The Hours

Neat interactive graphic on NYT visualizing how different surveyed groups report spending their time.

“I’m so sick of hearing about Viagra”

Hey look, it turns out that academic peer review might be just as illogical as the regular business world. (The Art History Newsletter)

Spectral Bagpipes

The Utrecht school that brought you “The Steadfast Philosopher” now brings you “Alluring Bagpiper”, coming soon to the National Gallery of Art!
Start of classes has been actually pretty exciting. Last night the six majors doing art history theses sat for two hours briefing each on the work that’s been done so far. Curiously, my work [...]

Wintry Mix

I’ve been continuing work on my preliminary paper for my art history thesis this year. I’ve been reading the literature for months, so now I’m down to looking closely through the major catalogues to figure out what images I’ll want to focus on. It’s a little daunting, but my advisor has provided her usual excellent [...]

Spoons! What are they?

“It was the advent of the salver spoon which changed so much about seventeenth-century Europe. Up till then, it was a backward province; a place of love, but not of lust; a place of culture, but not of high culture. With the advent of this trinket, everything changed.”
I’ve been re-reading Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches. [...]

Neither pitchers nor tots

My work week was oddly disrupted by a trip down to New York for the Foundation, but seeing the other scholars made up for it. The lunch and dinner weren’t too shabby, either. It is plain to me now why so many people flock to the world of finance.
I finally got the chance to actually [...]

Ladislaus the Posthumous

While we’re still in the middle of writing one catalog at the Gardner, we’re also wrapping up production on a book that is headed out for printing. Little did I know so much of the work of an art historian crosses with those in the publishing world. When the final proof of this catalog came [...]

The Long Goodbye

My mind is lousy today with thoughts of decline.
A post on NYT piqued my interest about a new book out by Alan Weisman called The World Without Us. Weisman conducted long and wide-ranging research considering the question of what would happen to our artifacts (from buildings and cities down to synthetic chemicals) if all humanity [...]

Coincidence

So I was searching for information on the several portrait studies that Elaine de Kooning did of President John F. Kennedy and ran across this article on JSTOR. Though it mentions Ms. de Kooning and “Kennedy” in entirely separate contexts (and thus wasn’t too useful for my SI work,) it so happens that I came [...]