Images of Japanese and Japanese American women can teach us what it meant to be visible at specific moments in history. In Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives (U Illinois Press, 2022), Elena Tajima Creef employs an Asian American feminist vantage point to examine ways of looking at indigenous Japanese Ainu women taking part in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition; Japanese immigrant picture brides of the early twentieth century; interned Nisei women ...
Jun 17, 2022•52 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021). In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, view...
Jun 15, 2022•47 min•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast Wanda M. Corn's book Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel Publishing, 2017) explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garmen...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of d...
Jun 13, 2022•2 hr 45 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Art forms have rules, usually implicit, that govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have: for example, a representational painting should be hung right-side-up, the same sort of paint medium should be used in restoration, and the painting should not be touched. In Immaterial: Rules in Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press 2022), Sherri Irvin argues that contemporary conceptual art is constituted by custom rules as well as by their physical medium: the artist may specify ...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 286•Transcript available on Metacast Yi Gu's Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard UP, 2020) examines the rise of open-air painting in 20th-century China, showing how this emphatically new form of landscape painting precipitated and participated in an ocular turn. In its urgent embrace of Cartesian optics and its interrelationship with new technologies like photography, open-air painting taught Chinese artists (and citizens) new, modern "ways of seeing." Gu traces the birth of the form in the early 20th century, sho...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast In Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic (Duke UP, 2021), Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being disc...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 448•Transcript available on Metacast The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists, but according to Mary Beth Willard, it’s hard to find good reasons to do so. In Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists (Routledge, 2021), she contends that because most boycotts of artists won’t succeed, there’s no ethical reason to do so most of the time. She then argues th...
Jun 08, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast In this podcast, Lisa Blackmore, Senior Lecture in the School of Philosophy, History and Interdisciplinary Studies Center at the University of Essex, and Liliana Gomez, Professor of Art and Society at the University of Kassel, introduce their edited volume Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean art (Routledge, 2020) and the multiple ways it proposes to "think with water". Spotlighting the ways in which artists in the Americas have long been in dialogue with water, liquids and fluids as...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the r...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas. Traditionally, exhibitions of architecture and design have predominantly focused on displaying finished outcomes or communicating a work through representation. In this ground-breaking new book, Fleur Watson unveils the emergence of the ‘new curator’. Instead of exhibiting finished works or artefacts, the rise of ‘performative curation’ provides a space where experim...
Jun 07, 2022•34 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and listeni...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep 146•Transcript available on Metacast In When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation (Leuven University Press, 2022), Dr. Andrew Shortland and Dr. Patrick Degryse examine how an initially valueless object becomes worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa. The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguin...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast William Ghosh talks to Saronik about Realism, and how it can both be subtly conservative and effectively radical, depending on its use. He takes us through realist tactics in texts ranging from V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River to Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex. William Ghosh teaches Victorian and Modern literature and Literary Theory at Jesus College, University of Oxford. His first book, V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought was published by OUP in October 2020. At prese...
Jun 02, 2022•19 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast Rima Fujita was born in Tokyo and now resides in Southern California. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with her B.F.A. and has exhibited her work internationally to much acclaim. As a descendant of the Last Samurai her creative aesthetics is strongly influenced by the philosophy of Bushido and Buddhism. Known for her distinctive style with vivid colors on black surface, Rima’s works are extracted from her dreams and meditation process. They are ethereal and evoke a timeless sense of l...
May 31, 2022•45 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Textiles were the second-most-traded commodity in world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the sale and exchange of silks, cottons, and woolens generated an immense amount of revenue. They touched every level of society, from rural women tending silkworms to pashas flaunting layers of watered camlet to merchants travelling to Mecca and beyond. Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (U California Press, 2021) offers the firs...
May 27, 2022•54 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Christopher Gilbert, Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College, has a new book that examines the understanding of American national character and culture through the works of caricature and comic representations. Gilbert specifically focuses on this kind of work that is produced during moments of crisis, particularly during wartime. Wartime often prompts self-understanding for a nation, since there is a demand that the reason for war is made clear, and the role of the nation is se...
May 26, 2022•45 min•Ep 604•Transcript available on Metacast For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon—kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries, and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to i...
May 24, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 101•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode Kim speaks with Lauren Fournier about autotheory. Lauren has recently published a book on the subject, titled Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021). In the episode she points to Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as the book that made the term famous, but refers us to a longer history of autotheoretical feminist writing, including work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks. She also mentions critical research by Zoe Todd, “A...
May 23, 2022•14 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (Norton, 2021), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—thi...
May 23, 2022•59 min•Ep 100•Transcript available on Metacast Elizabeth Oyler and Katherine Saltzman-Li's book Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age (Cornell UP, 2022) draws on literary works, artifacts, performing arts, and documents that were created by or about the samurai to examine individual "imprints," traces holding specifically grounded historical meanings that persist through time. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume assess those imprints for what they can suggest about how thinkers, writers, artists, performers, and ...
May 20, 2022•53 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast Through his blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher’s insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher’s prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the transfer of culture and life online. In the aftermath, The Memeing of Mark Fisher (Zero Books, 2021) re...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast The Benin Bronzes are among the British Museum’s most prized possessions. Celebrated for their great beauty, they embody the history, myth and artistry of the ancient Kingdom of Benin, once West Africa’s most powerful, and today part of Nigeria. But despite the Bronzes’ renown, little has been written about the brutal imperial violence with which they were plundered. Paddy Docherty’s searing new history tells that story: the 1897 British invasion of Benin. Armed with shocking details discovered ...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep 1202•Transcript available on Metacast A retrospective monograph of Alastair MacLennan’s performance art practice, its influence on the Belfast art scene, and its relationships with wider art histories. Actional Poetics-Ash She He: The Performance Actuations of Alastair MacLennan, 1971-2020 (Intellect, 2022) (Intellect, 2022) is the most comprehensive and complete legacy monograph about Alastair MacLennan’s extensive performance practice. Alastair MacLennan is emeritus professor of fine art, School of Art and Design, Ulster Universit...
May 16, 2022•59 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indig...
May 11, 2022•50 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents and interprets the artistic life of Romare Bearden. Gilmore details four generations of the Bearden family and grounds the reader in places formative to Bearden like North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. By centering Bearden’s art, Gilmore mines the historical record and this artist’s recollections which were at times conflicting, but neverthel...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep 296•Transcript available on Metacast In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and the public are often far more complex than the narratives of public benefit and private value would h...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair. (Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!) Reading List: GPT3 Creativity When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo? Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Mach...
May 06, 2022•21 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast Kim interviews Alliya Dagman about mimesis. Alliya references Plato’s Republic and various internet memes, including a John Oliver meme about how Xi Jinping hates being compared to Winnie the Pooh. Alliya is a PhD candidate in the English Department at NYU. She writes about poetics and theory, and is a vital force behind the Organism for Poetic Research. She is a badass WordPress developer too! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium ...
May 04, 2022•11 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 
