Robert-Goldwater-Library

Virginia-Lee Webb Tangles with the Entangled Object

AAOA's own Virginia-Lee Webb has an article in the current issue of the online journal Cultural Analysis:

An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication
by Bjarne Rogan, University of Oslo, Norway
with responses by Stephen Brown, University of Ulster, Jordanstown, Northern Ireland and Virginia-Lee Webb, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Abstract
The picture postcard craze went hand in hand with the rise of a new consumer culture, a more affluent society, and a new middle class. Modernity is the common denominator and the frame of reference. However, these cards served a multiplicity of uses and functions including as collectibles, ritual communication, and gift exchanges, and were enmeshed in a tangle of relationships. What characterized the craze for the picture postcard a century ago and guaranteed its enormous spread and popularity was precisely these enmeshed functions, concrete as well as symbolic, and the many layers of meaning invested in the postcard. Few material items are more aptly characterized as "an entangled object" than the picture postcard of the Golden Age.
[read full text in html]

PS: from the Editors of Cultural Analysis:

We are pleased to announce the publication of:
CULTURAL ANALYSIS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY FORUM ON FOLKLORE AND POPULAR CULTURE, VOLUME IV

This issue is now out in full, and available free of charge on the web
(in both html and pdf formats), at: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~caforum/current.html

Please feel free to share this information with anyone you feel may be interested.

The New Sugar Hill Gang

 
 Photos: Heidi Schumann for The New York Times
L: George Preston at the Museum of Art and Origins, in his brownstone.
R: Kurt Thometz in Jumel Terrace Books, a room in his brownstone.

excerpted via NYTimes:
Home Is Where the Art Is (and the Bookstores, Too)
By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH
Published: November 28, 2005

Neighbors often cooperate to improve the quality of life in their neighborhood. George Preston and Kurt Thometz, who live two blocks from each other in Jumel Terrace at the top of Sugar Hill in Harlem, simply chose to do it in a slightly unusual way. On Nov. 10, they opened two new cultural institutions - in their homes.

Mr. Preston, 66, who grew up in the neighborhood and will retire at the end of this semester after teaching African art at City College for 32 years, turned three floors of his brownstone at 430 West 162nd Street into the Museum of Art and Origins, displaying his collection of African masks, figures and implements. Over at 426 West 160th Street, Mr. Thometz, 53, a dealer in rare and out-of-print books who moved to the neighborhood in 2004, converted a room of his brownstone into Jumel Terrace Books, featuring works on Africana, Harlem history, jazz, African-American literature and related topics.  [see also our Nov 3rd post ]

Their dual opening night drew an array of literati, artists and intelligentsia, who made the two-minute stroll between the homes. The chain-smoking humorist Fran Lebowitz chatted with the Nigerian author Emmanuel Obiechina. Robert Farris Thompson, dean of African studies at Yale, signed a copy of his new book, "Tango: The Art History of Love," for the hip-hop legend Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite. The Harlem writer Playthell Benjamin, the soul music producer Billy Jackson (who co-wrote the Tymes' 1963 hit "So Much in Love") and Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson, mingled.
[...]

Mr. Thometz said he and Mr. Preston were following an old and recently revived Harlem tradition of holding art exhibitions, literary salons and musical soirees in the home. At least 30 art galleries are currently operating in homes throughout Harlem. A few blocks from Jumel Terrace, Sherman Edmiston, a premiere dealer in the works of Romare Bearden, has operated Essie Green Galleries in his Convent Avenue brownstone since 1987. Around the corner from Mr. Thometz, the jazz musician Marjorie Eliot is host to weekly concerts in her Edgecombe Avenue apartment.
[...]

Turning his home into a museum of African art (also open by appointment, with a $5 entrance fee) seems a natural step for Mr. Preston, who as a 21-year-old Beat poet opened the legendary Artist's Studio, a storefront on East Third Street. There, during its one year of existence in 1959, he was host to readings by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara.

He made his first trip to Africa in 1968, doing fieldwork in Ghana toward his Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University, and built his collection during numerous visits since. In 2001, the Akan tribe of Ghana made him a chieftain, in a ceremony that involved holding dried herbs in his mouth for four hours. "That's because one of the first things for a chieftain to learn is how to keep his mouth shut," he explained.

The arts of many tribes and periods crowd the rooms of his brownstone in warm, intimate profusion. Massive ceremonial masks painted in bold geometric designs glare down from the walls above tiny ancestral figures with exquisitely expressive faces; an Egyptian mummified falcon guards a doorway; a Chokwe chief's tobacco pipe, 40 inches long, has been rubbed to a glistening patina by many years of use. This is a museum where the curator gives the tour, explaining the provenance and meaning of every object.

Mr. Preston and Mr. Thometz are now planning collaborative exhibitions, lectures and musical events with other brownstone cultural institutions in the area. Mr. Thometz was hesitant to declare it a new Harlem Renaissance, then added, "But I can't resist calling us the new Sugar Hill Gang."

Google Print Update ("Google Book Search")

image source

If you are looking for illuminating posts on copyright check out our new favorite blog (via NEWSgrist):

if:book - A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book

google print is no more (11/17/05)

Not the program, of course, just the name. From now on it is to be known as Google Book Search. "Print" obviously struck a little too close to home with publishers and authors. On the company blog, they explain the shift in emphasis:

No, we don't think that this new name will change what some folks think about this program. But we do believe it will help a lot of people understand better what we're doing. We want to make all the world's books discoverable and searchable online, and we hope this new name will help keep everyone focused on that important goal.

image source

If you are looking for illuminating posts on copyright check out our new favorite blog (via NEWSgrist):

if:book - A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book

google print is no more (11/17/05)

Not the program, of course, just the name. From now on it is to be known as Google Book Search. "Print" obviously struck a little too close to home with publishers and authors. On the company blog, they explain the shift in emphasis:

No, we don't think that this new name will change what some folks think about this program. But we do believe it will help a lot of people understand better what we're doing. We want to make all the world's books discoverable and searchable online, and we hope this new name will help keep everyone focused on that important goal.

Creeping (digital) death of fair use

 

excerpted posts from if:book (via NEWSgrist):

copyright 101 (8/25/05)

Richard Lanham, the godfather of electronic text, has written a wonderful piece in Academic Commons calling for a course in copyright for all undergraduates. Lanham, a UCLA English professor who has had a significant second career as an expert witness in copyright cases, gives one of the more cogent summaries of the copyright morass we find ourselves in as the digital tide overwhelms previous notions of property and ownership.

the creeping (digital) death of fair use (11/02/05)

Meant to post about this last week but it got lost in the shuffle... In case anyone missed it, Tarleton Gillespie of Cornell has published a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about how sneaky settings in course management software are effectively eating away at fair use rights in the academy. Public debate tends to focus on the music and movie industries and the ever more fiendish anti-piracy restrictions they build into their products (the latest being the horrendous "analog hole"). But a similar thing is going on in education and it is decidely under-discussed.
[...]

Fair use is what oxygenates the bloodstream of education, allowing ideas to be ideas, not commodities. Universities, and their primary fair use organs, libraries, shouldn't be subjected to the same extortionist policies of the mainstream copyright regime, which, like some corrupt local construction authority, requires dozens of permits to set up a simple grocery store. Fair use was written explicitly into law in 1976 to guarantee protection. But the market tends to find a way, and code is its latest, and most insidious, weapon.

Amazingly, few academics are speaking out. John Holbo, writing on The Valve, wonders:

Why aren’t academics - in the humanities in particular - more exercised by recent developments in copyright law? Specifically, why aren’t they outraged by the prospect of indefinite copyright extension?...

...It seems to me odd, not because overextended copyright is the most pressing issue in 2005 but because it seems like a social/cultural/political/economic issue that recommends itself as well suited to be taken up by academics - starting with the fact that it is right here on their professional doorstep...

Most obviously on the doorstep is Google, currently mired in legal unpleasantness for its book-scanning ambitions and the controversial interpretation of fair use that undergirds them. Why aren't the universities making a clearer statement about this? In defense? In concern?
[...]
Fair use seems to be shrinking at just the moment it should be expanding, yet few are speaking out.

 

excerpted posts from if:book (via NEWSgrist):

copyright 101 (8/25/05)

Richard Lanham, the godfather of electronic text, has written a wonderful piece in Academic Commons calling for a course in copyright for all undergraduates. Lanham, a UCLA English professor who has had a significant second career as an expert witness in copyright cases, gives one of the more cogent summaries of the copyright morass we find ourselves in as the digital tide overwhelms previous notions of property and ownership.

the creeping (digital) death of fair use (11/02/05)

Meant to post about this last week but it got lost in the shuffle... In case anyone missed it, Tarleton Gillespie of Cornell has published a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about how sneaky settings in course management software are effectively eating away at fair use rights in the academy. Public debate tends to focus on the music and movie industries and the ever more fiendish anti-piracy restrictions they build into their products (the latest being the horrendous "analog hole"). But a similar thing is going on in education and it is decidely under-discussed.
[...]

Fair use is what oxygenates the bloodstream of education, allowing ideas to be ideas, not commodities. Universities, and their primary fair use organs, libraries, shouldn't be subjected to the same extortionist policies of the mainstream copyright regime, which, like some corrupt local construction authority, requires dozens of permits to set up a simple grocery store. Fair use was written explicitly into law in 1976 to guarantee protection. But the market tends to find a way, and code is its latest, and most insidious, weapon.

Amazingly, few academics are speaking out. John Holbo, writing on The Valve, wonders:

Why aren’t academics - in the humanities in particular - more exercised by recent developments in copyright law? Specifically, why aren’t they outraged by the prospect of indefinite copyright extension?...

...It seems to me odd, not because overextended copyright is the most pressing issue in 2005 but because it seems like a social/cultural/political/economic issue that recommends itself as well suited to be taken up by academics - starting with the fact that it is right here on their professional doorstep...

Most obviously on the doorstep is Google, currently mired in legal unpleasantness for its book-scanning ambitions and the controversial interpretation of fair use that undergirds them. Why aren't the universities making a clearer statement about this? In defense? In concern?
[...]
Fair use seems to be shrinking at just the moment it should be expanding, yet few are speaking out.

Blogging + The True Spirit of Peer Review

I've just added an excellent blog to our Blogroll (see left sidebar): if:book - A Project of The Institute for the Future of the Book. Below is an excerpt from a recent post about blogging, peer review and academia:

blogging and the true spirit of peer review

Posted by ben vershbow at November 17, 2005 03:27 PM

Slate goes to college this week with a series of articles on higher education in America, among them a good piece by Robert S. Boynton that makes the case for academic blogging:

"...academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture.

...might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?"

The idea of blogging as a kind of service or outreach is just beginning (maybe) to gain traction. But what about blogging as scholarship? Most professor-bloggers I've spoken with consider blogging an invaluable tool for working through ideas, for facilitating exchange within and across disciplines. But it's all decidedly casual. And that's part of what makes it such fun. But to gain acceptance in the academy, there have to be standards. There have to be barriers to entry. Traditionally, that's what peer review has been for. Can there be some sort of peer review system for blogs?

Boynton has a few ideas about how something like this could work (we're also wrestling with these questions on our back porch blog, Sidebar, with the eventual aim of making some sort of formal proposal). Whatever the technicalities, the approach should be to establish a middle path, something like peer review, but not a literal transposition. Some way to gauge and recognize the intellectual rigor of academic blogs without compromising their refreshing immediacy and individuality -- without crashing the party as it were.

There's already a sort of peer review going on among blog carnivals, the periodicals of the blogosphere. Carnivals are rotating showcases of exemplary blog writing in specific disciplines -- history, philosophy, science, education, and many, many more, some quite eccentric. Like blogs, carnivals suffer from an unfortunate coinage. But even with a snootier name -- blog symposiums maybe -- you would never in a million years confuse them with an official-looking peer review journal. Yet the carnivals practice peer review in its most essential form: the gathering of one's fellows (in this case academics and non-scholar enthusiasts alike) to collectively evaluate (ok, perhaps "savor" is more appropriate) a range of intellectual labors in a given area. Boynton:

In the end, peer review is just that: review by one's peers. Any particular system should be judged by its efficiency and efficacy, and not by the perceived prestige of the publication in which the work appears.

If anything, blog-influenced practices like these might reclaim for intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals. Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment—whether of straight scholarship or academic blogs—might actually revitalize academic writing.

It's unfortunate that the accepted avenues of academic publishing -- peer-reviewed journals and monographs -- purchase prestige and job security usually at the expense of readership. It suggests an institutional bias in the academy against public intellectualism and in favor of kind of monastic seclusion (no doubt part of the legacy of this last great medieval institution). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the language of academic writing: opaque, convoluted, studded with jargon, its total remoteness from ordinary human speech its surest sign of the author's membership in the academic elite. [...]

[read on...]

Managing Digital Assets forum

From Hangingtogether.org [with emphasis added]:

In Using up our words ...  Jim Michalko, the president of RLG, summarizes the highlights of the recent Association of Research Libraries membership meeting last week and a forum titled Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries that ARL co-sponsored with CNI, CLIR and DLF:

The highlight of the ARL meeting was a valedictory speech by William Bowen, President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He spoke about Portico (a Mellon initiative to create a long-term archive for e-journals and other digital resources) and other Mellon initiatives. His speech covered the history and trajectory of the Mellon initiatives that have spun off as independent entities - JSTOR, ARTstor, Ithaka, and Portico. For me the most interesting bits of the talk were his high-level concluding observations which he titled “From 36,000 feet”. I’d urge you to take a look at them. These concluding remarks are important observations for our community even without knowing the Mellon context. Read them.

The highlight of the Managing Digital Assets forum was the opening keynote by Don Waters (Program Officer, Scholarly Communications, Mellon Foundation) ... The most recent version of the talk is now on the ARL server.

Some things that struck me in hearing this version of the speech were the decisiveness with which a future for Open Access journal publishing was dismissed, the firmness in his conclusion that scholarly information resources must be aggregated to fulfill their digital potential, and the absolute conviction with which he warned institutions that they will need to get comfortable with “outsourcing” what they used to hold closely. This last point echoed some of Bill Bowen’s comments during the earlier meeting about the need to get past library and institutional thinking to consideration of system-wide issues and solutions. And as Don made his points he also made it clear that the secrecy and nature of the deals struck by the Google5 universities may represent a squandering of the public trust that they built up over many decades ...

Jim concludes that "the LAM [Libraries, Archives and Museums] community is in danger of using up all its good words. We’ve devalued (or had devalued by others) pretty much all the ones that are useful - library, archive, repository, asset, etc. Substantive interactions on these topics now need to be prefaced by a vocabulary calibration which will then be good only for the duration of that discussion." 

And on 'the need to get past library and institutional thinking', "the call for system-wide action which echoed across the meeting days does not necessarily require new organizations or institutions. There are a number already on the landscape that are, in fact, controlled by the community. With leadership, will, and perhaps a bit of funding, these organizations can effectively discharge some of the requirements for the future that the community is now identifying." [Read the complete post]

Image sources: Bowen image / Waters image

 

 

New Harlem Renaissance Triple Opening

From an email press release:

            

Frank Stewart (left) ; Petra Richterova (right)

On Thursday evening, November 10th, a watershed event in the emergence of The New Harlem Renaissance will take place when Essie Green Galleries joins Jumel Terrace Books and The Museum of Art and Origins in celebrating their inaugural openings. That evening, from 6 to 9, all three venues will open the doors of their landmark Sugar Hill brownstones in an ongoing cultural collaboration. The location of the venues of this collaboration revives the rich brownstone soirée traditions associated with Harlem.

Sherman Edmiston’s Essie Green Galleries, at 419 Convent Avenue (148th St.), is the only gallery with a permanent exhibition of Black American Masters of the 19th and 20th century, not just in Harlem but anywhere ... Thursday evening, November 10th in conjunction with the openings on Jumel Terrace and Gilliam’s opening at the Corcoran Museum, Essie Green Galleries will feature the works of Sam Gilliam.

Sam Gilliam Untitled (2004) Relief woodcut and collage on felt
image source

At Jumel Terrace Books, 426 W. 160 St. Dr. Robert Farris Thompson of Yale University will be signing copies of Tango: The Art History of Love –a surprising look into the African origins of the Tango. [see earlier post on Dr. Thompson]

It’s just a few blocks up the Hill, past the Duke Ellington residence, and up Jumel Terrace, where Paul Robeson resided, to 430 West 162nd Street, The Museum of Art and Origins (MoAaO). This is the only collection of African tribal art in private hands dedicated to public interactivity and the only research facility where scholars and students can physically examine the types of objects they are studying. Here, Dr. George Nelson Preston, Dr. Dinah Papi-Guimaerens, and J.C. Wu present a collection that includes a blacksmith’s bellows of the Fang people, a Kete people’s drum with a pair of Janis heads and a pair of Galoa bwiti posts. Also on view are several 18th to early 20th East Asian works on paper, and Contemporary art–objects that tell stories of their origins.

 In its photography gallery Museum of Art and Origins presents Delta to Delta: From The Niger to The Mississippi :  Photographs of West Africa, Cuba and Louisiana 1977-2005, by Frank Stewart and Petra Richterova. Opening November 11th, thereafter 7 days a week by appointment through December 7th 2005.

Frank Stewart won an Emmy for his Bearden Plays Bearden. He is co-author with Wynton Marsalis of Sweet Swing Blues on the Road: A Year With Wynton Marsalis and His Septet and with Lolis Eric Lolie of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country. Stewart has accompanied Dr. George N. Preston on several fieldwork trips in Africa. He will be present to sign copies of his books including the latest, Bearden by Frank Stewart (2005).

Petra Richterova has exhibited with Frank Stewart at the Fourth Street Gallery and Lincoln Center and is currently a doctoral candidate in Art History (Africa and the Caribbean) at Yale University. She has done extensive fieldwork in Ghana and Burkina Faso with Frank Stewart and Dr. Preston.

Goldwater Library receives Friede Collection catalog

A copy of the mammoth publication New Guinea Art: Masterpieces of the Jolika Collection of Marcia and John Friede (San Francisco: 2005) has just arrived at the Goldwater Library. The library copy of this two-volume boxed set was donated by John Friede.

This elegant two-volume publication depicts the art of New Guinea in richer detail than ever before. It is a detailed and broad-based survey, drawn from the Jolika Collection of John and Marcia Friede, the world’s foremost private collection. Volume I contains the lavish selection of magnificent color plates. Volume II features three essays by noted scholars and an extensive, illustrated catalogue section by John Friede. (from the publisher's blurb)

The essays:

• One symphony from many voices: collecting activities, and the culture of collecting since 1870, by Robert L. Welsch.
• Major themes in New Guinea art, by Dirk Smidt.
• Oceania: objects of revelation and desire, by Philippe Peltier.
• Radiocarbon dating of New Guinea carvings from the Jolika Collection, by Gregory Hodgins.

 

The catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition at the De Young Museum of the Friede bequest to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco as part of the De Young's gala re-opening this October. A compilation of news stories on the De Young, the new building and re-opening, and the appointment of Christina Hellmuth as the Pacific curator, can be found here.

The book, jointly published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and 5 Continents, Paris, is distributed in the United States by the Antique Collectors' Club.

Where's the Goldwater Library copy? Find it in Watsonline.

 

Caveat emptor

The Goldwater Library recently ordered and received a copy of African Sculpture by Warren Robbins, published by Schiffer Publishing of Atglen, Pa. The $49.95 (2005; ISBN 0764323326; hardcover) title promised to be a new work by the renowned scholar-collector of African art. To our chagrin it turns out to be a mediocre photomechanical reproduction of Robbins's African Art in American Collections originally published in 1966 -- a fact nowhere reflected in the publisher's web page for the work. This egregious oversight aside, Schiffer does offer in this edition a low-cost alternative to purchasing the 1966 version: A cursory search of Bookfinder finds that a copy of the 1966 edition will run you between $100 and $200. (It also shows the very same 2005 edition available from booksellers for as much as $155!)

Curiously Schiffer reissued the second edition of African Art in American Collections (1989) in 2004, under its original title.

This example of 'selling mutton as lamb' seems to have caught some of the cataloging community off guard as well. We have corrected our WATSONLINE cataloging record for African Sculpture to reflect the situation. Kudos to RALPH (The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities) for correctly identifying the most recent manifestation as a reissue of the original title -- too late to save our bacon, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I received the following reply to an email sent to the publisher:

Dear Mr. Day,

Thank you for taking the time to write. I will talk with the web site people about new wording or whatever the choice to try to be more informative. If the book des not suit you and you bought it from us, you may return it.

Sincerely,

Peter B. Schiffer

Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

Robert Farris Thompson on Soundcheck

via NPR.org:

Robert Farris Thompson
The Yale art historian discusses his new book, Tango: The Art History of Love on Soundcheck:

Forever Tango    

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Author Robert Farris Thompson joins us to discuss his new book Tango: The Art History of Love, which explores the cultural roots of the Argentinean dance form. Thompson is a renowned Yale art historian, and Publishers Weekly calls his new book "an antidote to those trite coffee-table books that treat the tango with purple prose." We then turn our attention to the Oral History of American Music archive (OHAM), which is housed at Yale and is the place to go for an insiders' look at the history of American music. We're joined by OHAM founding director Vivian Perlis and associate director Libby Van Cleve. Their new book,

Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, is culled from taped interviews with more than 300 composers, musicians, and others ranging from Ellington and Ives to Copland and Cowell.

                                   

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