Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:01:00

You may have been wondering what Smarthistory has been up to since we joined Khan Academy in October. We’ve had to keep this hush-hush…but we can now announce that we have contributed more than 100 videos to the unbelievably great, second iteration of the Google Art Project.

We’ve made 90 Khan Academy videos expressly for version 2, which launched today, April 3rd, at the Musée d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago, and museums in many other countries. We’ve also contributed 26 pre-existing videos to the Art Project. Finally, we worked closely with Sandbox Studios to create an engaging introduction to looking at art. Our videos can be seen in the education section (the playlist is embedded at the bottom of the first page) and on the specific object “detail” pages.

We jumped at this opportunity because the Art Project has such enormous educational potential. It is critical to gather works of art from different institutions to tell the nuanced stories of art history. The Art Project brings together works of art from 151 museums in 40 countries within a cohesive visual environment. The high resolution images, powerful zoom function, “Museum View” (an interior version of “Street View”) and the ability to collect and annotate images, are all features that are ideal for teaching and learning.

Museums of art safeguard, make accessible, and interpret our shared cultural history even as they help to define the civic aspirations of their communities. Museums have always been defined by place, although traveling exhibitions and, more recently, museum websites have helped to “jail break” the art. André Malraux famously identified this new ability to see across institutional collections in his essay, the “Museum Without Walls.”

For a “Museum Without Walls” is coming into being, and…it will carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art…which the “real” museums offer us within their walls.

——André Malraux, The Voices of Silence

As always, all Smarthistory.khanacademy.org content is free and open. If you’re an art historian, museum educator, or curator, and you’re interested in contributing to the work we’re doing, please contact us.

We especially want to thank Colleen Brogan and Rachel Ropeik for coming through in a pinch and for their uncanny ability to make complex ideas clear.

The University of Illinois, Springfield, is running a Massively Open Online Course – a MOOC (organized by Ray Schroeder). If you’ve never heard of a MOOC, read Marc Parry’s article in the Wired Campus blog. This MOOC is  “devoted to examining the state of online education and where e-learning is heading.”

What I’ve been wondering for a while (and even commented on a blog post on elearnspace, but my comment wasn’t posted), is why the the presenters are so overwhelmingly male.

Here’s the list:

Ray Schroeder (UIS) Moderator
Bruce Chaloux (SREB)
Bob Hansen (UPCEA)
Witt Salley (MoDLA)
Karen Swan (UIS) Moderator
Phil Ice (APUS)
Ben Arbaugh (UWOSH)
Michael Cheney (UIS) Moderator
Alexandra Pickett (SUNY)
Bethany Bovard (NMSU)
Nic Bongers (Oakland U.)
Glenda Morgan (UIUC) Moderator
David Middleton (Seton Hall U.)
Patricia McGee (U. Texas San Antonio)
Cable Green (Creative Commons)
Larry Ragan (PSU World Campus)
Jeff Newell (IL Com College Board)
Shari McCurdy Smith (UIS) Moderator
George Siemens (Athabasca)
Jason Rhode (NIU)
Shari McCurdy Smith (UIS) Moderator
Karen Vignare (MSU)
Linda C. Smith (UIUC)
Curt Bonk (IU)
Bruce Chaloux (SREB)
Seb Schmoller (ALT UK)

By my count, that’s 7 women to 18 men.

Geez and I thought education was woman’s work…

“Smarthistory.org is a free and open, not-for-profit, art history textbook. We use multimedia to deliver unscripted conversations between art historians about the history of art. We are seeking contributors—especially for canonical non-Western material and other survey topics not yet covered. We welcome comments, feedback and corrections.” The site has won some pretty impressive accolades:

- Webby Award: Best Education Website
- PC Magazine, Top 100 Websites
- Gold Award, AVICOM, International Council of Museums (ICOM)
- Mindshare Award, for history, 2nd place
- Exploratorium, Ten Cool Websites
- Communication Arts magazine webpick of the week

In addition to several articles:

- The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘Smarthistory’ Rethinks the Art-History Textbook Online
- The Huffington Post: Smarthistory
- EdTech Digest: Taking a Close Look at Smarthistory
- Communication Arts: Webpick of the Week
- 2010 Horizon Report

I think this project embodies many of the attributes I think are necessary to Open,

- reuse: their work is available through the Open Educational Resources Commons and Creative Commons licensed.

- collaboration: decision-making is influenced by and emerges from the community

- self-organization: they accept content from anyone on anything (open participation), and anyone can take on any role (open organization)

- transparency: all of their activities are exposed, e.g. projects and funding, (open access)

- openness: the direction for development is based on the interests and activities of the contributors and community

What is interesting, is that Smarthistory is eating their own open dog food with financing too. They have recently started up a Kickstarter campaign (http://kck.st/hhRyA6) to raise money for ongoing production/support costs. I like the idea of this approach, which to me resembles a meritocracy–where value (in this case an Art History text) is directly determined by the community (i.e. Art educators, students and institutions). Ideally (and I mean, “in an ideal manner”), if an open project can mature through the contribution of content, code, intellectual property, etc., why can’t it mature through donations? This allows me, a non-art historian without content to contribute, who does not have the time/skill to support their production, to be a “developer.” I think this is much different than seeking partners and sponsorships, who may direct development away from the interests of the community. Smarthistory adheres to the philosophy that the value/relevance/quality of the project is directly determined by the commitment of the community. For me I am wondering if this level of openness should be something I include in my own definition.

Patrick

P.S. you can become a developer to at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/360446359/smarthistory-art-history-conversation

Patrick Masson
Chief Technology Officer, UMassOnline

Originally posted on the Openness listserv at Educause

The OER community is understandably focused on the issue of sustainability. Smarthistory is already a very sustainable project since we designed it to have minimal ongoing costs; our back-end is an open-source content management system, and all of the content on the site are voluntarily contributions. Yesterday Philipp Schmidt, of Peer to Peer University, wrote a blog post about the possibilities of using Kickstarter to help support the OER (open educational resources) and OCW (open courseware) communities. It will be interesting to see if Kickstarter is a viable means of support for open education initiatives like Smarthistory.

From inception, we have sought to be a synthetic resource that pushes beyond institutional boundaries—in terms of the collections we draw from, our academic contributors, and the students we serve. It’s interesting to us that, in addition to simply being a means to raise funds, Kickstarter is also a measure of our project’s value for others, or at least the translation of that value into monetary terms. For us there is an interesting paradox, since the bulk of the people we serve—college students—are perhaps the least likely to support us with donations, since they are less likely to have the financial means to do so. So far, donations have come instead from informal users, the education/technology community, and our supporters.

We need your help to make this work. Here are some things you can do:

1. Go to the Kickstarter site and watch our short video—it explains everything
2) Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to spread the word about our campaign
3) Write a blog post about us
4) Interview us for your blog
5) Visit Smarthistory.org

Needless to say, if you can help us reach a wider community, we’d be indebted. Thanks again.

Well, I was going to write a blog post about how there should be no such thing as an online textbook, because once we get rid of the textbook-iness of the textbook (good riddance!) and it’s on the web and is interactive, hyperlinked and contains rich media, why not just call it a website?  But it looks like I was beaten to the punch and a much better article than I would have written on this subject just appeared, “The Line between book and Internet will disappear” by Hugh McGuire.

Here’s his list of what ebooks (or think online textbooks) can NOT do:

• You cannot deep link into an ebook — say to a specific page or paragraph chapter or image or table
• Indeed you cannot really “link” to an ebook, only various access points to instances of that ebook, because there is no canonical “ebook” to link to … there is no permalink for a chapter, and no Uniform Resource Locator (url) for an ebook itself
• You (usually) cannot copy and paste text, the most obvious thing one might wish to do
• You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal, written in 1942 — even if they are from the same publisher

Now, how long should this state of affairs last?

Here’s more:

You cannot do any of these things, because we still consider that books — the information, words, and data inside of them — live outside of the Internet, even if they are of the e-flavor. You might be able to buy them on the Internet, but the stuff contained within them is not hooked in. Ebooks are an attempt to make it easier for people to buy and read books, without changing this fundamental fact, without letting ebooks become part of the Internet.

Steven Zucker and I have written about and have been following the recent debates about the price of textbooks, and recent innovations in offering textbooks digitally, including renting them, licensing them, printing them, reading them only online, etc. I’ve been collecting the articles at my Posterous site. It’s been fascinating to read about Xplana, Inkling, Flat World Knowledge, and Coursesmart.

We wonder not just about how to reduce the price of textbooks (or make them free), but how long it will take textbooks as a genre to die. Or perhaps they never will…? Should we write an e-textbook that makes use of Smarthistory as a companion site?

In art history, Pearson/Prentice Hall has been busy rethinking the delivery of textbooks. For Janson’s History of Art, you can purchase the hardcover, the paperback, the western edition, brief editions, or you can purchase the ebook as a complete volume or by chapter (along with the proprietary software needed to read it). Via Coursesmart, you can also rent either the bound book or the electronic version – which you can highlight and annotate. These books can also come with passwords for an online interactive website, like the one offered by Pearson called “My Art Kit.” It’s worth noting that this growing multitude of options is creating confusion even on the publishers’ websites and it’s no wonder that faculty rely on the publishers’ representatives or their college bookstore to navigate these options!

Then there’s the simultaneous development of open educational resources (OERs), and that’s the area we’ve been active in, though we remain open to collaborations. OER is a broad term, and OERs are defined as “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.” Open educational resources include everything from open courses, learning objects, open courseware, video courses (think: Academic Earth), and the initiatives in this area have been heavily funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. See also Dave Cormier’s blog post on the complexity of the notions of  freedom and open-ness of OERs.

[By the way we couldn't agree more with Dave that "being open need not be complicated, it doesn’t need to be organized, nor does it even need to be funded. It has to respond to a need that exists" - Smarthistory has received grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, but runs entirely independent from an institution of higher education, and depends on voluntary contributions, and has a very small and sustainable overhead since it uses an open source CMS.]

Here’s a great list of OER resources and definitions. By the way, museums have been producing OERs for years (usually called exhibition subsites), but we don’t call them that for some reason. And what happened to the “learning object”? Sometimes it seems half the problem is that we come up with these terms that include some things and not other things for absolutely no good reason.

But back to the issue with digital textbooks. Why do we need textbooks at all – especially in the Humanities? If Post-Modernism has taught us anything, it’s taught us that there is not a single narrative, that there is no canon, that nothing can be “comprehensive.” Knowledge is messy. Acquiring it should be a little messy too.

SmarthistoryTravel focuses on curious, thoughtful travelers who want expert art analysis delivered in a casual and engaging style. The initial app in this series, “Rome: A First Look,” is now available in the iTunes App Store. We will launch a second app, “Rome: A Closer Look” later this summer. Additional apps that focus on art in other cities will follow. Proceeds from SmarthistoryTravel support Smarthistory, Inc., a not-for-profit organization. Enhance your travel experience and support Smarthistory at the same time!

Here’s our proposal for Open Ed 2010:

Smarthistory.org is a proven, sustainable, and inexpensive model for open educational resources in the Humanities. We will discuss lessons learned during the agile development process used to create this broadly adopted tool.

Smarthistory.org is a free and open, creative-commons licensed, multimedia web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement or substitute for the traditional art history textbook. For the past fifty years, introductory art history courses have nearly always been supported with a comprehensive textbook. These have grown unwieldy and prohibitively expensive; the standard art history textbook in the US now contains over 1100 pages and costs more than $150.

Begun in 2005, Smarthistory has grown in response to the needs of students, their professors, and informal learners. It delivers unscripted conversations between content-experts to engage students while using a form that is native to the web—multimedia. Subject-based pages combine image, video, maps, text, and high-quality links. Smarthistory was designed with multiple pathways to allow visitors to browse according to their needs and interests. Visitors can enter the site by artist, style, or time period and the home page contains an intuitive visual navigation that functions as an interactive timeline and is modeled on the chapters of a book.

Smarthistory does not seek replicate the format of the traditional textbook in an online environment. Instead, embedded videos use conversation to deliberately move away from the impersonal, monolithic voice of the typical textbook in-order to reveal disagreement, emotion, and the experience of looking. The listener remains engaged with both the content and the interaction of the speakers. These conversations model close looking and a willingness to encounter and engage the unfamiliar. Image-based disciplines can be difficult to teach in an online environment; but we have found, for example, that audio allows students to simultaneously focus on an image and commentary, in a way not possible with text. Smarthistory takes the inherent dialogic and multimedia nature of the web and uses it as a pedagogical method.

In 2009, Smarthistory won the Webby award for education, it has been cited for the past two years in the Horizon Report (published jointly by the Educause Learning Alliance and the New Media Consortium), and by organizations such as the International Council of Museums. Universities, libraries, and museums around the world direct their learners to the site. Smarthistory is aimed at undergraduate students, museum visitors, and other informal learners and was visited more than 450,000 times from more than 150 countries in 2009.

Smarthistory is an extendable Humanities framework that uses the open-source content management system MODx. It was inexpensive to create, and is easy to manage and update. Its chronological timeline/chapter-based format integrates new contributions into a single historical framework; an organizational structure applicable across the Humanities. This structure also allows many more content experts to be included than in a traditional text, and because the project is web-based, Smarthistory has grown iteratively and has quickly incorporated user comments and corrections. We invite other disciplines in the Humanities to adopt this framework and encourage those interested to contact us.

Arch of Constantine, 315 C.E., Rome

Speakers: Valentina Follo, Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker

http://www.smarthistory.org/arch-of-constantine.html

Made with Smarthistory’s partner, ContextTravel.com

Of course, visit Smarthistory.org for many more!

The Cornaro Chapel was very different from the way I imagined it. No matter how many photos I have seen– nothing prepared me for the experience in person. The chapel itself was very shallow – I had always imagined one could enter it, and should enter it to experience it. But that’s not the case. In fact, it seemed that the ideal viewing location was from outside the space of the chapel proper. The images of the Cornaro family on either side reminded me of images of patrons on wings of altarpieces (ie. the Merode Altarpiece) – an association I had never had. The illusion of the clouds beneath Theresa was so much more real than I imagined. I felt like teaching this without seeing it first hand was far less than ideal. I was reminded of the obvious – of how works of art are so very singular, so very unique. Loving a work of art from afar, from reproductions – one can fall in love that way, but it’s a little like falling in love with something that’s at least partly a lie. The tragedy of loving works of art. The terrible need to see in person what you have fallen in love with, and the difficulty of managing that always. And the pressing absence always of what hasn’t been seen.

WOW! Discovered at nearly midnight last night:

http://www.discoverpentimento.com/

I am so impressed – the interface is beautiful, and presents so many possibilities for interpretation. It’s offline. It’s free. Objects are available via themes, or an image gallery or item list. Audio, zooming… gorgeous!

WOW!

More later…

Ramesses II, Egypt, Herakleopolis
(Temple of Harsaphes), ca. 1250 BCE

Great Lyre from the “King’s Grave,” ca. 2650-2550 B.C., Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, bitumen and wood (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)

Unknown, Mixing Vessel with Odysseus Escaping from the Cyclops’s Cave, 550-500 B.C.E.

Speakers: Drs. Matthew A. Postal and Steven Zucker

Unknown sculptor, Venus after the Greek original by Praxiteles from the 4th century BCE,
Roman, 175 – 200 CE (Getty Villa)

Speakers: Drs. Beth Harris, Francesca Tronchin, Steven Zucker

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast In Bed, 1897 (Huntington Library).

Brooklyn is Watching is a breakthrough relational art project by Jay Van Buren that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery—Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar. In addition, there are two online forums for discussion, a blog which chronicles and comments on the work recently installed, and weekly podcasts where artists, art historians, gallerists and critics discuss the art and related issues.

Dekka Raymaker and Jay Newt

However, the most important aspects of Brooklyn is Watching are not found on the sim, in the gallery or within the critical discourses Van Buren enabled, but rather in the fraught relationships between the groups that inhabit these places. These interactions, or in certain cases, lack of interaction, starkly highlight the relative power of each group and their zones of influence. There are many distinctions within the art communities in Second Life, but there is a generally pervasive desire for art there to acquire the status accorded to “real” art and its attendant discourses, market, and press. This desire is made explicit and even exaggerated by the structures of Brooklyn is Watching which places artwork directly before a varied public, unmediated by gallery, curator or collector. Because all of the art has been placed on the sim within the past week, there is a heightened sense of immediacy. Clearly, artists who display their work on the Brooklyn is Watching sim explicitly seek critical attention. These tensions are implicit in the name—”Brooklyn is Watching.” It is also inscribed in its architecture, with its high watchtower and wide-eyed resident avatar.

The project enacts these antagonisms by offering artists the following instructions:
Welcome to Brooklyn is Watching. “Here” you will be able to be seen by visitors to Jack the Pelican Presents, an art gallery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Do something “here” and “you” will be watched, thought about and commented upon…whatever…leave “something” “here” and it will be chronicled on our blog and talked about on the Brooklyn is Watching podcast or…possibly…ignored…or possibly…mocked.

The heart of Brooklyn is Watching is this open invitation to artists to install (rez) their work on a sim, an uncurated space surrounded by water on all four sides. Artists and visitors find a flat astroturf-green field where art is scattered both at eye-level, below sea level, and often at altitudes well above the viewer. In the center of the sim sits an imposing tower. Its sole occupant is Monet Destiny, a large eyeball-shaped avatar (with additional protruding eyes), ironically sporting a trucker’s cap, his name a reference to Cezanne’s quip about the french Impressionist; “Monet is only an eye; but good God what an eye!” Over the course of the year, more than one hundred artists have left approximately four hundred works of art on the sim. This dynamic, uncurated exhibition space creates constantly changing relations between works of art that sometimes inter-relate or even intentionally intersect. Because so much of the art native to second life is concerned with defining space, the art itself shapes and reshapes the sim’s geography.

Brooklyn is Watching’s only physical installation is an alcove in the gallery Jack the Pelican Presents, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a magnet for new art outside of Manhattan. The installation consists of a couch, a coffee table, a computer, and a fifty-two inch monitor that continuously presents the avatar Monet’s view to gallery visitors. When Monet emerges from his watchtower, his motion and communication can be controlled by visitors, or if left to his own devices, he automatically shadows any avatar visiting the sim.

Brooklyn is Watching incorporates a blog and a weekly podcast. The blog allows individual contributors to chronicle and discuss specific works of art or broader issues and allows images and other materials to be sent via the “Tell us What to Watch” form. Posts regularly provoke or invite responses and this often leads to discussions between constituencies. In contrast, the weekly podcasts call on a core group of “regulars” (with rotating guests) that Van Buren assembles for compelling, no-holds-barred conversations about the meaning and quality of the most recent art installed on the sim. In this way, Van Buren relinquishes his authority replacing it with a salon-like discussion where meaning is constructed from the collision of multiple perspectives. Ideas are vetted and elaborated upon or summarily discarded, artists praised or dismissed.

By Jurria Yoshikawa

Second Life has increased the opportunity for non-experts to make art. As a user-created virtual world, Second Life has built-in tools that facilitate the act of creation. Every avatar is therefore a potential artist having the means of creation at her disposal. Like many other “web 2.0″ technologies, Second Life is both a platform and tool for content creation and just as the general public is invited to comment on the Brooklyn is Watching blog and non-experts participate in the podcasts, the spectrum of art makers in Second Life range from the theory-saavy Yale MFA to the amateur builder.

By Selavy Oh

Brooklyn is Watching seeks to witness and participate in the new broad wave of producers of culture that technology has empowered, producers with the potential to create more and more varied art than has ever been possible before (in contrast to the twentieth-century model of passive consumers of mass culture). Even the vocabulary that has arisen in Second Life is indicative of this shift away from an elite–in Second Life the word creator often replaces artist, and build is used instead of installation.

By Arahan Claveau

In part, Brooklyn is Watching asks the same question that Len Manovich asked in the last essay of “The Art of Participation,” an exhibition at SFMoMA, “can professional art survive the extreme democratization of media production and access?” When reformation Europe, aided by the printing press, realized that the Roman Church was not the sole path to God, the implications were enormous. Similarly, Brooklyn is Watching questions the apparatus and prejudices of the art market in the digital era and is perhaps the first Second Life project to explicitly focus on the juncture between real and virtual art practices and in doing so may point to critical issues that loom on the horizon.

DanCoyote Antonelli

Did we miss anything? Please let us know by leaving a comment.

Maybe this post should begin with the news that I started my new position as Director of Digital Learning at MoMA last week. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working at this great institution with such great colleagues.

And now the point of this blog post — we confess, we read the Digital Humanities Manifesto, with glee! We’re always suckers for descriptions of the radically new and different face of education that is emerging. This pleasure was sharply contrasted with the disappointment that we felt when we read the much more widely discussed essay, “The Last Professor,” by Stanely Fish in last Sunday’s New York Times Op/Ed section. Here, Fish, writing as curmudgeon of the academy, nostalgically laments the death of an idealized humanities education of yore—an education he imagines nobly separated from practical application and that he sees defiled by for-profit institutions and the rise of a permanent adjunct class. He ends by smugly noting “…I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.” He is reacting to and lauding his former student Frank Donoghue’s new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.” In his essay, Fish looks only to the past and seems to fear that all change leads to a for-proft, job-focused educational system.

Clearly, the humanities are changing and the university is being challenged to its core; but maybe what will be lost is its insular elitism. Had Fish had more vision, his essay might have noted that the humanities have never been more vibrant and that the very dim view he holds is largely because the cloistered walls of the University block the light. The continued vitality of the humanities is however very apparent to those whose wireless signals breach those walls to connect with and distribute knowledge in ways that are incredibly exciting and give us every reason to think that academic research and teaching are exactly where we want to be now.

Here is the definition of “digital humanities”:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

And here are our favorite parts of the manifesto:

Paragraph 11: Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.

Paragraph 13: Redefinition of the contours of the research community once enclosed by university walls. The field of knowledge and expertise far exceeds these confines. There is no containing it within these walls. The challenge: to construct models of knowledge creation/sharing that confront this increasingly distributed reality.

We’ve written earlier about a new model of education where teachers are more accountable to students (no more boring lectures?). With Smarthistory, we’ve tried to be entertaining AND enlightening – using conversation as our tool. We’ve also tried to eschew an authoritative voice in favor of personal, opinionated voices. But we’ve also struggled with how to engage a broader public. We’ve “distributed” smarthistory to dipity, flickr, youtube and vimeo… and we’re working on Facebook now too (with Juliana Kreinik’s help).

This past week, we had two important lessons. I had a twitter account for months, but didn’t “tweet” much. But in the last couple of weeks, when I was home editing alot of videos, I twittered a few times about the videos I was posting on Smarthistory.org. Nothing happened at first, but several days later there was a small explosion of interest — due in part to a few twitterers, the Getty Museum, Shelley Mannion, and CJ, who spread the word around. It was wonderful — we had a twitter epiphany.

Then, the Museum of Modern Art twitterer, one brilliant Victor Samra in the Digital Media and Marketing departments twittered Smarthistory, and the “followers” came rolling in and so did the lovely comments about the site. I look forward to working a lot more with Victor, and with my colleagues in the Education department, and the Digital Media department as well.

The other revelation this week happened with Flickr (readers of our blog know we have been HUGE fans of using Flickr for teaching for years). Here’s Steven’s summary from the Smarthistory page:

One of our Flickr contributors sent me the following: “One point I noticed in the discussion is the location at which Van Gogh painted the potato eaters. In the dialogue it is said that he painted it in a coal mining area in Belgium near the French border. Whereas, received knowledge here in Nuenen is that he painted it in the time he lived here.”

He is absolutely correct. We listened to the podcast and we clearly make an incorrect statement. The Potato Eaters was painted in Nuenen when the artist lived there and we were (unclearly) referring to a period a few years prior when Van Gogh was Borinage. We had been thinking of the impact of the spiritual on his subject in this painting. We are so glad he offered this correction. It is one of the great strengths of social media like Flickr. Here is a great reminder that expertise is broadly distributed. I love our networked world!

The Liberal Arts at an end!? We hardly think so…

Works of art discussed:
Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring, oil on canvas, 1921 (MoMA)
René Magritte, The Human Condition, oil on canvas, 1933 (private collection)
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1943-44 (MoMA)

Works Discussed:
William Holman Hunt, Strayed Sheep (Our English Coasts), oil on canvas, 1852 (Tate Britain)
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, oil on canvas, 1873 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City)
Vincent Van Gogh, Potato Eaters, oil on canvas, 1885 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)