Clark Conversations
Clark Conversations add an intimate dimension to scholarly life at the institute. In some conversations, Clark Fellows or short-term visiting scholars discuss their personal intellectual histories and commitments to the profession in a relaxed setting. In others, scholars debate current issues in art history without a prescribed script, before an informal audience.
W.J.T. Mitchell
November 2012
W.J.T. Mitchell, Beinecke Fellow at The Clark and Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with his friend and colleague, Michael Taussig, Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. The event was held at The Explorers Club in New York.
Mitchell is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. His books include Seeing Through Race (2012); Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (2011); and What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (2005).
Taussig teaches cultural anthropology and has written on, among other issues, violence, terror, the abolition of slavery, color, shamanism, iconoclasm, and alterity. His books include What Color is the Sacred (2009); My Cocaine Museum (2004); and Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987).
Hal Foster - video
October 2011
The Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and recipient of the 2010 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, Foster is noted for his writing on contemporary art. His many publications include: The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamiliton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (2011), The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (2011), Prosthetic Gods (2006), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (2002), Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1998), The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century (1996), and Compulsive Beauty (1995). Professor Foster was joined by Robert Slifkin, Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, at the Explorers Club in New York, to discuss how the relationships among criticism, theory, and history have changed since his generation of contemporary art writers came onto the scene in the 1980s.
Frank Ankersmit
April 2011
Professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. As a scholar and professor, Ankersmit has been an influential figure in philosophy of history and, in 2007, founded the Journal of the Philosophy of History. English translations of his published works include: Narrative Logic: A semantic analysis of the historian’s language (1983), History and Tropology: The rise and fall of metaphor (1994), The reality effect in the writing of history: the dynamics of historiographical topology (1990), and, most recently, Sublime Historical Experience (2005).
Hans Belting - audio
September 2010
Preeminent historian of medieval and early modern European art, as well as contemporary art and theory. His many books include Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (1984), The End of the History of Art (1987), Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights (2002), Art History After Modernism (2003), Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs (2006), and Looking through Duchamp’s Door (2010). Belting discussed his life, his career, and his research with Dario Gamboni, Keith Moxey, and Charles (Mark) Haxthausen.
Svetlana Alpers
March 2009
Alpers’s books have fundamentally changed people’s understanding of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and of Rubens, Tiepolo, and Velasquez, among others. Alpers discussed her life, career, engagements, and interests with the Clark’s Starr Director of Research and Academic Programs, Michael Ann Holly, and Williams College Associate Professor of Art History, Stefanie Solum.
Leo Steinberg
April 2008
Celebrated art historian and critic Leo Steinberg has published and lectured widely on Renaissance, Baroque, and twentieth-century art. Steinberg discussed his distinguished career and professional accomplishments in the company of Michael Ann Holly.
Linda Nochlin
May 2008
Linda Nochlin, the distinguished feminist art historian, discussed her work, career, motivation, and engagements in the company of Michael Ann Holly and Aruna D'Souza, assistant professor of art history and women’s studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
For information on upcoming scholarly events, including Clark Conversations,
visit our calendar of events.
