Enfilade

London’s View: A Festival of Art History (7–9 February 2014) is the latest example of events that slip by me. For anyone interested, the good news is that events were filmed and could be available online in the near future. Plans are also underway for 2015. Here’s the coverage from Apollo Magazine’s blog, The Muse Room. -CH

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Digby Warde-Aldam, “Great View: The UK’s First Art History Festival,” The Muse Room from Apollo Magazine (19 February 2014).

The venue is a large room in London’s Institut français, its windows looking out over the crazed Victorian skyline of South Kensington. French academic Frédéric Ogée looks slightly taken aback by the crowd, a mix of all ages that has just filled up every available seat—indeed, staff are starting to turn away latecomers to the lecture he is about to give, a fascinating half-hour examination of ‘Englishness’ in English art. At the end of the talk, Ogée is forced to cut short the barrage of questions from the audience in order to clear the room for the next speaker on the bill of the Institut’s View Festival.

The public interest in the talk shouldn’t really be surprising. The View, which had its first edition this month, is Britain’s first art history festival—which, taking into account the fact that the UK has festivals dedicated to everything from Heavy Metal to knitting comes as something of a surprise. Given London’s position as a global art capital, it seems bizarre that nothing like this has ever taken place in the city before. . .

The full review is available here»