Art History in the Age of the Internet - A Discussion

A Florentine Madonna and Child offset by a 3D printed #arthistory hashtag, a contribution to Dr. Charlotte Frost's hasharthistory project by Dr. Alexandra Korey

Dr. Charlotte Frost has recently arrived in Hong Kong where she is serving as a visiting assistant professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Over the past few years she has been working on a number of over-lapping projects that explore the histories of digital and new media arts and the materiality of art historical scholarship – not to mention what happens to art history as discipline after the arrival of digital and internet-based communication technologies. As part of this work, she has been hosting a distributed online discussion all October on the history of online art discussion communities and the future of art history/criticism.

The discussion has mostly unfolded on the New Media Curating discussion listserve (link) but she has also been inviting people to respond on their own blogs, through Twitter and on their Facebook pages. For example a really useful thread on the internet personas Luther Blissett and NN occurred on her own Facebook page (link)

Having talked about her work at the CAA conference in February of this year (link),  she invited me to talk about my own use of blogging and social media in art history as an independent scholar. The prompts in bold below have been provided by Charlotte to guide this discussion.

La Grande Bellezza and Raphael's Elusive Muse

Beauty awakens the soul to act

Dante

Our experience of art is invariably personal, and undoubtedly subjective. How we process a painting, sculpture or film is dependent on myriad factors from our own past and present, and includes elements of prior knowledge and experience of language, images and sound.

I would like to use this post to explore my experience of the Paolo Sorrentino film La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), which I saw recently as part of an Italian Film Festival. I have no intention of providing an exhaustive synopsis, but will recommend the film to lovers of Italian art and culture, and to aesthetes in general. The film may also be of particular interest to writers, as the main character is a writer, who having had success with a single novel early in his career, has spent most of his life as a columnist and socialite living among Roman high society.

Hiatus & Transition - a new space for 3PP

View from the balcony of my new apartment

Recent months have seen a slow-down in frequency of posts at 3PP.  I would like to take this opportunity to let readers know that my art historical adventures have continued, albeit in a different mode. In fact, in recent months most of the art objects I have been perusing have been to furnish my new apartment.

While I do plan to return to the standard and type of posts one would expect to see at 3PP, I have enjoyed this opportunity to exercise my aesthetic tastes and decorate my new living space with pieces recalling the Renaissance and beyond.

Why Art History - The Treasures of Constantinople

The remains of the 6th Century Church of St. Polyeuktos

It all started with peacocks... those dazzling creatures that represented the eternity of the spirit and had associations with Roman empresses... There once was a church, built by a royal princess who was the noblest in the land, that had a golden dome and was lavishly decorated with the most precious marbles from the empire, colors of green, blue and gold glittering everywhere, with peacock motifs decorating column capitals and niches around the church, it was known to have been inspired from the temple of Solomon. No one knew of its existence till half a century ago when magnificent marble fragments appeared as if by magic in the middle of Istanbul... This, was the Church of St. Polyeuktos in Constantinople, built in the 6th century by Anicia Juliana, a descendant of both Eastern and Western emperors ...

The Divine Rebirth of Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch

Among all of Raphael's great works, his Madonna of the Goldfinch has a strong personal resonance. The wonderfully rich story of its creation, destruction and restoration is representative of all that is possible when talented individuals are dedicated to creating and maintaining an object of great beauty and cultural value.