Athenaeum Review

Our guest on this podcast is Jacob Stegenga, the author of Care and Cure and Medical Nihilism. We discuss the effectiveness of medical interventions, the relationship between philosophers and practitioners, how to deal with complexity, the nature of sexual desire, and much more.

A conversation with Michele Hanlon, Associate Dean of the Arts at UT Dallas, about the transition to producing virtual events in spring 2020: https://www.utdallas.edu/ah/events/virtual-events.html

Our guest on this episode is Mark Roseman, the Pat M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany.

In This Episode:

How did the members of the Bund come to be part of such a cohesive and tightly-knit group? (3:00) — The charismatic style of leadership, and how such groups declined after 1945 in Germany (5:15) — The tension between democratic and authoritarian aspects of leadership in social groups (7:00) — How can small-scale actions, such as bringing flowers to the victims of an attack, or sending packages to a displaced-persons camp, have any effect in the larger society? (9:00) — What is the importance of exercise, and physical fitness, for the formation of the group? (13:00) — Writing the history of the Wannsee Conference: What if a key document such as the Wannsee Protocol had not survived? (18:30) — How do you deal with the different kinds of language used by the Nazi government in its planning? Rhetorically violent, vs. bureaucratically euphemistic and evasive (22:30)

Our guests on this episode of the podcast, here to discuss their exhibition Eddie Leon Returns, at the Reading Room in Dallas, are artists Linda and Ed Blackburn, and curator Caleb Bell.

In this episode: 

Curating Ray Madison (0:45) — Eddie Leon, the creation of the artist Ray Madison, a.k.a. Linda and Ed Blackburn (1:45) — The creative process (2:30) — The process of artistic collaboration (5:00) — The story of Eddie Leon (8:00) — The function of narrative: paintings vs. comic strips vs. cinema (10:45) — Pop Art vs. postmodernism (13:30) — Illusionism in comics (15:45) — Taking familiar subjects (TV cowboys, or the Bible) and making them unfamiliar (19:30) — From Berkeley to New York to Fort Worth (26:30) — Reflecting on the development of art in Fort Worth (29:00) — Finding the dramatic and narrative elements in the subject of a painting (33:30) — The decision-making process in creative art (38:30) — Linda Blackburn’s Western paintings (41:00) — Ed Blackburn’s e-mail paintings (42:00)

Our guest on this episode is Ambassador Jorge Alberto Lozoya, the inaugural director of the International Museum of the Baroque in Puebla, Mexico.

In Part 1:

Does the return of the baroque in contemporary culture imply a cyclical, as opposed to linear, concept of history? Asian vs. European ideas of history (2:15) — Trans-Pacific trade from the Manila galleon to the present (5:30) — The peculiar Western fascination with individual artists and writers (8:00) — Regional varieties of the baroque: Puebla vs. Spain and Italy (11:45) — Bishop Palafox and the Biblioteca Palafoxiana (13:00) — Similarities between Mexican and Southeast Asian styles (14:45) — Catholicism in Asia (17:00 — Taking the Greyhound bus from Mexico City to New York, aged fifteen (18:30) and resolving to become a diplomat (20:30)

In Part 2:

How would you respond to someone who criticizes globalization as merely a kind of “Yankee imperialism”? (0:25) — How Russian visits to Western supermarkets led to the downfall of the Soviet empire (5:05) — The 21st-century return of religion: Hungary, Brazil, Mexico (8:00) — Cervantes, Shakespeare, Mozart: a universal culture (13:15) —  Cosmopolitan dialogues: Gabriel Orozco, Octavio Paz, Sor Juana (17:30) —  What should people in the U.S. read to better understand Mexico? (20:30) — What to do after retiring from a long and distinguished career (24:00)

Our guest on this episode is Bonnie Pitman, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, and Director of Art-Brain Innovations at the Center for Brain Health at The University of Dallas at Texas.

In Part 1:

From museum director, to hospital patient, to starting up a program in art and medicine at UT Southwestern (1:45) — The role of medical humanities in medical education today (4:00) — Responding to skeptics who doubt that scientists should value the humanities in their research (6:30) — The humanities for primary-care doctors vs. for specialists (11:00) — Comparing the Art & Medicine course with undergraduate art history courses; The Abduction of Europa at the DMA (14:00) — How looking at a painting for 45 minutes develops one’s observational capacities (16:00) — Observing the human body: Henry Moore’s Two-Piece Reclining Figure, John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Sarah Sherburne Langdon (19:00) — Anne Whitney’s Lady Godiva: What is she doing? What is she looking at? (21:00) — Ignite the Power of Art and the four different types of museum visitors (observer, participant, independent, enthusiast); almost tripling the attendance numbers of the DMA over the course of eight years (23:00) — Practical approaches to designing exhibitions: Renoir, Tutankhamun, etc. (29:00)

In Part 2:

Becoming a museum director: A visit to the National Gallery of Art (0:45) — From museum consulting, to deputy director of the Berkeley Art Museum and director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum; meeting Jack Lane, Deedie Rose and Margaret McDermott in Dallas and coming to the DMA and then UT Dallas (5:00) — Getting sick with a lung infection in 2008, and coming up with Do Something New in 2011, daily for over 3,000 consecutive days (11:30) — Resilience, focus, commitment and inspiration (16:15)

Our guest on this episode is Volker M. Welter, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In Part 1:

Discovering the work of urban planner Patrick Geddes: community, civic responsibility and civic society (2:30) — The origins of town planning in the late 19th century: architecture, economics and biology (5:00) — The urban environment of Edinburgh today: from the Old Town to the Outlook Tower  (9:15) — Visualizing the topography of Edinburgh in the Outlook Tower (14:15) — Geddes’s 1925 plan for Tel Aviv, Chaim Weizmann and Israel Zangwill (16:44) — Connecting Tel Aviv to historic Jaffa (21:30) — In the 1930s, Jewish refugees and the Bauhaus arrive in Tel Aviv (24:00)

In Part 2:

Along with practical functions, the need for cultural or spiritual elements in town planning: Geddes’ “cultural acropolis” (1:45) — The cosmic and religious symbolism of Geddes’s unbuilt plan for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus (4:45) — Vitalism and spiritualism in Geddes’s town planning work in India and Pakistan (6:45) — Town planning after 1945 and the collapse of fascism: reassessing modernism (10:00) — Discovering the architecture of Ernst L. Freud — the architect to the Weimar bourgeoisie builds a country house outside Berlin (15:00) — Beyond the “communist / reactionary” dichotomy in the history of Weimar architecture (19:25) — Freud’s bourgeois villas: an alternative to the völkisch and radical tendencies between the wars (24:45) — Capitalist vs. socialist architecture; designing the first office spaces for psychoanalytic therapy (29:00)

In Part 3:

Vernacular architecture in California: the Case Study Houses (2:00) — the Tremaine houses and family patronage of domestic architecture in midcentury America (4:30) — how the Tremaine family worked with different modern architects (9:45) — Burton G. Tremaine, Emily Hall Tremaine, and modernism (13:30) — Walter S. White and midcentury modern architecture in Santa Barbara (19:30) — Aspirational modernism: small houses in Palm Desert (22:30) — Walter S. White at the Kissing Camels Estate in Colorado (27:30)

Our guest on this episode is Don Howard, the former director and a Fellow of the University of Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

In this podcast: 

Why Einstein was not only a great scientist, but an important philosopher of science (1:30) — How Einstein found the intellectual courage to go against tradition (3:00) — From physics major to philosopher of science (5:30) — Do physicists and other scientists take an interest in the philosophy of science? The Seven Pines Symposium (9:30) — History and Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame (12:30) —  What happens when high-tech employees protest a Pentagon contract? (15:45) — The state of virtue ethics among technologists (19:00) — What happened to virtue ethics during the enlightenment? (20:45) — How does virtue ethics work in practice, within a given community? (24:30) — How to deal with overlapping communities of practice (25:30) — How to think about some current problems in technology and robot ethics: Should robots have rights? … What about self-driving cars? … Autonomous weapons?? … Robot scabs and the universal basic income

Our guest on this episode is Ittai Weinryb, Associate Professor of Art History at Bard Graduate Center in New York and curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place.

In this episode:

Art and Frontier: the role of art in “frontier societies” e.g. around the Black Sea in the 14th century [or 19th-century Texas] (1:30) — How colonial forces, e.g. the Venetians and Genoese, both convert and control indigenous communities, and produce luxurious objects for export back to the mainland (2:00) — 250,000 slaves exported from the Black Sea to Genoa in a decade (2:45) — How European colonialism and globalism operated before Columbus (3:15) — Robert Bartlett’s idea of the constant expansion of Europe from its Carolingian core (4:15) — in the 15th century, the Black Sea was not yet “European” (5:00) — taking over natural resources e.g. silver mines, displacing silver from the Harz and the Black Sea (5:15) — the historiography of medieval slavery (6:00) — parallels between Black Sea and Mediterranean slavery? (7:45) — the basis for Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (8:30) — exchange between center and periphery in art history (9:30)– The “middle ground” where settlers and indigenous forces meet and reciprocally influence each other (10:00) —

“Hildesheim avant-garde,” the first large-scale bronze casting since the end of the Roman empire, and the frontier situation of the Ottonians around 1000 (12:00) — It doesn’t make sense that Bernward would go all the way to Rome and back for inspiration for his doors (13:45) — Why does a village of 400 people need a set of three-ton bronze doors? (14:45) — The church campaigns to convert the local Slavs (15:30) — Rethinking the “art history of masterpieces” (17:45) — Why so many pagan Jupiter Columns survived the Christian conversion of German-speaking lands (18:30) — Sacred trees and groves in Germany (21:30) —

Primordial objects in art history (23:00) — The shock of the new and the ability to break away from a tradition or series (24:15) —  Rudolf Berliner on “The Freedom of Medieval Art” (26:00) — The basic carnal human desire for something new (26:30) —

Agents of Faith: the way in which people charge objects with sentiment (28:00) — Votive object-making: one of the earliest, most universal practices of mankind, since at least 5000 BCE (29:00) — Protestant vs. Catholic votives in the German lands; Volkskunde at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (31:15) —  Modernity, secularization and ex votos: Michael Jackson or David Bowie as “saints” (35:30) — Atomized modern society and the desire for belonging and community (38:45) — The Open Work, contemporary art and participation (41:00) — The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages and techniques of making: doors, fountains, bells and otherwise (45:15)

Our guest on this podcast is Catherine Craft, curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center; she recently organized The Nature of Arp, which travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

In part one:

The place of “nature” in Arp’s art (1:30) — an antidote to the horrors of World War I (2:00) — not so much the appearance of nature, as its operations and principles (2:45) — sketches made while walking along Lake Zurich, seeing the waves upon the shore (3:15) — forms suggested by the liquidity of the ink: both abstract, and suggestive of the natural world (4:00) — not just the form of nature, but its dynamic energy (5:15) — A sense of humility before nature (6:00) — against the Romantic creator figure: entropy and things falling apart (6:30) — art “as natural as a bud bursting open” (7:45) —

The artistic relationship between Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp (9:00) — joint commission for the Café de l’Aubette in Strasbourg (11:15) — the shock of Sophie’s accidental death in 1943 (13:30) — untangling questions of joint authorship (14:30) — Jean’s efforts at ‘posthumous collaboration’ after Sophie’s death (16:00) — increased late interest in spirituality (17:45) — the history of the chance-based works (19:45) —

The original and the copy in Arp’s work (23:00) — coming to New York after World War II (25:15) — the 1920s Dada reliefs, shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery in the 1940s and seen by Gorky, Pollock, and De Kooning (25:30) — Robert Motherwell’s interest in Arp’s 1930s collages (26:45) — Ellsworth Kelly’s interest in Arp’s non-self-expressive, chance-based works (28:00) — Donald Judd’s interest in the utterly smooth surfaces of Arp’s sculptures (29:30)

In part two:

The origins of An Audience of Artists (1:00) — What did “neo-Dada” originally mean? (3:45) — Artists who functioned simultaneously as critics and historians, e.g. Robert Motherwell, or Marcel Duchamp (5:45) — Is painting a ‘Dada’ medium? (7:45) — The beginnings of Melvin Edwards: Five Decades (11:30) — Edwards’s work in Now Dig This! at the Hammer Museum (12:45) — Contrasting academic vs. museum work, and established vs. unfamiliar stories (15:30) — Abstraction, social relevance, or both? In the cases of Edwards, Frank Bowling and Jack Whitten (19:15) — The interest in independence and liberation movements in Africa; establishing a base in Senegal with his wife, the poet Jayne Cortez (23:00) — interest in African blacksmithing; a Fulbright to work and teach in Zimbabwe (24:15) — How a curator approaches a space: the Peggy Guggenheim Collection vs. the Nasher (28:00)