Athenaeum Review

Our guest on this episode is Ludwig Schwarz, whose series of Desktop Paintings has recently been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art.

In the podcast:

How did you develop the “desktop” concept in relation to that series of paintings? (1:30) — How do you generally develop the concept for an exhibition? (5:00) — Deciding to leave, and then return to, painting (14:00) — From SMU in Dallas to the School of Visual Arts in New York (18:30) — New York in the 1980s (20:15) –Using painting in relation to other media (32:30) — Discussion of current projects (37:30) — What happens when a set of work goes into a museum? (40:00)

Our guest on this episode is Gregory H. Williams, the author of Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art.

Part One:

How did the political and economic changes in 1970s-1980s West Germany (the waning of the economic miracle, the Tendenzwende, the rise to power of conservative Helmut Kohl) affect the art of that period? (1:15) — Three generations of postwar German art (3:15) — The role of humor: Sigmar Polke vs. Martin Kippenberger (7:00) — Kippenberger’s interdisciplinary theatricality (14:00) — Problematic masculinity: bad boys undermining the cult of the heroic genius (17:15) — Translating German art for an American audience: Kippenberger vs. Anselm Kiefer (20:30) — Rosemarie Trockel, Monika Sprueth, Max Hetzler and the 1980s Cologne scene (25:30) — Humans and animals in Trockel’s work (29:00)

Part Two:

Varieties of humor in West German art: defensive and apathetic, or generative and creative (1:15) — Dealing with a crisis in the modern project: progress stalled, needing an outlet (4:00) — Isa Genzken, modernism and architecture (6:56) — Changes in the biennial era after 1989 (13:15) — A new generation in Cologne: Cosima von Bonin, Christian Nagel, Andrea Fraser, Michael Krebber (18:15) — Günther Förg: modernism, formalism, architecture (22:30)

Our guest on this episode is Abigail Solomon-Godeau, the author of Photography after Photography: Gender, Genre, History.

In this podcast:

Early work as a picture editor; doing research for textbooks; working with photographic agencies and libraries; mockups with an Exacto knife (1:45) — Working within the culture industry, or propaganda industry, and the educational apparatu (4:15) — From photographic research, to studying the history of photography in Paris libraries (6:00) — Pioneers in the history of photography: Maria Morris Hambourg at the Metropolitan Museum (9:00) — Writing inside and outside academia (12:00) — Feminism and art history in the 1970s (15:00) — How language and textuality moves the viewer away from a naive or transparent reading of photographs (17:00) — Critical feminist photographic work: Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler (19:00) — Propaganda images e.g. ISIS (21:00) — Photography and the Holocaust: Georges Didi-Huberman (23:45) — Ethics of street photography and the male gaze (28:00) — Pioneering women: Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus (29:00) — Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris, 2014: racial politics in the U.S. vs. in France (30:45)

Our guest on this episode is Sandra Russ, the author of Pretend Play in Childhood: The Foundation of Adult Creativity.

In the podcast:

When do children begin engaging in pretend play, and fantasy play? (1:00) — Helping children develop their imagination, understanding of others’ perspectives, and manage their emotions (1:45) — Does society adequately appreciate the importance of play for children? (2:45) — What can parents do to encourage their children to develop in pretend play, and what is the impact of iPhones and iPads? (4:30) — What happens to children after the age of 10, when they grow out of pretend play? (7:45) — Gender differences in pretend play (10:45) — Have gender differences changed over the past 20 years? (12:15) — The objects of play, vs. the narratives that children weave around the objects of play (14:45) — How did you originally enter this field of research? (15:15) — Using play in therapy (16:00) — How does play differ across cultures? (19:00) — How can adults cultivate creativity in their daily life and work? (21:45)

Our guest on this episode is Stephen T. Asma, author of The Evolution of Imagination and Why We Need Religion.

In this episode:

As a musician, how do you understand what happens in the brain during jazz improvisation? (1:30) — How does the pressure of a ‘live’ musical performance stimulate creativity? (4:45) — From Aristotle and Kant to behaviorism: have philosophers and psychologists fully appreciated the value of the imagination? (7:00) — Why scientists should use films and novels, not just experiments, to understand human beings (10:00) — Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio and affective neuroscience: the importance of emotions for decision-making (12:00)

Our guest on this episode is Thomas W. Gaehtgens, the former director of the Getty Research Institute.

In this episode:

Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin (1823-1830) and the Romantic idea of the sacred in art (1:45) — Assembling royal collections for the new museum; how Napoleon spurred the development of national collections in Europe (2:45) — Making art accessible to the public, in order to promote the moral improvement of its viewers; self-discovery and character development (4:45) — A royal collection in the Enlightenment; the king gives his collection to the people (6:15) — From early 19th-century Romanticism to Wilhelm von Bode‘s idea of a period room c. 1900 (8:45) — How did Bode’s concept of the period room develop? (12:00) — Two competing concepts of the museum: the ethnological and the masterpiece (18:30) — Conflicts of taste in the late 19th century: academic conservatism vs. internationalism (23:00) — How Impressionism came to Berlin (25:00) — The relationships among the different museums on Berlin’s Museum Island: including the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode Museum, and the Pergamon Museum (30:00)

Our guest on this episode is Martin Powers, the Sally Michelson Davidson Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, and the author most recently of China and England: the Preindustrial Struggle for Justice in Word and Image.

In Part One:

Growing up in Back of the Yards, Chicago, the first person in the family to go to college (1:15) — inspired by picking up a Dover Classics edition of Zhuangzi, the radical 4th-century BCE philosopher (1:30) — Robert Maynard Hutchins-style Great Books education at Shimer College, reading only primary sources (2:00) — Chinese language study at the University of Chicago (2:45) — from UCLA to Michigan (3:00) — Art and Political Expression in Early China (1992), before economic and social history was as widely recognized within art history (3:30) — Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China (2006) and the origins of bureaucratic theory in China from the earlier ritual system (4:00) — administrative and bureaucratic history and social theory (4:45) — the perennial questions of class and social structures (5:15) — Great Books are not just Western (5:45) —

Han funerary art and the question of style (7:15) — public funerary monuments and the power of art in the hands of the middle classes (7:45) — private political organizations working against the government, and the breakdown of the rule of law and distinction between public and private in Han society, in the middle of the 2nd century BCE (8:45) — unqualified people appointed to public office (9:45) — the war of words leads to a war of art, and the dynasty collapses (10:15) — how different styles of art establish different social structures in the Han period (10:45) — Charles Tilly and societies organized by individual or by group (12:30) — group-oriented sumptuary laws in Europe and China (13:00) — do historians pay enough attention to art objects and visual culture? (14:00) — how art objects provide a different kind of evidence than do documents (14:45)

In Part Two:

Discussing China and England:

How 17th- and 18th-century translations of Confucius powerfully affected the European Enlightenment (0:30) — In Europe, the radicalism of Confucius’s meritocratic ideas (1:45) — and that government should promote the happiness of the people (2:15) — Le Comte’s book offends the French nobility and is burned (2:45) — Du Halde’s two-volume descriptions of Chinese life, customs and culture in the 1730s (3:15) — Jesuit translations of Chinese “Great Books” anthologies (4:00) — Samuel Johnson’s glowing review of the translations (4:30) — The English freethinkers quote the Chinese texts against aristocracy (5:00) — Baron Montesquieu argues against pure meritocracy, Jefferson and Paine argue for it (5:30) —

The situation of ethnic minorities (8:00) — In Tang times, one in 12 chancellors were non-Chinese (8:45) — In the Song dynasty, non-Chinese could compete fairly on the exams due to the blind grading process (9:00) — Is this history well-known in China today? (10:00) — Are there conflicts between the meritocratic elite and the less enlightened masses? (12:15) — Public service, an essential component of “merit” (12:45) — Diderot and d’Holbach’s exasperation with the popularity of the aristocracy amongst country people (13:30) — In imperial China, the presumption that businesspeople should not be engaged in government, due to the appearance of conflict of interest (14:45)

Our guest today is Annabel Daou, an artist who lives and works in New York. She visited Dallas on the occasion of life itself, her solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery, and also discussed her current project for the National Museum of Beirut.

In this episode:

Could you describe your connections to Dallas-Fort Worth and to Beirut? (0:45) — Working with the people of Beirut (3:15) — How did people respond when you approached them? (6:00) — How objects with complex histories become embedded in everyday life (8:00) — How does the recent history of Beirut affect its present? Remembering the city in the 1970s (12:15) — Translating personal experiences into different artistic media: paintings, paper, sound (15:00) — Text and language: the ‘autobiography of a’ (20:00) — Does the experience of Lebanon give any insight into the current political conflicts in the United States? (24:45)

Our guest on this episode is Michael Lobel, professor of art history at Hunter College and the author of books on Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and John Sloan.

In this episode:

The mechanical and the handmade in early Pop Art: Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann (0:55) — Andy Warhol vs. Pop Art (5:05) — The past, the obsolete and outmoded, and the origins of the term “Pop Art” (6:40) — James Rosenquist, the Cold War and the military-industrial complex (11:15) — Pop Art around the world (16:00) —  John Sloan and the Ash Can School: newspaper illustration, American cities and the painting of modern life (18:30)

See also:

• Michael Lobel, “Pop and Its Sources: Reconsidering Roy Lichtenstein’s Mr. Bellamy,” Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 20th, 2018.
• Michael Lobel, “What John Sloan Can Teach Us about Illustration and American Art,” Eldredge Prize lecture, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, October 27th, 2016.

Our guest on this episode is Vlad Glaveanu, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology and Professional Counseling at Webster University Geneva, and an expert in the cultural psychology of creativity.

In this episode:

How research on Easter egg decoration in Romania led to a research program in creativity (0:50) — The importance of community, habit, values, and practices for (1:30) — Habitual creativity, masterful practice, and creativity as craft (1:45) — Traditional crafts in the modern context (4:30) — Collaboration and group dynamics in creative teams e.g. screenwriting (9:00) — Is “American culture” more individualistic? (12:30) — Did studying and working in Romania, Denmark and the United Kingdom shed light on different conceptions of creativity? (16:30) — What about the biological basis of creativity? (19:45) — Nature and nurture are not opposed to each other (21:45) — Is “creativity” an overly neoliberal, consumerist, individualistic concept, in contrast to the concepts of “wonder” and “possibility”? (24:45)