Review article: Holland on Paper in the Age of Art Nouveau

Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2018

This paper responds to Steven Sutcliffe’s call to broaden and “revitaliz[e]” (2014: 41) the theoretical understanding of New Age practice. It has two aims: to produce a sketch of New Age artistic production – its most typical forms and genres – and to account for some, though not all, of its surprises and puzzles by reference to the specific functions and contexts of New Age art forms, including books, films, paintings and music. Analysis of New Age art is surprisingly underdeveloped relative to analysis of the New Age as a consumerist phenomenon. It appears that the New Age is approached principally as a consumption machine, without sustained consideration of the cultural forms that it produces as anything more than commodities. In addressing this issue we argue that New Age art has three orientations: communicating dogma; facilitating change and catalysing embodied responses. Although this survey leaves us with more puzzles than answers, this paper aims to extend understanding of the New Age empirically and theoretically.

Motion: Transformation, 35th Congress of International Committee of the History of Arts, edited by Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf, Bononia University Press, 2021, p. 403-408.

Knowledge and practice pictured in the artist’s studio. The ‘art lover’ in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.

This article examines the long overlooked representation of the 'art lover', or liefhebber, in the artist's studio in the seventeenth-century Netherlands and the ways in which the liefhebber's image coalesced with a larger cultural discourse of connoisseurship, amateurship, and artistic practice. It situates these images in the iconographic tradition of the Flemish collector's cabinet, and demonstrates how the values inherent to the konstkamer became part of the visual language and meaning of the studio visit. Drawing academies, manuals, and art theoretical treatises reshaped the role of the art lover in and outside of the studio, ennobling artist and art lover alike. In this way, Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Pieter Codde, Frans van Mieris and Michael Sweerts, 'pictured' a new form of artistic knowledge and modernized an iconographic tradition.

Contemporary Culture, 2013

When the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research invited me in 2006 to develop an art-science project about the commercialization of culture, I had no concrete idea what form such a collaborative project would possibly take, except that I wanted us to critically investigate the market ideology that over the last decades has infiltrated almost all aspects of everyday life in the Netherlands. From the 1990s onwards, large sectors of the welfare state system -notably health-care insurance, communication services and public transport -have been privatized. Education has yet been spared, but most schools and universities are nevertheless managed as a business and marketed as high-performance cars for top-talented students. Culture itself is increasingly supplied by (semi)private firms and appropriated by corporate capital, produced for a profit under the conditions of market exchange. In the arts, which have benefited from extensive government support since the 1950s, the Dutch have witnessed a remarkably rapid shift towards commercial practices and a discourse of cultural entrepreneurship. Artists are encouraged to turn themselves into brands in order to increase their revenue-earning capacity. Museums sell these brand names to cultural consumers and advertise the attendance figures of blockbuster shows ("over 50,000 visitors in the opening month") as if they were movie theatres operating within a Hollywood-controlled distribution system. What interests me as a social historian in this ongoing process of commercialization is its political economy. What are the underlying social dynamics and power struggles that restructure the transformation of the cultural field in the Netherlands? Does the "new order" of market economics in the non-for-profit sector challenge existing social hierarchies and power relations or does commercialization reinforce the position of the vested cultural elites? Before discussing the insights gained by our art-science exploration, which offers only the beginnings of a systemic understanding of the complex dynamics at work, let me explicate the central concerns of my research by giving a rough draft of the commercial tendencies in the not-for-profit segment of the cultural field, taking as an

Art History, 2002

Tradition is art history's eternal Other: it is that which must be overcome, resisted, thrown off or, if a compromise must be made, creatively appropriated. The history of the art of the nineteenth century, that "great" age of innovation, progress and revolution, is more than any other rooted in anti-traditionalist sentiment, steeped in a rhetoric that privileges innovation and bound to narrative structures geared against artistic tradition. Modernist and other teleological histories of nineteenth-century art have always emphasised change and novelty. But even revisionist accounts of the art of the nineteenth century leave scarcely any room to consider tradition in its own right. These have generally either sung the aesthetic praises of traditional art without much further reflection, or have discussed academic art as innovative in another way, either within a traditional framework or in the sense that the art under consideration points forward to developments other than those associated with formal modernism. This rejection of artistic tradition may be due to its use in fascist and totalitarian ideologies, but is also the result of a structuralist approach within the discipline of art history that continuously opposes new

No great paintings tantalize the onlooker more than the Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century. Skulls and bookbindings gleam, floors and windows glow, men with paintbrushes and women with brooms stare out at us. Are we being shown the Dutch world as it really was? Taught a moral? Told a story? The paintings offer few obvious clues. Yet their loving, minutely accurate reproductions on canvas and panel of the tiniest details of the three-dimensional world continue to fascinate museum visitors and provoke historians and critics.

Oud Holland, 2008

1990

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2008

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2022

The following essay proceeds through twenty-one visual and textual 'scenes' from the complex history of the art school, as a contribution to debates about its political character. The title is taken from Jacques Rancière's (2013) Aisthesis. This is Rancière's most sustained exposition of the 'aesthetic regime of art'. His strategy in this book is to juxtapose 'the event' of an artwork against 'the interpretive network which gives it meaning' (2013, ix). He is specifically interested in the transition between different 'regimes of art'. The scenes in this article map the transition from what Rancière calls the 'representative regime' to the 'aesthetic regime' on to the historical, pedagogical, ideological, and political evolution of the modern art school. These scenes roughly cover the period from the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the art school protests in 1968. They also include references to the nineteenth-century UK Schools of Design, Socialist Realism, Greenbergian Modernism, Althusserian ideology critique, and the Bauhaus. This essay is a sketch leading toward a longer, non-linear, counter-history of the art school.