Happy birthday Giorgio Vasari!

Today Giorgio Vasari turns 500. If not the founding father of art history (Winckelmann, Philostratus the Elder, and Vitruvius might all possess equally good claims to the position), he was the one who made it sexy and set the discipline's tone for generations. He was a character, who remained convinced that making music would lead to an artist's downfall and reveled in the salacious gossip of his day. Art history might have got more responsible since his day, but it was rarely as much fun. So, as they might have said in Tuscany, felice compleanno!

A roundup of coverage of Giorgio's big day:

• Noah Charney uses Vasari's birthday to talk about efforts to uncover a lost da Vinci.
• The Guardian recounts some of the best moments from Vasari's Lives.
• The Uffizi has a special Vasari-centric exhibition up.

Links

Installation view of Fred Wilson's Objects and Installations.

• The Art Law Blog skewers critics and snobs who predictably decry blockbuster shows.
• Tyler Green with a must-read post on Fred Wilson's latest project. Like much of Wilson's work, it's polarized a community and got a lot of people talking (heatedly) about how art, history, and public attitudes towards both intermingle.
• Hol Art Books thought it was a good idea to bootleg ArtForum and mail the magazine the bootleg copies. They were then, for some reason, surprised and hurt to hear from ArtForum lawyers. Still, their explanation of the project has some interesting points.
• MoMA's admission price hike has garnered a lot of attention. Jon Bruner at Forbes thinks it's an OK plan, Choire Sicha at The Awl disagrees.

Geoff Dyer vs. Michael Fried

Geoff Dyer kicks off a new column for the New York Times by launching an attack on the unsuspecting Michael Fried. The Atlantic's Ujala Sehgal likes it, New York Observer's Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke wants to see a good literary feud, and Tyler Green thinks Dyer did a "deft" job. Others are a little more charitable.

The general social media consensus seems to be in favor of Dyer, and Ian Bogost's blog post sums up most of the reasons why. Dyer wittily mimics Fried's style to critique the turgid prose of academia, a prose-style that has become increasingly inaccessible to non-academics. His article isn't a piece of anti-intellectualism, as some of Bogost's academic friends claim, but it plays on the ivory tower's well-cemented position as object of ridicule. From Thales falling down the well to Fried endlessly introducing his ideas, academics make themselves easy targets. Folks largely re-tweeted Dyer's article with glee for the same reason that my non-academic parents switch off when I try to explain the appeal of Hubert Damisch.

But, as someone who spends the majority of their time wading through academic publications, I've come to appreciate the occasional economy of academic prose. Some academics, like Joseph Leo Koerner, write beautifully and prove that Dyer's punches can't be generalized too far  (Yale University's Alexander Nemerov is a joy to read, but since his father was poet laureate he should probably be considered a special case). Ultimately, I think Bogost was right to link to Damon Horotwitz's article which points out the benefits of cultivating a well-informed, readable humanism that snatches the best of both worlds.

Jerry Saltz and the art world

This year's Venice Biennale provoked an impressive number of hostile reviews, particularly of the American Pavilion. Jerry Saltz penned a cogent critique of the Biennale, seeing an insidious trend in contemporary art towards a generic style of "aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements." Highlights of this style include:

Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction...

Saltz concludes that much of the problem lies in the education of artists:

This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.

Having studied art in an academic environment, this critique largely rings true. That's not to say there's anything wrong with earnest yearning, nor that artists shouldn't learn the history of their art. Robert Indiana's extended homage to Marsden Hartley, for instance (below), demonstrates how contemporary artists can craft rich, subtle pieces that reference and rehash old art. But even Indiana's elegies enlarge our view of being human in a slow, stilted way that demands years of study and ultimately proffer an intellectual stimulation.

I read this as confirmation that the most exciting artistic work rarely happens in the art world. Instead, the worlds of film, graphic design, and architecture pulse with the kind of life the art world left behind years ago. Rather than enlarging our worldview slowly and subtly, films like The Thin Red Line or Taste of Cherry shatter it and (more importantly) offer profound creative insight.

Data display

New Scientist describes a collaborative project between a Boston University researcher and an atmospheric analysis company to measure and visualize methane leaks in major U.S. cities (a screen grab from their video of Boston is above). Their videos graph measurements onto Google Earth simulations. The mustard-colored pixelated spikes indicate that all may not be well in our city streets, grafting danger onto the street-view function. As yet another example of scientific illustration that attempts to make the invisible (literally) visible, the video embodies a key assumption about scientific inquiry that developed in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Barbara Maria Stafford, analyzing shifts in scientific imagery notes that before the advent of invasive imaging (brought to a head in contemporary techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging), notes that "diseases only existed when they became manifest on the skin." When Gericault painted the heads of convicts (below), J.T. Zealy photographed slaves for Louis Agassiz, or phrenologists drafted painstakingly precise guides to the human head, they worked from the exterior in. The keys to the world lay in experience and keen observation.

In contrast, the methane video dramatizes a mistrust of the naked eye. As the data display industry grows (check out Periscopic, where a friend of mine works, for example) and visual literacy evolves in a media-heavy environment, what kind of assumptions about looking and visualization will change? Already, smartphone apps augment vision in real-time. Stafford's work turns on the opposition between interiority and exteriority; will other oppositions reverse or fall?

Links

• Lucian Freud, the man who declared “for me the paint is the person,” is dead. His Girl With a White Dog is above.
• Apparently art crime is dumb crime.
• Jonathon Jones on the vandalized Poussins in London. Jones concludes that:

modern society cannot be trusted – there is too much craziness out there. Museums should be more severe on visitors.

Links

 I'm in New England, hence the sparsity of posts, and William Stanley Haseltine's sketch of the Rhode Island coastline.

• Terry Hart posts at Copyhype on the "protectable elements of a photograph," summarizing several key copyright cases.
• NYTimes on a prolific art thief.
• The Secret Service visits an artist who installed spyware on computers on Apple stores.
• In case the news hasn't hit you yet - the Brandeis has elected NOT to sell its art collection.

The beauty differential

The latest attempt to use science to explain art pulled people from different cultures, and used fMRI to evaluate their brain patterns as they made aesthetic judgments about paintings and pieces of music (the original study can be found here). Aiming to "formulate a brain-based theory of beauty," the study's authors from University College London walk into an arena fraught with tension - after all, countless hours have been spent composing tenuous (and racist, sexist, ethnocentric) scientific criteria for evaluating beauty.

Twenty-one subjects ranked pieces on a scale of beauty, from 1-9, and the study's authors used these rankings to sort pieces into the categories of beautiful, ugly, and indifference-inspiring. Attempting to side-step entrenched art-historical debates about cultural conceptions of beauty (typically opposed to traditional, humanist claims of universally appreciable beauty: see Winckelmann), the study's authors left the actual evaluation of beauty up to each individual subject. Leaving aside the question of what makes the beautiful beautiful, the study's authors seem to ask whether the human brain even recognizes beauty as a phenomenon.

Apparently, they found that the human brain responds to "beautiful" stimuli very differently from "ugly" stimuli. While I can't speak to the science of their findings, it's important to note (as Katherine Harmon does) that the study has significant limitations. It doesn't attempt to define what made subjects rank a painting more beautiful; nor does it bear on the role of beauty in evaluating art by other criteria. Notably, subjects made their judgments on 16-second flashes of paintings and pieces of music. "Slow art," or forms of beauty that take time to emerge, disappear from the study's purview.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly has died.

Video games

More on video games: the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot restrict the sale of video games to minors because of violent content. Scientific American rounds up the science behind the decision.