Rogier van der Weyden, Magdalen Reading (1438)-- I spotted this gem of a painting this past week while in London at the National Gallery. — Rogier van der Weyden, *Magdalen Reading* (1438)-- I spotted this gem of a painting this past week while in London at the National Gallery.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

February 08, 2016

Whirlwind! That pretty much describes my very packed five days this past week in London. I tallied something like 2-3 museum/galleries per day, saw hundreds of works of art, and got to glimpse the dizzying world of the art market while delivering a conference paper related to the topic—my Fitbit steps averaged well over 20,000 each day. As crazy as it was, I highly recommend visiting an art city in this way. It is both exhilarating and energizing to take in so much visual culture in such a short span while simultaneously attending an academic event. Once again I am reminded of why I love to do what I do, and having a great friend and local (thanks again Lara!) to accompany me on many of my visits was a special bonus. Home late Sunday after a tiring flight, I was very happy to catch up on rest and reconnection on Family Day (a holiday here in B.C.). I was also able to sort through some of the best of my media picks for the week—enjoy!

"Playing Back 50 Years of Video Art"

hyperallergic.com

"Inklings of a Chill in the Art Market"

nytimes.com

"8 Books You Need to Read This February"

vulture.com

"Why academics need to get moving"

theguardian.com

"Find the Truth at 'The X-Files' Art Show in This Otherworldly Gallery"

indiewire.com

"Chinese Dissidents Are Being Abducted Outside of China"

slate.com

"People really want to believe there's a 'laptop' in this ancient statue"

mashable.com

"In defense of Ai Weiwei's drowned Syrian boy photo (PODCAST)"

cbc.ca

"‘The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse’—An Interview"

nybooks.com

"Maria Hassabi | PLASTIC (VIDEO)"

moma.com

List of Links (for quicker linking):

Something about this juxtaposition of nature, art, architecture, and light/space captured my attention as I sat for afternoon tea at the British Museum.

Location| London, UK: Money, Power, Collections

February 05, 2016

London as always is a rush. Like New York, it is a place that seems endless and no amount of planning can cover off all that you might want to see and experience. And so, like with any great buffet, you have to pick and choose wisely, knowing that many tempting things will not get onto your plate. This time around, I am here to attend a conference and give a paper related to the Venice Biennale. But I am also here to visit with a dear friend and fellow art historian, Lara, who has recently moved to London to pursue her professional interests in art advising, appraising, and all things art history. With this particular conference and visit thus far, I have been struck by intersecting themes around value, perception and status as it relates to both art collecting and exhibition—I am in London after all.

Capturing the scene outside of Sotheby's on the night of my arrival. The quiet on the street sits in contrast to the millions of dollars in art transactions happening inside.

It started Wednesday night when I arrived and met with Lara at Sotheby’s to attend the Impressionist and Modern Art evening auction. I was fortunate that Lara could secure us tickets, and inside we were witness not only to a real “scene” in terms of conspicuous displays of wealth and posturing, but also the tens of millions of dollars in art sales transactions that transpired in minutes, and with such casualness and even an air of the banal. Flipping through the catalogue, it was fascinating to read both the provenance and exhibition history of each object—some of the works had not been seen publicly in decades, such as the much buzzed about Rodin statue which did sell for a higher price than expected—while others, such as Monet’s Le Palais Ducal had been circulated through well placed shows over the last century and would be recognized by educated collectors. Like a cabinet of curiosities, the assembly of items up for auction represented an eclectic and unexpected mix of objects that had landed together for a short time, each with its own long story of transmission.

My souvenir from the night-- the catalogue (a million thanks to Lara for securing the tickets!)

The next day I headed over to the University of London for the Venice Biennale conference. My paper, related to the ways in which the Biennale has been transformed by shifts in both perception and curatorial vision over recent decades, was part of a panel interrogating the evolution of the event’s strategic positioning in connection to the global art market. What struck me in the post-panel discussion was just how conflicted people remain about the motives around why and how people collect art. In my own arguments, I raised the issue of how difficult it is to stage a high-profile art exhibition claiming alterity and a call for art to speak truth to power when the biggest spenders in the current art market are people who have made their money in non-democracies with horrendous human rights records and history of attacks on artistic freedom. Others commented on the recent interest in collecting dematerialized art forms (such as performance and site-specific installations from the 1970s) that had originally been conceived to resist commodification. Is this part of an attempt to recognize and bring awareness to these art practices, or more cynically, is this just a form of niche collecting that is gambling on these objects having some future value. Is it both?

The somewhat imposing door and entrance to the conference venue. So much tradition and history at this particular institution.

Later in the afternoon with my head spinning from conversations about art, money, and questions of legitimacy, I headed across the street to the British Museum. Oddly, in all of my trips to London, I had somehow never made the visit. Maybe it is my own natural resistance to tradition, or the problem again of the London buffet, but this time I was determined to see the famed Elgin marbles that I have lectured about dozens of times in my art history survey courses. My timing was perfect as the rooms with the marbles were quiet and almost empty. I couldn’t help thinking about the connections between what I was seeing, my night at the auction, and the conference discussion a few hours earlier. Of course the story of how these objects ended up in this room are part of all of those paradigms (I felt the exact same tension when viewing the Haida poles in the main museum entrance), but also my self-awareness over the way I was viewing and experiencing these objects. It was all a bit too palpable. Later after a much needed break and indulgent afternoon tea service (did I mention the jet lag yet?) I wandered through the Enlightenment section of the museum, cleverly constructed as a virtual space that places viewers inside an 18th century library complete with cabinets of oddities and objects to delight the senses. It was a reminder of how the impulse to assemble, order, and catalogue information is part of my own training. It was also a reminder of how the world of art and the study of its many messy contours remains incredibly relevant and vital.

The quiet spaces of the Elgin marbles rooms was unexpected but very welcome.

Seeing the Haida poles so dislocated from home brought a profound mix of feelings.

Architecture juxtapositions abound at the British Museum.

Afternoon tea was every bit of delicious as I expected, and the glass of Prosecco was the perfect addition.

The Enlightenment room ended up as a surprise favourite space on my visit. It reminds me of my own scholarly training and roots.

Jean Béraud, Parisian Street Scene (1885) via Met Museum's Instagram feed this week. — Jean Béraud, *Parisian Street Scene (*1885) via Met Museum's Instagram feed this week.

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

January 31, 2016

Another week down and I am finally starting to get into the swing of 2016 (at the end of January no less)-- how about you? It seems however that the tumultuousness of the economic markets and global tensions of the past month are now being directly reflected in this week's art news. My media feed lit up after Ai Weiwei announced via Instagram of his withdrawal from Danish exhibitions in protest of new and controversial immigration laws passed in that country. At the same time, new street art from Banksy has appeared opposite the French consulate in London that brings awareness about police violence against refugees in camps around Calais. In Russia, performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky has been detained by police and placed in a psychiatric hospital after his many protest pieces criticizing the Putin regime. I have linked to these stories and a few more related to stress in the creative economy around labour rights and artistic production. All pretty disheartening, but awareness and knowledge about these developing issues is powerful.

On a much brighter note, I am very excited about the preparations underway for the Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium that I am co-organizing with Shelley Boyd for later this month, and about which I blogged earlier this week. I have included two food related media items in honour of the themes and ideas covered at this event. And finally, I am off to the UK in the coming days to present a paper at a conference in London at the IESA (Institut d’ Études Supérieures des Arts), a French HE Institute specialising in Collecting and Art Market studies in partnership with the Royal Holloway College and University of London. The conference focuses on the Venice Biennale and the art market, and I look forward to blogging more about my research, reflections, and visits to museums and other sites while there. Cheerio and stay tuned!

"The Collapse of Postmedia PODCAST"

canadalandshow.com

"Ai Weiwei Withdraws Art from Two Danish Museums in Protest of Controversial Immigration Law"

hyperallergic.com

"The MoMA Cookbook: Vintage Recipes and Reflections on Food by Salvador Dalí, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, and Other Great Artists"

brainpickings.com

"Celebrate Yourself and Your Cool Pants With Our Kanye Motivational Posters"

nymag.com

"Steam’s Atari Vault Package Brings Back 100 Classic Games"

wired.com

"Banksy's First Interactive Work Criticizes Police Violence Against Refugees"

artnet.com

"Marina Abramović on Cindy Sherman's Untitled #90 (1981) VIDEO"

moma.com

"New Artist-Led Project Surveys Plight of Canadian Arts Interns"

artfcity.com

"Dissident Russian Performance Artist Sent to Psychiatric Hospital"

artnet.com

"What an Editor Learned from Cooking 90 Meals in 30 Days PODCAST"

food52.com

List of links (for quicker linking):

You can visit the symposium registration page to view full schedule and bios of presenters. The student artwork featured on our poster was created by Tasman Brewster in connection to Canadian poet Lorna Crozier's poem "Jell-O." The student collabora… — You can visit the symposium registration page to view full schedule and bios of presenters. The student artwork featured on our poster was created by Tasman Brewster in connection to Canadian poet Lorna Crozier's poem "Jell-O." The student collaboration for this poem is featured here.

Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium| February 19-20: REGISTRATION OPEN!

January 27, 2016

It is finally here—mark your calendars! On Friday, February 19th and Saturday, February 20th, the Canadian Culinary Imaginations Symposium of Literary and Visual Fare is set to take place on Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Richmond Campus in the Melville Centre for Dialogue. This is an event that I have been co-organizing with Dr. Shelley Boyd (KPU English Department) as a two-day interdisciplinary event featuring over 25 invited speakers, ranging from local and international academics, to artists, curators, and writers, who will explore how Canadian writers and/or visual artists use food to articulate larger historical and cultural contexts.

We are pleased to feature our creative keynote speaker Vancouver Poet Laureate Rachel Rose presenting a talk on the topic of poems inspired by food. Our other featured speaker is internationally recognized Visual Artist Sylvia Grace Borda who will lead a discussion on her art projects and their relationship to sustainable food systems and economies.

The symposium will coincide with the launch of the public art exhibition we have also planned, organized, and curated— "Artful Fare: Conversations About Food"— presenting the collaborative art projects of KPU Fine Arts and English students as they engage in creative-critical dialogues about Canadian poetry. Full schedule and list of participants and all registration information can be found HERE. Spread the word and join us in the conversation!

Background:

Over the past year, I have been working with Canadian Literature specialist Dr. Shelley Boyd on fostering a collaborative research stream related to her already well-developed research and publications in the field of literary food studies. In my own capacity as an art historian, I have had an interest in the representation and discourse around food, metaphors of consumption, and the symbolic use of food in modern and contemporary art, and especially among the avant-garde. Our interests intersected while I was working on a research project looking at the work of Canadian-born artist and designer Tobias Wong and his use of food and popular culture in several projects (I went on to present a paper related to this research titled “Object Lesson—The Case of Tobias Wong” at the AAH Association of Art Historians Annual Conference at the University of Reading in 2013). Wong’s close working relationship with novelist and artist Douglas Coupland, a prominent Canadian figure that Dr. Boyd has also been researching and presenting work about—notably, her paper “Douglas Coupland's "Digital" Landmarks: Navigating the Electronic Environment” presented at a Canadian Studies conference at the University College Dublin in 2012—sparked our interest in collaborating on a project looking at the literary and art historical implications of Coupland’s output on Canadian food narratives. Our collaboration and mutual interest in Coupland hinges on how he utilizes pop art sensibilities and aesthetics, which take obsession with consumer culture and convenience food as potent subject matter, and connects them to a literary style that relishes in the creation of dystopic fictional microcosms.

Our shared research, located at the intersection of literary and art historical analysis, laid the foundation for our collaborative work co-organizing the Canadian Culinary Imagination Conference and it also helped inspire a related student project that has been taking place at KPU since last fall.

The online exhibition of "Artful Fare" accompanies two separate physical art exhibitions slated for February 19-20 and March 3-17 at KPU.

“Artful Fare: Conversations About Food Student Collaborative and Exhibition Project”—which can be viewed HERE— is an ongoing project started in fall 2015 and the brainchild of Dr. Boyd partnering KPU English students studying Canadian poetry together with Studio and Art History students working across a wide range of disciplines in the Fine Arts Department. All of the participating students were assigned Canadian poems selected by Dr. Boyd to align with the broader theme of food narratives. Students were then put in small mixed groups of English and Fine Arts students studying the same poem and encouraged to approach the themes of the poetry from their own disciplinary perspective while working collaboratively to share context and insights. The result of these student collaborations (focusing on 17 Canadian poems) can be explored on the online exhibition and will also be featured as two separate art exhibitions set to coincide with the symposium at KPU Richmond on February 19-20, and at KPU Surrey on March 3-17.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #13 (1978) — Cindy Sherman, *Untitled Film Still #13* (1978)

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Round Up

January 24, 2016

The semester is well underway and it always seems like a million deadlines appear in the first few weeks of every term. The past seven days have been a blur of editing, teaching, prepping, grant writing, and attending many many meetings. I also have some exciting projects and events that I have been working on (both on my own and in collaboration) that I am looking forward to sharing when the time comes. Still, I have been enjoying the process of settling into my courses and getting to know my students. Part of this week's media round up includes a podcast that I have been obsessed with. If you guessed Serial, you are close. It is in fact the Slate Serial Spoiler Special that reviews and discusses each episode of the popular podcast after it airs. I truly enjoy listening to the commentators unpack all that is good and not so good about Serial. Another pick I want to draw your attention to is the long article on Steve Jobs published by the New York Review of Books this month. Having read the Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson last summer and experienced Sorkin's screenplay in the Danny Boyle movie a few months ago, it was great to see an in depth review of the many recent treatments of Jobs' life and legacy. Enjoy your week and happy linking!