Can We Understand Art Outside of Culture?

One of the biggest debates inside the world of art criticism and scholarship is whether art, especially world art, can be understood without the idea of culture. In the debut issue of the scholarly journal World Art, John Onians surveys the landscape of the divide between those who still hold that culture remains key in understanding art and those who base their perception of art on human nature and the natural environment in which the art was produced. As the world gets smaller and, more importantly, as we more frequently crash into one another, the answer to the question of culture versus nature might allow us not only to understand the art of others, but also to understand the people who make them. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can We Understand Art Outside of Culture?"

Tomb Raiders: Looting Antiquities During the Egyptian Revolution

Watching American media outlets attempt to cover the events happening in Egypt over the past few days reminded me of just how ignorant we are about the rest of the world. For many Americans, Egypt remains the land of pharaohs, mummies, and pyramids and not the modern state so connected to the rest of the globe that the world-wide economic troubles finally trickled down the Nile and inspired the masses to protest against the ruling body. And, yet, pharaohs, mummies, and pyramids do play a part in the story of the past week in Egypt—a tragic tale. Details remain sketchy, but it seems pretty certain that damage has been done to antiquities in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, home to the world’s biggest collection of pharaonic treasures, including the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut (Egypt’s only female pharaoh) and the greatest Egyptian artifact of them all—King Tutankhamun’s Golden Mask. King Tut rose to fame in the 20^th century because tomb raiders never found his final resting place. Sadly, a new generation of tomb raiders might destroy in one sad moment of chaos what their predecessors missed over millennia. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Tomb Raiders."

Eternal Life: Italian Mosaics of the First Christian Millenium

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, Domenico Ghirlandaio—whose frescoes graced the walls of the Sistine Chapel before those of his apprentice, Michelangelo—once called the art of mosaics as “vera pittura per l’eternita” or “true painting for eternity.” Joachim Poeschke’s Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 demonstrates the seemingly eternal life of these pre-Renaissance mosaics, which contain some of the earliest images of Christian art. In this first published survey of the subject, Poeschke analyzes how religion and politics teamed up to produce these glories of artistry in words while allowing stunning photographs of the mosaics to speak for themselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Eternal Life."

[Image: Enthroned Madonna and Child between Angels. Nave, north wall. Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. Nave, Circa 500 and 560.]

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for the image above and for a review copy of Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 by Joachim Poeschke.]

The Mind’s Eye: Freud and Photography

When we think of Sigmund Freud, we think first of words—the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, books such as The Interpretation of Dreams, and the infamous Freudian slip. In Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art, Mary Bergstein, Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, suggests we should instead think of pictures, specifically photography. “[P]hotography penetrated the cognitive style of Freud and his contemporaries,” Bergstein asserts in decidedly Freudian language, and “documentary photography—of art and archaeology, but also of medicine, science, and ethnography—influenced the formation of Freudian psychoanalysis.” Photography, with its fragmentary and evocative elements, mirrors the way human memory works for Freud. Thus, the mind’s eye, both conscious and subconscious, mimics the photographic lens. Mirrors of Memory provides a new lens through which to view Freud’s development within the early development of photography and the visual culture we now live in. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Mind's Eye."



[Many thanks to Cornell University Press for providing me with a review copy of Mary Bergstein’s Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art.]