James Elkins
News:
Passed the 300,000 word mark on my work in progress. Writing every day! Please use the contact form to schedule lectures, studio visits, or seminars. I've started using Academia.edu as a message board. If you download something of mine that's posted there, send me a note: I'm always glad to answer questions. (There are also more texts posted on Academia.) See "Lectures" page for the travel schedule. (Updated June 24, 2017.)
Latest uploads:
New reviews and essays are on Goodreads and on Writing with Images. Latest texts on this site: 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. Other live writing projects are finished: Visual Worlds, and The Impending Single History of Art. Thanks everyone for contributing!
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A perennially unfinished project: an essay (or a lecture, or a book) giving reason why art historians should practice what they study.
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A reply to a very eccentric proposal: that the Venus of Willendorf and associated "Venus" figurines are self-portraits.
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A lecture on the limits of historians' acknowledgment of their own involvement and motives in their work.
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Two essays on the state of art history in Ireland, with reference to the general question of how art history is taught in smaller countries.
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An essay on the limits of visual representation, with attention to recent positions taken by Rosalind Krauss and Georges Didi-Huberman.
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An essay on the current state of the theory of the gaze, and a critical assessment of its recent development.
A review of the exhibition and book Iconoclash.
Two articles on what's wrong with David Hockney's theories of optics in art, and what's odd about the interest they attracted.