When Art History goes Bad

Damien Hirst's dead butterfly wing-covered bicycle, 2009

Horatio Greenough, George Washington, marble, c. 1840

Frank Gehry, Ray and Maria Stata Center, Cambridge, MA, 2004

Thanks to Joyce Youmans and the rest of the crew at local Atlanta outfit, Burnaway.org, I recently discovered a clever new blog to add to my blogroll. Nicole Jordan is an art history graduate student who is a self-proclaimed "art history nerd who likes to complain," which makes her ripe for the job of blogging about When Art History Goes Bad. Although you may not agree with all of her gripes, most of them are hard to refute. Take for example Damien Hirst's dead butterfly wing-covered bicycle on which Lance Armstrong finished the 2009 Tour De France, Horatio Greenough's semi-nude statue of our nation's founding father, or Frank Gehry's Ray and Maria Stata Center on MIT's campus. Although her examples could fill a book, Jordan doesn't stop at bad works of art, she discusses exorbitant price tags at auction, highly inflated artist's egos, and influential critics (who shouldn't have been).

I could spend all day reading her blog. Her ideas are humorous, her writing is clever, and after all, she is an art historian.