• The Violence of the Unsaid in Van Sant’s Elephant and Paranoid Park: The Active Role of the Viewer in Creating Narrative Meanings by Ana Paula Barroso.
• Japanese Fireworks (Hanabi): The Ephemeral Nature and Symbolism by Damien Liu-Brennan and Mio Bryce.
• Writing ‘whiteness’: Representing the Afrikaner in post-apartheid South Africa – a comparative study of Athol Fugard’s “Sorrows and Rejoicings” (2002) and Jason Xenopolous’ “Promised Land” (2002) by Tamar Meskin and Tanya van der Walt.
• The Cult of the New and the Work of Critique by Angeliki Spiropoulou.
• Water Over Skin: A Post-colonial Analysis of Cultural Identity - Overcoming a Sense of Shame by Daphne Cazalet.
• Transforming Hamilton, Creatively: Changing a City from a Cowtown to a Wowtown by Cheryl Reynolds.

By Randy Kennedy from The New York Times…

After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place entrusted with protecting priceless art — conservators would be able to fix the work quickly, in time for a major Picasso show in April.

But two other rare mishaps at the Met in recent years have provided hard lessons about the difficulty of making broken masterpieces whole again and of predicting when they will go back on view.

In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view. More…

The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 5, of  The International Journal of the Arts in Society includes:

• Art: An Integrated Part of Built Environment: Case Study of Kashan Residential Quarters’ Centers by Zahra Ahari and Fatemeh Goldar.
• Fluidity, Shift and Bloom: Understandings of an Oceanic Sublime in an Age of Ecological Collapse by Fiona Edmonds-Dobrijevich.
• Pedagogy, Programs, Projects and Partnerships by Linda McLeod.
• Reading the Transnational out of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s A Tale of Love: How a Film Serves as a Public Pedagogue and What it Teaches by Julia Yujie Li.
• The Arts in a Time of Recession by Marque-Luisa Miringoff and Sandra Opdycke.
• Backpack Journalism: Observations on Digital Media’s Effect on Arts Journalism & Criticism in the U.S. by Johanna Keller.

This thread over at Unfogged reminds me of something that’s puzzled me for years, ever since reading this: why didn’t prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn’t it become the expected thing that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction? (No doubt, in that branch of the wave-function*, obsessive fans still want to get the original drawings, but obsessive fans also collect writer’s manuscripts, or even their typewriters, as well as their mass-produced books.) 16th century engraving technology was strong enough that it could implement powerful works of art (vide), so that can’t be it. And by the 18th century at least writers could make a living (however precarious) from writing for the mass public, so why were visual artists (for the most part) weren’t artists? (Again, it’s manifestly not as though technology has regressed.) Why is it still the case that a real, high-class visual artist is someone who makes one-offs? I know that reproductions have been important since at least the late 1800s, but for works and artists who first made their reputation with unique, hand-made objects, which is as though the only books which got sent to the printing press were ones which had first circulated to acclaim in manuscript. More…

The fifth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of the Arts in Society is available.

Some of the papers included in Volume 4, Number 5:

• Making Sense of the Absurdity of Life in Camus’s the Myth of Sisyphus by Ashkan Shobeiri, Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Arbaayah Ali Termizi.
• Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’ by Ruth Skilbeck.
• Community and Community-based Art Making by Ronald Aman.
• Rhetoric and Service Learning in Addressing the Challenges of Diversity by Sarah O’Connor.
• Electric Cowboy Cacophony: A Project for Cross-genre Free Improvisation by Michael Edwards.
• The Museum of Desire: Cognition in Performance and Reception by Rick Kemp and Brian Jones.