I played vengefully for the rest of the afternoon. All of my toys died horrible deaths at least once. But I never lost sight of my goal.

Please go read Hyperbole and a Half. It’s really fantastic.

Sterger may succeed where defenses have failed: she’ll knock him out of the league, sooner than expected.

Nice. How about:

BRETT FARVE may succeed where defenses have failed: HE’LL KNOCK HIMSELF out of the league FOR ALLEGEDLY SENDING UNWANTED COCK PICS.

Honthorst, the successful court painter in The Hague, had, while he still flourished as an artist, a lively brush; but, whether it was to please the girls, or because money lulled him to sleep, he fell into a stiff smoothness: about which Linschoten, who was used to attacking his work lustily, taunted him, saying that Honthorst could no longer do a worthwhile stroke. “All the same,” replied the latter, “I do better strokes than you every day of the week, and I’ll show you one you can’t repeat.” So saying, he pulled a handful of ducats from his purse, shoved them on the table, and stroked them towards him, by which he meant to show that with his painting, however it might look, he knew how to earn money, whereas Linschoten, with his broad brush, was still a poor man.

Samuel van Hoogstraten in his 1678 Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, translation by Paul Taylor in Dutch Flower Painting 1600-1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)

This is a stunning piece that just goes to show the really incredible things you can do these days with some careful planning and not a little bit of fate on your side. Be sure to click through to the video page on Vimeo where the creator discusses some of the interesting details of the project.

I’ve not been posting much, which is probably best explained by my unexpectedly-dramatic job at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. As the temperature climbs into the triple-digits my New England bones protest my decision to live in the District. But in spite of them I have signed on to a few more years here in the form of a doctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland. Here’s to finding an apartment for the coming year with quality AC.

We have to ask ourselves what is looking? Is looking a strictly visual process or is it a deep, emotional process? We should test and totally absorb the emotional process in front of a work of art and then, as art historians, we should undergo the critical task of asking ourselves whether the emotional impact of the art is identical with the historical, or original, mission of the object. One must ask oneself what the tension between these two things is and then bring them together. Today in the art history of Bildwissenschaft or media studies people want to throw away the emotional side of art history so that works of art become examples of information. We must defend the emotional effect of art even if, in Germany, we experienced irrationalism among art historians who swam in their emotional impressions alone. So, we have the task of putting our emotional impression through critical enlightenment, but if we remove the emotional side then we can close shop.

I think there is a real danger of treating emotional orientation as different from any other aspect of someone’s personal life in a manner that is actually deeply complicit in prejudice and injustice.

from a great post by Andrew Sullivan on the glass closet. Worth a read by anyone who thinks that DADT should be enforced for everyone.

When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I’ll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I’ll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

Temporary storage of the British Museum’s collections during the first world war in underground rail tunnels was followed by 1930s studies of the effects of humidity on art, but with mixed evidence about the specific effects of different ranges. With the advent of the second world war, works from several galleries and museums were stored in environmentally stable slate quarry caves in Wales, with no discernable changes in their condition. In the aftermath of the war, the approximate temperature/humidity ratios of the caves became the gold standard for climate control in museums.

Only decades later were these standards reconsidered:

In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution’s Conservation Analytical Laboratory issued revised guidelines allowing for as much as 15 per cent fluctuation in relative humidity (35 per cent to 65 per cent) and fluctuations by as much as ten degrees Celsius (52 degrees Fahrenheit to 88 degrees Fahrenheit), regardless of the materials from which objects were made.

Now that it’s finally trendy to deal substantially with sustainability issues, the International Institute of Conservation will be taking up this question at a roundtable next month. Hopefully out of it we’ll get a handful of institutional leaders who can help to pull the rest of the field into accepting substantial “lifestyle” changes in the hopes of reining in energy consumption.