Museum director smackdown!

Kickoff for Super Bowl XLIV is two short hours away, but Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson and New Orleans Museum of Art director E. John Bullard began their trash talk a week ago. They've each bet the loan of a great painting to the other if their home team loses.

If the Colts win, the IMA borrows a Claude from NOMA; if the Saints prevail, NOMA gets the IMA's Turner. (The whole back-and-forth, plus images of the wagered paintings, are at Modern Art Notes. It's particularly funny when Anderson describes a NOMA Renoir as "sentimental blancmange".)

Apparently the commingling of high art and hyped sport is pretty funny--the story's gotten a lot of attention, from art sites, to ESPN, to the BBC (it's not even their kind of football!), to a piece on public radio. Bring it! (image source)

Update: Looks like the Indianapolis Museum of Art's Turner will be visiting New Orleans.

More about higher ed

Further to my Woe Unto the PhD post below, my friend J linked to this article about Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee. Gee advocates that candidates for tenure be weighed for accomplishments other than the usual publish-in-a-scholarly-journal sort--these alternate qualifications could include teaching skills and mainstream writing (might that include exhibition catalogues?).

Related reading: Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered. Or visit the Chronicle of Higher Education and search "tenure" for pages and pages of tales from the trenches.

Whither the PhD?

As those of us who follow trends in academe may have read, Louis Menand's recently-published The Marketplace of Ideas takes to task the entire structure of the academy. And correspondingly, he critiques the PhD-getting process.

I haven't yet read the book--just the excerpts published in Harvard Magazine (the comments after the article are worth a read, too). The gist of it, very roughly:

It takes nearly a decade to earn a PhD in the humanities. Only about a quarter of students who start a PhD program wind up with tenure-track jobs. So why put students through such a grueling, penurious process? Does it really require nine years of training to become qualified to teach undergraduates?

Well, of course not. Here's what Menand offers instead:

"there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought. . . . And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction . . . . If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having."

Related breaking news, from the Art History Newsletter: the College Art Association 's Online Career Center reports that job listings for art historians "declined 14.3% from FY 2008 (July 1, 2007–June 30, 2008) to FY 2009 (July 1, 2008–June 30, 2009) and are on track to decline another 36.9% in FY 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010)." No one will be shocked to learn that at least one professional organization states part-time and adjunct positions increased during this period. The breakdown of CAA stats is here. (image source)

Good-bye to "American Stories"

The Met's "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” closed today, and I was sad to bid it farewell. Mainly because so many of the many, many pictures were the stuff of American Art 101. Walking through was akin to stepping into a slide carousel (well, a PowerPoint), in the best possible way. Favorite old friends, in chronological order:

-- John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778). Famous for good reasons: primeval danger, compelling characterizations, and a real-life story.

-- Richard Caton Woodville's Politics in an Oyster House (1848). Dining and punditry, nineteenth-century style.

-- Lilly Martin Spencer's Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses (1856). Beautifully rendered, a fascinating period interior, and a funny conceit. All by a woman who supported her family of 13 children (only seven survived) and a mostly-unemployed husband.

--William Merritt Chase's Ring Toss (1896). Lovely homage to Spanish art, all lush brushstrokes and a surprisingly modern big swath of empty space. (Plus, you can buy your own ring toy--pictured here--at the museum store)

-- John Sloan's Cliff Dwellers (1913). Cheerful squalor.

A well-done blog accompanied the show. Would love to see similarly focused, relevant blogs for exhibitions at more museums. That is, with all that extra time curatorial staffs have. . .

Related: I recently learned of the the Archives of American Art's blog.

Good links. . .

. . . to fun stuff:
CSAs for artists, the Art Handling Olympics, and Mona Lisa in your coffee. (via Modern Art Notes, AFC, and c-monster)

Art as memorial

Work on the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the National Mall recently began at the Tidal Basin. And appropriately enough, the Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution both reported the story this weekend. The project is slated for completion in about 18 months.

So this may be a good moment to consider memorial art. Why do we--meaning humanity as a whole--so often make public art to commemorate a person or an event? What's the earliest example--the Paleolithic wounded bison in the Altamira cave? Roman equestrian monuments? The Bayeux Tapestry? (a fun aside: Make your own Bayeux Tapestry here!)

As social creatures, making art is one way we tell stories and preserve history for each other and for ourselves. We go to the National Mall to see Jefferson in his Pantheon and Washington's obelisk. In 2011, we'll also go to see Dr. King. (image source)

Do Klingons like art?

In case you need a reason to appreciate social media and digital photography: without them, we never would have seen this. (And SAAM is particularly good at harnessing these technologies in the service of the museum.)