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In regards to documentary photography, the issue of responsibility—be it ethical, social, political, or a combination thereof—has been a central concern throughout its polemicized history. One could stretch that argument, along the line of memory, from the last photograph uploaded or tweeted onto the World Wide Web at precisely 00:00 tonight, to the first instances when human presence was registered on a photographic plate, as in the famous view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, where a passerby stopped to have his shoes polished, seen from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s window in 1838. Yet the fundamental difference between such instances and… Full Review

In the 1992 postscript to her essay “Patrilineage,” published in Art Journal the year prior, Mira Schor argued for the necessary interruption of male-dominated art history through the production of histories of and by women. “The method is really very simple,” she explained. “It will always be a man’s world unless one seeks out and values the women in it” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 117). Despite the changes of nearly two and a half decades, this lesson remains relevant (sadly, so do many in Schor’s essay): unless… Full Review

In this absorbing yet brief book, Stephen Houston, a noted Maya epigrapher and archaeologist, seeks to map out one of the core issues of the anthropology of art—materiality—within the ancient Maya context. The volume highlights in particular native attitudes toward the spirits or energies that reside within certain materials with which the Maya fashioned their visual culture. Over three main chapters, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence outlines varied dimensions of ancient Maya materiality, employing close visual analysis of artworks, interpretations of hieroglyphic texts, and ethnographic comparisons. The scope of visual culture addressed largely pertains to… Full Review

Art history would seem to be a discipline that could and should generate digital visualization projects—if only for the simple reason that the objects of study are already and easily found in digitized form. As evidenced by the number of workshops and conferences and the general buzz on the subject, the attention given to this type of project has intensified in the past few years; but there are still very few operational sites in the field. A close consideration of one such site, “What Jane Saw” (visited May 2015), raises important questions facing project developers and users of digital art-history… Full Review

What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse… Full Review

“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later… Full Review

As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti… Full Review

This important collection of essays originated in a symposium entitled “The Muse in the Marble: Plastic Arts and Aesthetic Theories in the Seventeenth Century” held at the American Academy in Rome in 2004. Anthony Colantuono, one of the two organizers, had the original idea to publish the papers. In 2008, he enlisted the help of Steven F. Ostrow, and the project gradually expanded, with several new essays commissioned from leading scholars. As the editors state in their preface, they aimed to create a volume that “would engage issues concerning the theory and production, reception, and interpretation of early modern Roman… Full Review

The “Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” the Vienna School of Art History, hardly needs an introduction today, as anyone interested in the history of academic art-history writing will have come across at least some of the recent literature in several languages, mostly devoted to one or other of the school’s chief protagonists, be it Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, or Ernst Gombrich. Julius von Schlosser’s account, still the most useful brief introduction, is now available in English (Julius von Schlosser, “The Vienna School of the History of Art” (1934), translated by Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 1 [December 2009])… Full Review

Scholarship across the disciplines on death and commemoration in the early modern era is rich. A significant new contribution is Minou Schraven’s Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration. The volume focuses on the development of funeral apparati—ephemeral decorations for the celebration of requiem masses on behalf of ecclesiastical princes and heads of state—in sixteenth-century Rome, which evolved into increasingly spectacular displays. These formal changes paralleled new attitudes regarding commemoration and devotion as well as shifts in ideological and institutional claims of the papacy. Funeral apparati encompassed a wide range… Full Review