Art and Art History News
Katrina Grant
Poussin’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps on a Elephant via Art History Today
The Atlantic asked its readers to tell them why Humanities PhD programs (in the US) haven’t collapsed (and in some cases are growing) if there is no job market? They elicited an interesting range of responses, I think my favourite is ‘Perhaps there is simply an inverse ratio between how much a person loves something, and how carefully they consider the economic wisdom of pursuing it.’ Indeed.
A thoughtful piece on ABC arts by Barnaby Smith asks whether curatorial choices in the new Royal Academy show in London, Australia, show perpetuate British ideas of Australian art.
A piece in The Atlantic Cities on why American University campuses embraced Gothic Architecture - ‘”The newer the campus was, the older it appeared to be.”
Is a smuggling scandal about to erupt around the looting of of sculpture and antiquities from Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Suggestions that the Met’s return of two tenth-century Khmer sandstone sculptures to Cambodia, which had been displayed for nearly 20 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, may only be the beginning.
Bill Henson has pulled out of the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art after tabloid beat-ups about images of children - though the planned works for the exhibition were of doorways and landscapes. But, as Suzie Keen, write it was too late ‘the moral horse had bolted’. A worry that it seemingly took less than a week of ‘moral panic’ to censure an art exhibition.
David Packwood has some history of Poussin’s ‘Hannibal Crossing the Alps’, recently put up for sale by Christie’s in London.
Italy’s Antimafia squad has been called into Pompeii.
Australian inventors have helped to create a 3D digital map of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.