Getty

This previously unpublished transcript of an undated and incomplete handwritten essay on surrealist doyen André Breton by American art critic Clement Greenberg is illuminating in terms of the otherwise somewhat oblique connection between politics and avant-garde art for the younger Greenberg, the precise nature of whose professed Marxism has long been contested. It was composed in response to Breton’s “Political Position of Surrealism” (1935). In his text, Greenberg argues that Breton is correct in his claim that radical artists should not let questions of politics distract them from autonomous work. However, unlike Breton, he does not contend that this is the case because such artists will be vindicated by future audiences and should, accordingly, work in defiance of a mass audience. Rather, Greenberg argues that no other mode of working opens up new fields of aesthetic experience while bemoaning the state of affairs where such art is inaccessible to the working class, ultimately c...

(press release):

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, as investigative reporters  for the Los Angeles Times, are also Pulitzer Prize finalists  for their investigative journalism  exposing the  criminal  world of  art smuggling, which also risked the patrimonial theft and  loss  of the  “Morgantine Aphrodite”, as  described in their book, “Chasing Aphrodite”, just published in the United States. 

Their  presentation- a “ first-time “ premiere in Europe- will take place at the University  Kore, Enna,  Monday, May 16, at 10:30 AM, in the Central Auditorium of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture..

This conference  represents a  highlight of  the Kore- sponsored  program, “La Kore incontra la Dea”, an  integral part of the Mediterranean Archeological degree course under the guidance of Professor Flavia Zisa, who has  collaborated for years with the Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California,  and also contributed  to the recovery of  the Morgantine Aphrodite  figure,  finally  returned by the Getty Museum to Italy.

This conference constitutes an important contribution to re-capturing  the historical context in which  criminal smuggling of art works  led  to the illegitimate acquisition of the Aphrodite sculpture. The authors’ investigation created a media impact that  changed American  public opinion about the  Getty Museum itself. From that moment on, the American public  began to envision the museum not as a temple  of art, but rather as a source for clandestine smuggling of precious art works.
Now, after years of investigative work, the two authors will be present at University Kore to introduce their first book on this subject, which narrates all the story’s relevant aspects with fresh revelations on the complicity of particular criminal networks,  including the involvement of illustrious figures in the art world and their sordid relations with criminal  dealers  whose  only aim  is to exploit and sack  treasures  from the precious patrimony of  Sicilian archaeological art.

The conference meeting  that will place  on  May 16  constitutes an integral part of a five-day educational program  dedicated  to international studies organized though the auspices of  the  Faculty of Mediterranean Archaeology degree course, and also  in collaboration with CLIK (the University  Language Center) with participating guest speakers coming from  Cairo, Egypt; and also from  San Diego, Venice, Los Angeles, and Milan, with  their particular attention being given  to scientific research, education and creating greater interest in  the cultural  patrimony of art while covering subjects from Leonardo da Vinci to the Jewish Museum in Venice; from The Egyptian Museum in Cairo to the discussion of policies for  promotion of  international cooperation.

The conference’s  successive  appointment, May 24, will host guest speaker Laila Azzam from the University of Hewan in Cairo and presently  Professor of Egyptian Studies for the degree course at Kore  in the Faculty of Mediterranean Archaeology. Professor Azzam will share her observations on the critical moments she experienced during the recent Egyptian civil uprising, the subsequent fall from office of  President Murabak, and how  these  events affected the activities of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo- of which the professor is member of the Scientific Board.  Professor Azzam’s  personal  testimony is particularily relevant and  of dramatic interest in this crucial moment in Mediterranean area history.  Similarily, this also  represents an important moment for Kore University’s  own involvement and profound  interest demonstrated  in Mediterranean Archaeology. In fact, Kore’s degree  course in Egyptian Studies represents a unique  curricular offering among the universities in  Sicily and  Southern Italy as far as  Naples.

The pervasive critical, even popular assumption that there can scarcely be a conceptu ally viable relationship between contemporary art and the artistic traditions of Islam has been especially difficult to negotiate for contemporary artists. An extraordinary example of the anxiety that such a view may generate is a statement by the French Algerian artist Kader Attia: "To the question is there a contemporary Islamic art, I would answer, we are currently building it, re-appropriating (unconsciously) our culture and its influences in our own way."1 Indeed, the implied critique to which Attia and other contemporary art ists from the Middle East seem to be responding is the assumption that there has never been an "authentic" modernity in the Islamic world to which contemporary manifesta tions could be anchored.2 As Attia's statement indicates, it seems imperative for these artists to remain sufficiently unconstrained by those religiously defined traditions to be able to reappropriate their own culture—and especially its "Islamic" characteristics, if they are so inclined—in order to build the modern variant of those arts now deemed to be "traditional," or unmodern. For all practical purposes, in order to fit the international mold, Islam seems to have been removed from its historical location as an intrinsic part of the artist's creative impulses.3 Instead, contemporary artists have tended to articulate the relationship between tradition and the Muslim experiences of the modem by appealing to the contempo rary social and political complexities of the cultural zones that they occupy. For some, the relationship is encapsulated in reference to the postcolonial experience of dislo cation, with its high political price. Attia, for instance, posits the conceptual interde pendency of appropriation and dispossession in his installation Untitled (Skyline) with empty refrigerators encrusted with small pieces of mirror resembling the glass window towers of modernist architecture, as bland and soulless as the Parisian suburbs where French working-class citizens of North African descent live.4 His particular negotiation strategy, through a conceptual medium, is to him "a translation of signs of cultural reap propriation, through my own history, which lies between the Occidental and the non Occidental worlds."5

The various sculpted busts of Ottavio Farnese (1524–86), duke of Parma and Piacenza, are still at the center of debates of attribution. Focusing on the bust in Carrara marble in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the author proposes a new attribution to Lombard-born sculptor Giovanni Battista della Porta (1542–97), one of the protagonists of the Roman artistic scene in the second half of the sixteenth century. While archival sources attest to Della Porta’s ambition to work in the service of the duke and to Farnese’s awareness of the sculptor’s artistic achievements, the attribution is largely based on comparisons with Della Porta’s works. Finally, the author discusses hypotheses related to the dating of the bust, the occasion of its creation, its original location in Parma, and the bust’s movements prior to its entry into the Getty collection.

This essay reevaluates the works of the Florentine painter Carlo Dolci (1616–87). While for art‐historical authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the name Dolci was just a byword for mocking the sentimental style of the exclusively religious paintings, the audience of the 17th century could still understand Dolci's “sweetness” as an authentic expression of an old theological concept that went back to the Bible itself—the so‐called dulcedo Dei, or sweetness of God. The essay looks at Dolci's reception throughout the centuries to show how it came to be that the theologically substantiated aesthetics of sweetness in Dolci's oeuvre fell into oblivion.

After the Opium and Arrow Wars, European, Japanese, and American governments nego tiated unequal concessions from the Qing imperial court. Companies and individuals established residential and commercial bases along the coast from Hong Kong to the Korean peninsula and Manchuria, creating a semicolonial environment that was inten sified by clashes with foreign troops. In these spheres, commercial and military, pho tography greatly facilitated the construction of identities. This essay is concerned with photography's role in the assignment of "Chinese" character and with the international consumption of this constructed "China" during the period from i860 to 1920. This was the period of photography's great growth internationally, when the new technology was a partner to vast colonial operations, imperial contests, and commercial experiments. Companies such as the American firm Underwood & Underwood pack aged and distributed sets of stereographic prints taken in foreign locations, expanding the viewership of images worldwide; these professionally printed photographic sets served a significant role in the construction of modern China.1 Photographic encounters between destitute workers along China's coast and foreign traders, officials, and business repre sentatives were recorded by Japanese, American, and European wartime photographers. "China" became an object of spectatorship—an extremely popular one—but its popu larity was imbedded in a foreign, negative image framed through violence and submission. The elaborate captions that accompany these photographs define "China" vis avis the larger domain of production and consumption, whose international dimensions are evident in the range of languages used: French, German, Italian, Russian, and English.2 Captions for the racialized images taken by professionals such as British portraitist Wil liam Saunders (fl. ca. 1862-88), American James Ricalton (1844-1929), and French patron of photography G. Prat (fl. 1878-96) routinely describe the people in Hong Kong, Guang zhou (Canton), Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing as "people of the Yellow Race."3 The cap tions note class and racial qualities, and the images are often explicitly violent. While it is beyond the length and scope of this article to determine the extent of colonial photog raphy's impact on Chinese identity, it is nonetheless critical to understand that colonial photography enjoyed an afterlife in the nationalizing construction of the Chinese self during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.4 Early photography was used effectively in treaty ports

This essay proposes an approach to the genre of the seventeenth-century French fashion print that follows the rubric of the printmakers, which takes the basic physical and graphic format of the genre rather than the thematic content of the images as its essential characteristic. This allows for an examination of the many interrelated modes of address that an image or theme might traverse in the course of minor graphic adjustments, and of how these formed a language for more complex interventions into the genre of the fashion print, which brings to light the ways in which the pictorial and rhetorical ingenuity of the printmakers participated in a broader cultural discourse on fashion, fashionability, and social identity in the late seventeenth century.

While visualizations of various types—such as maps, 3-D models, and animations—have become staples in digital humanities approaches to art and architectural history, how to integrate analog data (artworks and drawings, archival documents, and so on) into born-digital outputs remains a fundamental concern. This article discusses processes developed through ongoing work on the art historical visualization project Florence4D. It proposes an integrated approach where technologies for 3-D models, mapping, and location-aware augmented reality (AR) converge, while the research data is no more than a click away in structured ontology databases. The structure of the underlying data is key to creating a collaborative research space where the three broadly defined spatial technologies of 3-D and augmented reality, GPS, and geoinformation systems (GIS) interact, enabling researchers to move seamlessly between building-, local-, and urban-scale analysis and the interpretation of art, architectur...

The pervasive critical, even popular assumption that there can scarcely be a conceptu ally viable relationship between contemporary art and the artistic traditions of Islam has been especially difficult to negotiate for contemporary artists. An extraordinary example of the anxiety that such a view may generate is a statement by the French Algerian artist Kader Attia: "To the question is there a contemporary Islamic art, I would answer, we are currently building it, re-appropriating (unconsciously) our culture and its influences in our own way."1 Indeed, the implied critique to which Attia and other contemporary art ists from the Middle East seem to be responding is the assumption that there has never been an "authentic" modernity in the Islamic world to which contemporary manifesta tions could be anchored.2 As Attia's statement indicates, it seems imperative for these artists to remain sufficiently unconstrained by those religiously defined traditions to be able to reappropriate their own culture—and especially its "Islamic" characteristics, if they are so inclined—in order to build the modern variant of those arts now deemed to be "traditional," or unmodern. For all practical purposes, in order to fit the international mold, Islam seems to have been removed from its historical location as an intrinsic part of the artist's creative impulses.3 Instead, contemporary artists have tended to articulate the relationship between tradition and the Muslim experiences of the modem by appealing to the contempo rary social and political complexities of the cultural zones that they occupy. For some, the relationship is encapsulated in reference to the postcolonial experience of dislo cation, with its high political price. Attia, for instance, posits the conceptual interde pendency of appropriation and dispossession in his installation Untitled (Skyline) with empty refrigerators encrusted with small pieces of mirror resembling the glass window towers of modernist architecture, as bland and soulless as the Parisian suburbs where French working-class citizens of North African descent live.4 His particular negotiation strategy, through a conceptual medium, is to him "a translation of signs of cultural reap propriation, through my own history, which lies between the Occidental and the non Occidental worlds."5