Guffwatch - CAA special
February 13 2013
Picture: CAA
The College Art Association conference is taking place at the moment in New York. For a certain type of academic art history, it's the main annual event, certainly in the US. I'm sure those attending and giving papers will have a great time - but as ever I'm baffled by many of the session titles. On the first day there are, for example, sessions called:
- The Proof Is in the Print: Avant-Garde Approaches to the Historical Materials of Photography’s Avant-Garde
- Transmaterialities: Materials, Process, History (which includes a paper entitled, 'The Generative Possibilities of Base Materiality in Postwar Conceptions of Art and Architecture')
- The Empathetic Body: Performance and the Blurring of Private Self in Contemporary Art
- Beyond Good or Bad: Practice-Derived Epistemologies of Studio Critique
I have no idea what any of the above are about. Why do art history papers have to have obfuscatory titles? For a subject which continually claims to be anti-elitist, art history too often speaks in an alien language designed specifically to exclude.
The session on Practice-Derived Epistemologies, whatever they are, includes a paper called, 'Demystifying Critique: Exploring Language and Interaction with Non-Native Speakers of English'. I'm a native English speaker, and I need help demystifying this kind of language. But then maybe I'm just a bit dumb.
Update - a reader writes:
If you took, more or less at random, some of the words in all the papers you cite, you could still come up with a paper that wouldn't look out of place on a CAA programme. How about:
Transmaterial empathies: Conceptions of practice-derived critiques of the self in Avant Garde postwar epistemiology.
Update II - I probably am just dumb. Reader Dr Matt Loder tweets:
I went to one of the supposedly unfathomable panels. It was perfectly fathomable. I hope Bendor comes to AAH!
On the other hand, I did spot, on the second day of the CAA conference, at least one session title that even I would understand:
French Art, 1715–1789
West Ballroom, 3rd Floor
Chair: Colin B. Bailey, The Frick Collection
Update III - another reader writes:
Highlight for me was the "Critiquing Criticality" session, with the unintentionally ironic paper "Mediocrity doesn't happen overnight ... it takes a lot of hard work". I do hate 'critique' as verb. I know it has historic precedent, but 'criticising' is always better. 'Critiquing' gives the wrong focus, implying that it's all about the construction of a critique rather than the criticism of an external object. But maybe that's the right connotation in this context.
The 'New Connoisseurship' panel looks interesting though - I hope an AHN reader is attending and will provide a report.
Me too. The session on connoisseurship is titled:
The New Connoisseurship: A Conversation among Scholars, Curators, and Conservators
West Ballroom, 3rd Floor
Chairs: Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; H. Perry Chapman, University of Delaware
Note that dealers don't get a look in. But then we are very much 'Old Connoisseurship'.
Update IV - I am not dumb! Top US art critic Jerry Saltz writes on why he goes to CAA:
I say go for the voyeurism and snacks, stay for the panels and symposium. I often attend super obscure ones about how wood was beveled in 15th century Italian marquetry; or the presence extra-terrestrials in pre-Christian art. Mostly, however, when I get the CAA program (available on line or at the Hilton) I'm utterly baffled by the titles. Much of academia speaks a foreign tongue, using insular jargon and language I'm either unfamiliar with, can't understand, or isn't in dictionaries. I love made-up words. But when they don't make any new sense I get antsy. And feel dumb.
Phew...
Update V - a distinguished art history professor writes from the US:
I am an avid reader of AHN and was amused by your comments about the CAA meeting in NY. I gave up attending several years ago -- too crowded, too frantic, too expensive, too many presentations I don't understand or care about.
Update VI - a CAA attendee writes (kindly):
I've been following your delightful blog for a few months now and I want to thank your for the work you put into it. It is balm for an art soul tattered by the likes of Artfagcity and Hyperallergic here in the NYC area. I was playing catch up and came across your Guff post on the annual CAA conference. I had to laugh because I fell behind while attending for the first time this year. There was the nonsense I knew to expect from more seasoned veterans, and that I didn't feel to badly trying to avoid, and some wonderful panels that left me inspired to go back to grad school and do good art history, not bad contemporary art-history-theory nonsense. For all the panels on art criticism this year, and despite my interest and concern for the field I only sat through one lecture (which was great, but I was too exhausted to go on, and it might have continued horribly).
