Art and Its Audiences

Art and Its Audiences: Materiality and Kleinarchitektur: The Economy of Scale in Renaissance Architecture
Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 5:00pm
Alina Payne, Professor of Early Modern and Modern European Architecture, Harvard University
101 McCormick Hall at Princeton University

Art and Its Audiences: All That Glitters: Image and Ornament in Early Islam
Thursday, April 1, 2010 - 5:00pm
Finbarr Barry Flood, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Wolfensohn Hall

Art and Its Audiences: The Audience as Prisoner
Reflections on the Activity of the Object
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - 5:00pm
Horst Bredekamp, Professor of Art History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Wolfensohn Hall

The basic problem of all pictures is grounded in their bipolar existence. They are created objects, but nonetheless present themselves as physical beings. This paradoxical double-structure is exemplified in the “ME FECIT” of numberless inscriptions. With its “EGO,” the pictorial work declares that it does not consist of artificially shaped dead material, but of a living form. Dramatizing this problem, Leonardo da Vinci created the formula that pictures “imprison” the audience.

Art and Its Audiences: Reception Issues in Early Mass Visual Culture
Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 5:00pm
Michael Leja, Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania
101 McCormick Hall at Princeton University

A new modern ecology of images took form in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Our ways of understanding and describing this new situation artistically and sociologically have relied on crude conceptual tools: notions of mass and elite cultures; highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow audiences; modernist fine art and commercial kitsch.

Art and Its Audiences: "Landscapes and their Users: From Romantic to Modern in the Representation of Normandy"
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - 5:00pm
Stephen Bann, Professor Emeritus, History of Art, University of Bristol
Wolfensohn Hall

The celebrated views of the Normandy coast painted by the Impressionists in the 1860s/70s may be seen against a continuous development in the modes and objectives of visual representation dating back half a century. This was not, however, a simple evolution, but a succession of stages through which different technical applications paralleled the shifting paradigms of historical and cultural awareness in post-revolutionary France.

Art and Its Audiences: "Photography after the End of Documentary Realism: Zwelethu Mthethwa's Color Photographs"
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 - 5:00pm
Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President, San Francisco Art Institute
101 McCormick Hall at Princeton University

One major critique of documentary realism at the height of apartheid in South Africa was its overdependence on dehumanizing spectacle, and that from this concern emerged the icon of the victim. For its critics, especially black artists such as Zwelethu Mthethwa, documentary photography was always at the ready to link the iconic and the impoverished with little recourse to examining its effects on social lives.

Art and Its Audiences: "Who Were Artists in Ancient Egypt and What Audiences Did They Address?"
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 5:00pm
John Baines, Professor of Egyptology, University of Oxford
Wolfensohn Hall

For additional information, please see the news release.

Art and Its Audiences: "Behold the Invisible"
Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 5:00pm
Kaja Silverman, Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies, University California, Berkeley
101 McCormick Hall at Princeton University