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The 2009 American Council for Southern Asian Art (ACSAA) conference on “New Darshans: Seeing Southern Asian Religiosity and Visuality Across Disciplines” was wide in scope and interest: it featured thirty-five papers; covered periods from the second century B.C.E. to today; and focused on geographic areas from Rajasthan to Bengal, from Tibet and Himachal Pradesh to Tamilnad, and included Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Chattisgarh, and even areas outside the subcontinent like Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, and the...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “emerge” as: “to come forth into view . . . from an enclosed space.” This definition has implications for the study of landscapes, especially those of the productive English countryside. Tidy patchwork fields and hedgerows have come to be regarded as quintessentially—and innately—English. However, what is not necessarily part of this perception (even though it has long been studied by historians, geographers, and archaeologists) is how such a...

In October 2009, the Toronto Photography Seminar and the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of the United States co-sponsored Feeling Photography, an international, interdisciplinary conference convened to investigate photography’s relationship to affect, emotion, and feeling. Conference presentations engaged and extended recent critical discussions of affect, which address aspects of human experience that have been largely under-theorized, ignored, or excluded from discourse. Put simply, affect foregrounds the body’s responses to stimuli at the moment...

The museum marks a place where rule-based ethics and a reliance on principles, codes, laws, and mission statements actively intersect with situational ethics and the invocation of consequentialist arguments. While it may not be news that, in theory, the ethical dimensions of museum practice involve every area of the profession and all genres of museums, the manifold ways in which theory might confront those practices are sometimes less clear. At New Directions in Museum Ethics:...

In the preface to Sociology of the Arts: Exploring Fine and Popular Forms (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), Victoria Alexander reminds her readers that “scholarship . . . necessarily constructs an arena in which combatants from different perspectives battle over each other’s claims” (xiii).The role of scholarship, so defined, has had a rather negligible, and virtually non-existent, place in the traditional development of arts management as a field. It has evolved, instead, through a process of apprenticeship...

Historically the book has served as a locus for the interaction of disparate forces. Dimensionally complex, it has been a place where material, cultural, structural, philosophical, temporal, mechanical, and aesthetic elements can encounter, react, assert, concede, proselytize, and reconcile. That the poet Charles Baudelaire can compare himself to a beggar nourishing his vermin while doing so in formal alexandrine meter, that the book can act in one moment as a container of authority and in...

On July 25, 2009, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) in Minneapolis held its first ever Book Art Biennial. Consisting of a speaker, two panels, several exhibitions, and the awarding of the inaugural MCBA Prize, the biennial brought together book artists and advocates in an intimate environment to share their ideas about the efficacy of artists' books as agents of social change and tools of activism. John Risseeuw opened the conference with a keynote...

In 1942, Laurence Vail Coleman, then president of the American Association of Museums, sought to define the special nature of the campus museum: “The campus museum should be, above all, an instrument of teaching or research, or of both.” And, he wrote, “the first duty of a university or college museum is to its parent establishment, which means that the faculty and student body have a claim prior to that of townspeople and outsiders in...

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in twenty-five years of curating shows, I can’t recall a single artist mentioning Greenberg, let alone taking his ideas seriously.” This remark––made by the chief curator of a major U.S. museum of contemporary art during a coffee break at the “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art” symposium––helped me gain some perspective on the event. So did the introduction by the organizers, Miguel de Baca and Prudence Peiffer,...

Michael Meister’s review of my book The Temple Architecture of India brings to the fore two basic and interrelated questions about medieval Indian temples. How should one name and classify their various forms? And how were these forms conceived and designed? The review focuses largely on typology and terminology. Meister implies one general criticism: that I do not adequately follow the names suggested for shrine forms by inscriptions and texts. Here the distinction needs to...