Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened...
Jan 29, 2025•59 min•Ep. 23
Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this animal-style imagery, examining the dissemination of this image system. Filled with fascinating images carefully chosen...
Jan 25, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 552
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the mon...
Jan 19, 2025•51 min•Ep. 2
The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public education project of teaching people to make their own no-power, low-budget radios called open-wave receivers. They’ve held radi...
Jan 13, 2025•57 min•Ep. 40
One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (U Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor. Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural comp...
Jan 06, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 428
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves in...
Jan 03, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 12
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices ma...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 54
Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 249
In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and positions, and illustrators are a critical voice within the field. Grounding discussions in concepts fundamental to ...
Dec 27, 2024•27 min•Ep. 82
Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the few remaining examples of the once more prevalent urbanized bridge type. Drawing from early Florentine chronicles and previously unpublished archival documents, The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Theresa Flanigan traces the history of the Ponte Vecchio, focusing on the cur...
Dec 21, 2024•50 min•Ep. 32
Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are discussing his Oxford University Press, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2024). Erich’s book explores the idea of conservation: the practice of preserving things for posterity and fighting against the tides of entropy. What we choose to save can range from famous paintings ...
Dec 19, 2024•44 min•Ep. 19
Paloma Checa-Gismero talks about the many processes of re-evaluation, re-contextualization, and re-animation that designates an object as art. To illustrate this point, she calls our attention to the work of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1970s, or the 1989 exhibition titled Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She develops the concept of aesthetic conversions in her new book about the histories and geographies of art biennials, which, in the post cold war w...
Dec 16, 2024•21 min•Ep. 150
Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum's new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met's strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is this "jewel box of a novel" (Kirkus Reviews) that imagines a privileged 20th-century woman as an artifact--an object prized, collected, and critiqued. One Woman Show (Avid Reader Press, 2023) revo...
Dec 14, 2024•52 min•Ep. 147
A. L. McClanan's Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art (Reaktion, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over 5,000 years, representing power, transcendence and even divinity. It explores the history and symbolism of griffins in art, from their appearances in ancient Egyptian magic wands to...
Dec 14, 2024•46 min•Ep. 51
Becoming Modigliani (Rake Press, 2024) is a comprehensive biography that delves into the troubled life of the Jewish-Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.; Written by Dr. Henri Colt, an internationally recognized lung specialist, the book examines the artist's legend and Modigliani's creative journey from a medical perspective, from his birth in Livorno, Italy, to his tragic death in a paupers' hospital in Paris at the age of thirty-five, presumably from tuberculous meningitis. Becoming Modigliani s...
Dec 09, 2024•57 min•Ep. 161
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum? The Met: ...
Dec 07, 2024•57 min•Ep. 2
Johanna Drucker’s Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) uncovers the enigmatic life and work of Ilia Zdanevich, better known as Iliazd, a revolutionary figure in modernist art and literature. The book explores Iliazd’s journey from his beginnings in the Russian Futurist avant-garde to his later experiments with artist books in Paris, where he collaborated with icons like Picasso and Matisse. Drucker’s work delves into Iliazd’s radical creativity, analyzin...
Nov 29, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 2
In recent decades, the disciplines of retail history, business history, design and cultural history have contributed to the study of department stores and other types of shops. However, these studies have only made passing references to window display and its role in retail, society and culture. In The Professionalization of Window Display in Britain, 1919-1939 (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Kerry Meakin investigates the conditions that enabled window display to become a professional practice during the...
Nov 25, 2024•52 min•Ep. 117
In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Dalia Nassar, author of Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (Cambridge UP, 2022) among other works. Dr Dalia Nassar works at the intersection of the history of German philosophy and environmental philosophy and ethics. She has written on the tradition of romantic empiricism, including its significance contemporary questions of ecology and environment. She has also worked to promote women in the history of philosophy, especially...
Nov 17, 2024•34 min•Ep. 9
Born and raised on Manhattan Island, Eric Drooker began to slap his art on the streets at night as a teenager. Since then, his drawings and posters have become a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on covers of the New Yorker. His first book, Flood, won the American Book Award, followed by Blood Song (soon to be a feature film). Naked City is the third volume in Drooker’s City Trilogy. His graphic novels have been translated into numerous languag...
Nov 17, 2024•52 min•Ep. 18
In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In t...
Nov 16, 2024•59 min•Ep. 77
In this episode of High Theory, Faye Raquel Gleisser tells us about Risk. A calculable danger in economics, athletics, sociology, or healthcare, risk has become a socially constructed danger that changes who we are and how we move through the world. Faye asks us to think about how risk management and risk literacy shaped the conceptual and performance work of American artists in the late twentieth century. Who is at risk? Who is safe? And how do we know? Faye’s book, Risk Work: Making Art and Gu...
Nov 16, 2024•20 min•Ep. 146
Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first study of women's philosophies of art in long nineteenth-century Britain. It looks at seven women spanning the time from the Enlightenment to the beginning of modernism. They are Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, Emilia Dilke, and Vernon Lee. The central issue that concerned them was how art related to morality and religion. Baillie and Martineau treated art as an agency...
Nov 12, 2024•59 min•Ep. 161
How to think about the contradictory figure of R. Murray Schafer? A renegade scholar who used sound technology to create an entirely new field of study, even as he devalued the very tools of its trade. A gifted composer who claimed a sincere appreciation for indigenous cultures, yet one who, perhaps, could only love them on his own terms, only as they fit into his sweeping vision for Canadian music. An erudite reader with a deep knowledge of world cultures, who nevertheless dismissed Canada’s mo...
Nov 11, 2024•50 min•Ep. 30
In this episode of High Theory, Esther Gabara talks with us about Non-Literary Fiction, that is, works of fiction that belong to the world of contemporary art, rather than the world of contemporary literature. She focuses on literary and narrative strategies used by Latin American and Indigenous American artists to make “non-objective” forms of visual art under the pressures of neoliberalism. To learn more, check out her book, Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism (Chicag...
Nov 09, 2024•15 min•Ep. 145
R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you’re someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music–or you’ve just thrown around the word “soundscape”–you’ve probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada’s most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the W...
Nov 04, 2024•37 min•Ep. 29
Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage (Princeton UP, 2024) is a beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored pape...
Nov 02, 2024•55 min•Ep. 160
Today, in honor of World Listening Day, we rebroadcast our story on renowned Australian sound composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English. This episode of gets deep into English’s own listening practices as an artist, specifically a technique he calls Relational Listening. In fact, as you’ll hear, he describes himself not as a sound maker but as a professional listener—that’s how central the act of listening is to his artistic practice. In particular he talks about his reworking of an im...
Oct 28, 2024•40 min•Ep. 28
In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Lucy Benjamin. Dr Lucy Benjamin is a researcher in architectural theory and creative practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of environmental theory, architecture, and philosophy, especially the emergence of repair as a design principle and the conditions for human rights in the age of eco-crisis. They discuss time and space on the streets of Paris; repairability and broken Cuban furniture; and developing her own perspective. A transcript of this episode...
Oct 27, 2024•34 min•Ep. 8
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature (U Michigan Press, 2024) develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to new possibilities. By applying this theor...
Oct 18, 2024•42 min•Ep. 160
