The Daniel H. Silberberg Lectures, the longest running lecture series at the Institute of Fine Arts, is planned and coordinated by the Graduate Student Association. Art historians, archaeologists and conservators, specializing in a variety of periods and genres are invited to share their latest research with the IFA community and the public.

The Siberberg lectures are held on selected Tuesdays at 6 p.m. in the Institute's first floor Lecture Hall at 1 East 78th Street. The lectures are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.

2012-2013 Concept Statement

During Erwin Panofsky’s early years in the United States as an émigré from Nazi Germany, science and technology significantly eclipsed the humanities in terms of broad support and inquiry. In 1940, he responded to this condition with an essay titled “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” arguing that humanistic and scientific research share common methodologies, yet diverge in their treatment of human records. Namely, while each use methods of observation and analysis, for the scientist, the artifact is an instrument for inquiry, absorbed into history, and for the humanist, it is the object of inquiry, emerging from history. Mobilizing a methodological model of “rational archaeological analysis” combined with “intuitive aesthetic re-creation,” he made the disciplinary case for the essential role of the art historian, as a humanist with technical expertise. If Panofsky’s rationalization for the humanistic disciplines functioned at one level as a tactic for self-preservation, it also underscored an urgency to the art historian’s project, as a humanistic enterprise within an era that launched technologies and economies of mass-violence.

Violence interrupts and reconfigures; it degrades and reconstitutes; it also forms a basis for historical continuity. In a contemporary society saturated with violent imagery, in which scholarly discourses are imbued with considerations of violence, and in an intellectual atmosphere that favors technical knowledge over humanistic inquiry, we contemplate the urgency of the art historian’s project and the disciplinary cases that might be made. Through a series of six lectures and related discussions, the 2012-2013 Silberberg Lecture Series will ask how works of art and artistic practices perpetuate or resist violence, and the responsibility of the art historian in this discourse.

Schedule

September 18, 2012
Wendy Bellion, Associate Professor of American Art, University of Delaware
The Afterlife of Iconoclasm: Sculpture in Early New York
Click here for an abstract

October 9, 2012
Andrew Herscher, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan
Envisioning Exception: Satellite Imagery, Human Rights Advocacy and Techno-Moral Witnessing
Click here for an abstract. Watch video below.

November 27, 2012
Melissa Chiu, Museum Director and Senior Vice President, Global Arts and Cultural Programs, The Asia Society
Art + Politics in Chinese Contemporary Art
Click here for an abstract. Watch video below.

February 12, 2013
Christiane Gruber, Associate Professor of Islamic Art, University of Michigan
Violence's Vestiges: The Martyrs' Museum in Tehran
Open to the public, RSVP required. For reservations click here.
Click here for an abstract

April 9, 2013
Richard Clay, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Co-Director of the Heritage and Cultural Learning Hub, University of Birmingham (U.K.)
Iconoclasm and Violence in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795
Open to the public, RSVP required. For reservations click here.

May 7, 2013
Robert Hayden, Professor of Anthropology, Law and Public & International Affairs and Director, Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh
Intersecting Religioscapes: A Comparative Approach to Trajectories of Change, Scale, Competition, Sharing and Violence in Religious Spaces
Open to the public, RSVP required. For reservations click here.
Click here for an abstract