Season’s Greetings and Happy New Year

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, 'Nativity with the Virgin kneeling by the crib' 17th century, Art Gallery of NSW

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, ‘Nativity with the Virgin kneeling by the crib’ 17th century, Art Gallery of NSW

A final post to wish everyone the best for the Christmas Season and a Happy New Year. Thanks again for reading and for sending in your news, reviews, and other items of interest. This was the fifth year of the Melbourne Art Network and I can honestly say that it wouldn’t keep going without the support of everyone who reads it, so thank you. MAN will take a short break and be back in mid-January. Until then you might find me lurking around on Twitter and Facebook, or I might switch the internet off and try to make a dent in that teetering pile of not-yet-read art history books I have collected over the past year.

A few recent stories and long reads if you are looking for something to peruse over the next week or so.

Linda Nead in Apollo turns a critical eye to the current exhibition in Paris ‘Splendour and Misery’

While prostitution is the subject matter of all the images, female objectification is their shared meaning and purpose. Furthermore, there are no works by women in the exhibition; it would have been very difficult for a woman artist in this period to have chosen the subject for a publicly exhibited work of art. As a result, by the final gallery and the studies by Picasso for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one feels the inescapable weight of a man’s point of view, and of art as the expression of particular male fantasies.

Henry Skeritt has written about ‘Aboriginal Art Criticism and Its Discontents’ in Art Guide.

If some commentators are to be believed, Aboriginal art criticism has been either absent or, at best, flaccid; it has not provided a template for meaningful engagement with Aboriginal art, nor has it provided any criteria fro exercising judgements of quality.

Bendor Grosvenor of Art History News takes apart the ‘science’ on the Mona Lisa.

Poor ‘Mona Lisa’. We can’t stop talking about her. Or speculating, theorising, investigating, filming, researching, and arguing about her. We seldom look at her. We’re too busy trying to work out what we think ‘lies beneath’. But if we were to just stop and look at the picture, objectively and without pre-conceptions, we might then begin to accept that this mesmeric creation is simply a portrait of a Florentine lady who, as the old sources tell us, was born Lisa Gherardini, and Lisa del Giocondo - hence ‘La Joconde’. True, it is one of the best portraits ever painted, by one of the greatest artist who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci. But it’s still a portrait.

A different art + science story about the ‘recreation‘ of Caravaggio’s ‘Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence’, stolen from an oratory in Palermo in 1969.

But now a new twist has emerged in a tale that for decades has come to symbolise the Cosa Nostra’s enduring hold over Sicily. A replica of the lost Caravaggio is being brought back to the spot where the original once hung. It is expected to be welcomed to its new home on Saturday by Italy’s head of state, Sergio Mattarella, a former judge from Sicily and government minister whose brother was assassinated by the mafia in 1980.

“We are not bringing back the original, but a facsimile. However it is one that will look very similar to the original,” said Roberto Pisoni, the head of the Sky Arts production hub, which is based in Milan.

A fascinating story from last month about the hidden trove of modern masterpieces in Tehran.

As Iran lurches toward reengaging with the world after the end of years of sanctions, a crown jewel waits in history’s shadow. Built by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, just before the 1979 revolution, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art amassed the greatest collection of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America—and dropped off the map. Now it’s reemerging.

A measured response to the current discussion about cultural institutions and racism by Bidisha in The Guardian. In part a response to stories like this one that claim the changing of labels and descriptions in the Rijksmuseum was ‘whitewashing’ history.

Of course, there’s a difference between a reflexive text that quotes racist epithets to demonstrate racism, and one in which those epithets are used liberally, casually and without any self-reflexiveness and awareness, because its creator was a racist, the society they were born into and creating for was racist and nobody minded. I think Mark Twain’s unthinking racial stereotyping, whether or not he meant well, should be acknowledged and discussed in schools, not banned from the table outright.

And if that is not enough - Routledge has put together it’s most read articles from the Visual Arts journals under it’s umbrella here.

 

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