Publishing art history books has always been fraught with problems: image rights, high quality printing costs, and diminishing opportunities for print publication contracts, to name a few. Yale University Press is, with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant, exploring options to make digital publication a greater possibility for topics in art history. One great…
Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that will provide popular textbooks to California students as free downloads. The first stage includes State funding for 50 open-source digital textbooks. The second stage will be to establish an Open Source host/library. The goal is to lighten the high prices students now pay for textbooks. It will be interesting…
For those who were unable to get to Kassel, Germany this summer for documenta 13, here’s your chance to virtually experience installations at all venues. The 360°-Tour offers participants numerous ways to navigate the vast system of projects: by visitor’s favorites (with accompanying video), by a room-by-room “walk through” of each venue, by individual works of…
The Museo Nacional del Prado has launched a new website dedicated to beautiful digital images of their entire collection of works and documents by and about Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. Goya en el Prado (available only in Spanish) is divided by medium, then subject, and entries for a few paintings offer supplemental technical…
There’s an interesting multi-part discussion going on in the New York Times about whether art (visual, performance, theater, film, writing, music) can still shock us. Articles revisit some historic events such as the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and the public funding battles in the 1990s over controversial art (such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs…
Palm Springs Modernism Week isn’t until 2013 (February 14-24, 2013, to be exact), but organizers are offering “an early taste” of the annual event when they announced they’re joining in the 6th Annual Docomomo US Tour Day Saturday, October 6, 2012. In fact, Modernism Week is holding four days of events the weekend of October…