New Book | Becoming Property
From Yale UP:
Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory, and Law in Early Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0300222791, $75.
This original and relevant book investigates the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the 16th century to the French Revolution. It charts the early history of privilege legislation (today’s copyright and patent) for books and inventions, and the translation of its legal terms by and for the image. Those terms are explored in their force of law and in relation to artistic discourse and creative practice in the early modern period. The consequences of commercially motivated law for art and its definitions, specifically its eventual separation from industry, are important aspects of the story. The artists who were caught up in disputes about intellectual property ranged from the officers of the Academy down to the lowest hacks of Grub Street. Lessons from this book may still apply in the 21st century; with the advent of inexpensive methods of reproduction, multiplication, and dissemination via digital channels, questions of intellectual property and the visual arts become important once more.
Katie Scott is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Lecture | Katie Scott on Artists as Consumers
From BGC:
Katie Scott | Artists as Consumers:
A Picture, a Snuffbox, a Teacup, a Carriage, an Umbrella, and a Bath
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 5 December 2018
Katie Scott will deliver a Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture on Wednesday, December 5, at 6pm. Her talk is entitled “Artists as Consumers: A Picture, a Snuffbox, a Teacup, a Carriage, an Umbrella, and a Bath.”
This paper is part of a collaborative research project into the material culture of eighteenth-century French artists. It focuses not on the studio, however, but on the domestic interior and on the diverse stuffs of social life. It asks how prominent artists such as Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, and Jacques-Philippe Le Bas responded to the range of consumer goods, both luxury and every-day, flooding the Parisian market in which they lived and worked. Did ownership of gold boxes and porcelain, and also baths and umbrellas, serve to articulate artistic identity in new ways? Was that artistic identity single and determined largely by official institutions such as the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, or was it multiple and inflected by individual taste and patterns of consumption? In short, what did material things mean to artists, and what did these same things say about them?
Katie Scott is Professor in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She has a longstanding interest in the interior and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French decorative arts, which she teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and which is the focus of much of her research. Her current research project, which she will present in this lecture, is a collaboration with Dr. Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University, London) that will result in a book to be published by Getty Publications in 2020.
Call for Articles | Boletín de Arte, Special Issue on Animals
From H-ArtHist:
Boletín de Arte 40 (2019), Special Issue: Animals and Art History
Edited by Reyes Escalera Pérez and Concepción Cortés Zulueta
Articles due by 28 February 2019 (in Spanish, English, French, or Italian)
As humans, we live surrounded by animals that we often ignore, or that we tend to substitute with or filter through our meanings, perceptions and symbolism. However, in recent decades animals have been increasingly present among the concerns and interests of our societies not just through their representations, but also as subjects and agents whose perspectives are worth considering. In parallel, animal studies (or human-animal studies) have reclaimed animals as a field of inquiry of the humanities and social sciences, including art history. This transversal approach is usually acquainted with biology and other related disciplines, interacts with other area studies (gender, postcolonial, queer, etc.), and is reinforced and may be accompanied by frameworks like posthumanism, or by environmental concerns.
This Animals and Art History issue of Boletín de Arte is open to address the subject of non-human animals from all periods, methodologies and approaches of art history. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
• Representations of animals (portraits, photographs, scientific illustrations, etc.)
• Biographies of historical or artistic animals
• Emblems and treaties on animals
• Museums and animals, animals inside the white cube
• Nature and symbology of animals
• Artistic genres or topics about animals
• Artists and their animals
• Artists who collaborate with other animals
• Animals as creators or artistic agents
• Cinema and animals
• Videos of animals on the Internet
• Animals, art and gender
• Animal activism and art
• Eco-art and animals
• Art or designs for other animals
• Animals and aesthetics
In order to be accepted for consideration and double blind peer reviewed evaluation, the articles have to address the topic of Animals and Art History with a maximum of 31,500 characters (including spaces) and with no more than 10 images. The submission has to be made on-line, by registering through the on-line platform of the Boletin. Please find detailed submission guidelines at the Boletín’s website (scroll down for the guidelines’ English version).
Boletín de Arte, an open access journal edited since 1980 by the Department of Art History, University of Málaga, proposes a special thematic issue commemorating its 40th anniversary. This special issue will focus on the representation, presence, and agency of non-human animals in art history and visual culture.
Please note that this CFP and special thematic issue affects only the ‘Articles’ and ‘Varia’ sections, not the sections of ‘Book Reviews’ and ‘Exhibition Criticism’. For any queries, contact Reyes Escalera (drescalera@uma.es) and Concepción Cortés (ccorteszulueta@uma.es).
Conference | Moving Landscapes: Gardens
From The Huntington:
Moving Landscapes: Gardens and Gardening in the Transatlantic World, 1670–1830
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 7–8 December 2018
Both as physical locations and as fantasies of selfhood, gardens always speak of where and how we see ourselves in the world. Focusing on the imagination and creation of gardens in the disparate geographies of 18th-century Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, this conference explores transatlantic ideas of nation, location, and self, and asks how the experience of gardens might be shared across nations, oceans, and cultures.
Funding provided by The Huntington’s William French Smith Endowment and The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute
F R I D A Y , 7 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8
8:30 Registration and coffee
9:30 Welcome by Steve Hindle (The Huntington) and opening remarks by Stephen Bending (University of Southampton)
Session 1 | Making Places in the Atlantic World
Moderator: Stephen Bending
• John Dixon Hunt (University of Pennsylvania), Raising the Veils of Isis, Then What?
• Tom Williamson (University of East Anglia), Production, Power and the Natural: Explaining the Differences between English and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Curatorial tours of the botanical collections
3:00 Session 2 | New World Landscapes and Transatlantic Imaginings
Moderator: Jennifer Milam (University of Melbourne)
• Therese O’Malley (NGA CASVA, Washington, D.C.), The Garden in the Wilderness
• Joseph Manca (Rice University), The Human Presence in George Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon
S A T U R D A Y , 8 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8
9:00 Registration and coffee
9:30 Session 3 | Planting the Transatlantic Garden
Moderator: Stephen Bending
• Finola O’Kane Crimmins (University College Dublin), Improving the Atlantic World: Transatlantic Tourists and their Landscape Designs, Comparisons and Route
• Elizabeth Hyde (Kean University), A Reciprocal Exchange of the Productions of Nature: Plants and Place in France and America
11:00 Session 4 | Transatlantic Designs
Moderator: Jennifer Milam
• Emily Cooperman (ARCH Preservation Consulting), The Last Polish of a Refined Nation: Philadelphia and Garden Art in the Atlantic World
• Jonathan Finch (University of York), The Estate Landscape: A Transatlantic Dialogue
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Session 5 | Experiencing the Transatlantic Landscape
Moderator: Stephen Bending
• Jill Casid (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Landscape Vertigo
• Rachel Crawford (University of San Francisco), Fragmented Gardens
4:00 Roundtable
4:30 Closing remarks by Jennifer Milam
Enfilade 
leave a comment