Ingrid Rowland takes a critical look—a critical “gaze”?—at our use of “gaze” for Lacan’s use of regard.

The use of bright colors has entered the news in two unexpected ways this week, and is accompanied by fascinating photographic evidence.

“One unique venture should be noticed,” Peffer continues, “not because it has a general application to this field but because it is an interesting example of what may be done under special conditions. The Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia is the educational outgrowth of the A.C. Barnes Company, manufacturing chemists., but it is primarily the product of a unique personality…” So begins Nathaniel Peffer’s 1926 introduction to an aspect of Albert C. Barnes’s educational efforts of which I was previously unaware.

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s Chicago 1890 is a slim, engaging study that places a handful of the city’s first skyscrapers, including The Monadnock, the Masonic Temple, and the Reliance Building, in the context of the raucus decade during which they were erected.

I’ve just finished David Blumenthal and James A. Morone’s The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (University of California Press), which discusses eleven presidents’ encounters with illness alongside their attempts to influence health care policy. Blumenthal, professor of medicine and health policy at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to Barack [...]

David M. Henkin’s City Reading (Columbia), the last book I read in 2009, comes close to my current ideal of the historian’s first book, offering a novel and ambitious argument within well-defined parameters.

The editors of Frieze magazine invited me to write about some of my favorite books published this year. My response, posted here, was paired with that of Amit Chaudhuri and is published in issue 128 (January-February 2010).

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge), a sweeping comparative history of slavery and its eradication, is the fruit of Seymour Drescher’s fifty years of scholarship on the topic. As the title indicates, Drescher is particularly interested in abolition, and he therefore examines historical developments based on their effect, whether positive or negative, on the institution of slavery.

I am enjoying Ryuichi Sakamoto’s new box set of live solo piano music. It’s titled, simply enough, Playing the Piano, and comes out on Decca/Universal next month (according to Amazon). The version I found contains over two hours of music, much of it pastoral and beautiful. One piece, however, sounds nothing like the others. In [...]

My copies of Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited and introduced by Steven Henry Madoff, arrived with today’s mail. Madoff invited me to formulate a questionnaire concerning art education and circulate it among prominent artists. The respondents, who discuss their experiences as both students and teachers, are Ann Hamilton, Dana Schutz, Fred Wilson, Guillermo Kuitca, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Matthew Higgs, Mike Kelley, Paul Chan, Paul Ramírez-Jonas, Piero Golia, Shirin Neshat, and Thomas Bayrle. Madoff_art_school_coverMy introduction and a selection of the artists’ answers are below.

This idiosyncratic and entertaining history uses five paintings by Johannes Vermeer and two additional artifacts to explore nascent global trade. Small details in the canvases—the officer’s hat in Officer and Laughing Girl, the globe resting on a cabinet in the background of The Geographer, the silver coins about to be weighed in Woman Holding a Balance—act as “doors,” in Brook’s phrasing, that open onto the seventeenth century.

One of the virtues of Jia Zhang-ke’s recent film 24 City (2008) is that he focuses on particular losses: the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon the employees of Factory 420 in Chengdu, first under Mao’s regime in the 1960s and 1970s, and then during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy, the effects of which are still being felt today.

My severest disappointment in not attending this year’s Venice Biennale is missing the premiere of Steve McQueen’s new film Giardini. McQueen, to my mind one of the best artists of his generation, shot the half-hour-long film in the public garden that houses the national pavilions used during the Biennale. What he depicts, though, is the [...]

Fifteen months after I visited Iceland, the country’s economy crashed in spectacular fashion, and the autopsy reports now being published suggest that I may also have been experiencing one side effect of an enormous bubble [...]

From William Leach’s fascinating book Land of Desire: “It was in the department stores, not in the museums, that modern art and American art found their first true patrons.” [...]

Last Saturday, Valentine’s Day, I celebrated with my fiancée in a somewhat unconventional manner: For a little more than an hour, we read numbers aloud, from 79,936 to 80,495, in a small recording studio. We did so as part of artist On Kawara’s decades-long ongoing project One Million Years [...]

The strongest impression I gathered from The Outermost Dream is one of an editor’s sensibility: ego suppression and attention to the delicate arrangement of material. Written with sympathy for and out of curiosity about his subjects—he avoided writing about fiction, choosing instead to discuss memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and biographies—Maxwell’s essays judiciously arrange for the reader the salient, character-summarizing facts of remarkable lives. [...]

Though Sven Beckert’s book The Monied Metropolis is primarily an economic and political history, it also incorporates some commentary on the upper-class culture of the period. As always with a good work of scholarship, an odd, telling detail or two will stick out of such a book like a coin gleaming on the sidewalk. [...]

Notes, links, and additional information pertaining to my interview with Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Kathleen A. Foster about her exhibition “Thomas Chambers: American Marine and Landscape Painter, 1808–1869″ [...]

“As with people,” Solotaroff writes, “I find that I have more to say about writers than I admire than about those I don’t. This does not preclude registering judgments that spring from a lessening of interest or esteem, for the point of reviewing an author is to deliver the experience of reading him or her, and to be less than candid is to weaken the conviction that has otherwise come to praise.” Sensible words [...]

“It may well be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of evidence and sources, clarity of presentation.” [...]

“The more I read of Williams, the more I was convinced of his relevance to contemporary ethics, especially (at first) a prominent question in contemporary religious ethics, the relationship between religion and morality. Do we need religion in order to maintain a public morality? Can Christians in particular make a contribution to a vision for public morality without either appearing to endorse theocracy or appealing to a universalistic basis for morality?” [...]

Benjamin Kunkel’s remarkable essay “Drawn and Quartered on the Internet,” in the current issue of n+1>, carefully parses how four common types of internet usage affect public life. Because it is not now available online, I will seek here simply to outline its argument, present a few quotations from it, and encourage you to seek it out in your local bookstore. [...]

Several weeks ago Leonard Lopate interviewed on his radio program two obituary writers whose stories of the useful pressures of deadlines, necessitating last-minute scrounging in the library or on the phone (in search of evocative details), were quite charming. Now I’ve found an obit worth sharing [...]

Notes, links, and additional information pertaining to my review of Lecia Dole-Recio’s recent exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York. [...]

The CJR writer Elinore Longobardi favorably compares Labash’s 10,000-word report with other recent analyses of “Detroit”—not the city, but rather the metaphor for the US auto industry. As the executives from the Big Three automakers were paraded in front of Congress, I thought back to my experience in Detroit and crossed my fingers that some enterprising journalist or writer would soon travel there and report back to the rest of us what it is actually like. [...]

“Melville usually wrote in the mornings and took his family for carriage rides in the late afternoon, after a midday meal. Among their favorite outings were visits to the Shaker settlement at Mount Lebanon.” [...]

Notes, links, and additional information pertaining to my review of Sharon Lockhart’s newest films, screened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. [...]

Consider this post a bookmark (“book mark”?) meant to spur my own further library research. Early in Thomas Bender’s New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987), he comments briefly on a figure previously unknown to me, Hocquet Caritat. Bender writes, [...]

So says short story writer Gary Lutz, whose address to the students of Columbia University’s writing program, delivered last September, has been reprinted in the January issue of The Believer. Thankfully it is one of the texts reproduced in full online. (Link via The Dizzies.) Here is an excerpt: I can’t remember reading anything with [...]

This morning, while waiting for water to come to a boil, I read the brief titular essay in Wendell Berry’s collection What Are People FOR? It was first published in 1985. An hour later, opening today’s Times to the Op-Ed page, I came across “A 50-Year Farm Bill,” an editorial Berry coauthored with Wes Jackson. The [...]

During the decade after I discovered punk rock music and DIY culture in the early 1990s, I consumed music voraciously. I ordered albums from record-label and distributor catalogues; attended shows, up to four nights a week, in sweat-scented basements, bowling alleys, bars, church recreation halls, and all-ages clubs; and dissected Maximum Rock’n’Roll, Punk Planet, and [...]

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War has received incredible press attention, both because it is a well-written work by a respected historian and because its author was recently named president of Harvard University. Eric Foner praised it in The Nation; Geoffrey C. Ward did as well, in The New [...]

One of the two term papers I wrote this past semester surveyed the reputation of Roger Williams as it has broadened and deepened since about 1950. Here is part of the introduction (minus footnotes, but with links): In the public imagination, Roger Williams—Puritan dissident, founder of Providence, tireless proponent (in both England and New England) [...]

Not long after I moved to New York in 2001, I was hired by a gallery on far west Twenty-second Street. At the time the curator (and now Greene Naftali Gallery director) Jay Sanders and the artist Richard Aldrich were working on the same block, and we comprised an unofficial Bas Jan Ader fan club. [...]

Yesterday morning I completed what is perhaps the longest book I’ve ever read: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The transformation that Howe studies involves the “revolutions” of both communications and transportation during the period. This is in marked contrast to earlier interpretations of the era, [...]