio evaluation while giving me the option to narrate with or without the addition of me on video in the corner of the screen.

To this list, I will add one further essential tool that lives on my Mac menu bar—that is Gestimer. This tool allows me to set timers to work (I use the Pomodoro method, which I have blogged about here), but also lets me create quick reminders with a drag function that is super intuitive, elegant, and most important, simple!

Enjoy the links and let me know if there are any must have apps and tools that you use in your workflow. I am always learning and adapting!

"From BTS to ‘Squid Game’: How South Korea Became a Cultural Juggernaut"

nytimes.com

"‘It’s a closure’: the artist making an endless, erasing Covid-19 memorial"

theguardian.com

"The Culture Revisionism Industry"

gawker.com

"Fragonard’s The Swing has been restored—and it's saucier than ever"

theartnewspaper.com

"Writing Is Thinking"

insiderhighered.com

"Should Docents Be Canceled? My Contrarian Take on the Controversy"

artsjournal.com

"Facebook Failed the People Who Tried to Improve It"

wired.com

"Why the ‘Academic Social Contract’ Is Breaking"

chronicle.com

"The Art Angle Podcast: How a Fiery Breakup Sparked the Biggest Art Auction in Decades (PODCAST)"

artnet.com

"Vancouver Art Gallery receives $100M donation, largest single cash gift in Canadian history (VIDEO)"

globalnews.com

Andy Warhol, *Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times* (1963) at MoMA. The description for the piece reads: “In 1962 Warhol began to cull images of tragic frontpage news stories. He silkscreened this image of a fatal car accident fourteen times. "I tried doing them by hand," he said, "but I find it easier to use a screen. This way, I don’t have to work on my objects at all." Warhol's distance from the work’s making parallels his diffusion of this gruesome image through repetition and deterioration.”

Weekly Round Up... And A Few More Things

October 31, 2021

Sadly, my news aggregator Feedly has been down all day, and I am unable to access my weekly picks for the round up. I hope this isn’t some Halloween curse, but I have decided instead to post a gallery of spooky Halloween related artworks from the world of art history. Click on the images below to learn more. Enjoy! 🎃