News:
Finally out, after 6 years of work: a textbook with Oxford Press, co-authored with Erna Fiorentini, called Visual Worlds.
The opening pages of my novel are now online with Place (lierary magazine in Brussels). More on the novel here.
Also in 2020: my summary of the state of art writing around the world, called The Impending Single History of Art: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives. To be published by de Gruyter.
Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. See Lectures page for my travel schedule.
Latest uploads:
The book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?; the book How to Use Your Eyes; and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. (There is also a website with reviews of contemporary piano music.)
Live Writing Projects:
I am experimenting with writing live on the internet. These texts update live, and you can contribute to them & be thanked when the book is published. (1) What is Interesting Writing in Art History?, (2) Writing with Images. Thanks everyone for contributing!
An essay on the overuse, or misuse, of Charles Sanders Peirce's sign system in art history.
On the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, and his use of color, which was neither entirely unnatural nor abritrary.
Is "art history" the name of a discipline, or an area of interest, that is practiced throughout the world? Or is it a Western interest, currently spreading along with capitalism?
There is no such thing as "outsider art" because naive and untrained art has been a traditional accompaniment of modernism since its inception.
On the confused uses of fractals by artists, and some mathematicians' sense of art: on productive misunderstandings.
A perennially unfinished project: an essay (or a lecture, or a book) giving reason why art historians should practice what they study.
A reply to a very eccentric proposal: that the Venus of Willendorf and associated "Venus" figurines are self-portraits.
A lecture on the limits of historians' acknowledgment of their own involvement and motives in their work.