Visual Possibilities of Worlds to Come: An Interview with Maria Loh

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, associate director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Maria Loh,
professor of Art History at City
University of New York Hunter
College.
Professor Loh's research focuses on
early modern and Renaissance art
history, particularly Titian,
the 16th-century Venetian painter.
Her work brings exciting new
perspectives to Titian's art.
For example, in her first book, when
she looked at a little-known heir to
Titian to examine how his legacy had
changed over time.
Or in her new book, where she argued
that Titian's paintings present us
with not only a sensory experience
but also an argument that challenges
the way we see the material world.
Professor Loh is well known for
placing early modern and Renaissance
art into productive dialogue with
contemporary ideas and culture.
She frequently relies on
20th-century cinema to illuminate
Renaissance and early modern
painting.
She's also edited a collection of
essays on early modern horror,
which traces some of the ways that
the fear and anxiety of
representation has existed across
centuries.
One of the effects of this approach
is to energize our thinking about
early modern art and culture by not
canonizing it.
According to Maria Loh, Titian and
his contemporaries are not old
masters to be praised but artists
and thinkers wrestling with many of
the same questions that we still ask
today.
The other effect, then, is to give
us new ways of thinking about our
own experience, which is perhaps
even more valuable and exciting, at
least for those of us who aren't
early modernists, since it comes
from an unexpected source.
Professor Loh's newest book is
called Titian's Touch: Art, Magic,
and Philosophy.
According to Professor Loh, one of
the difficulties of writing about
Titian is telling a compelling story
without rehashing all the old tales.
So I began by asking her how she
accomplished this in her new book.
Well, Titian is an artist that is
endlessly fascinating, and I knew
that before I even began because
I had looked into his work
previously in my first book
and in my dissertation work.
But in terms of writing a monograph
about one single artist,
that's nothing I had ever attempted.
And it seemed like a very daunting
task.
It seemed to be
from a tradition of
art history that, certainly,
when I was in graduate school in
the nineties, that monographic
celebratory approach was something
that postmodernism
kind of looked down upon with the
death of the author and everything
else that came with it.
So I thought it would be a real
challenge to think about how
one could write a monograph
that nevertheless addresses some of
those concerns that came out of
the theory of the seventies,
eighties, and nineties.
When I began, I thought,
"Well, this should be a nice, simple
task," because it was pitched to me
as a easy 40,000-word
book, a short book on Titian.
I thought, "Well, that shouldn't be
too bad." But then I saw
it, and I thought, "Oh my God,
there's so much literature on
Titian." It was kind of like being
confronted with all of the
Shakespeare literature, and
so much of it is really-- I mean,
all of it is fascinating.
And there were certain patterns that
came up again and again about his
biography.
So in a sense, one of my challenges
in taking this project on was
to rethink the monographic
tradition for a
general readership that was neither
specialist in the Renaissance nor
in the Venetian
kind of history.
Not necessarily in the history of
art at all.
And that was from where I began.
Now, one of the other things that
art historians have often focused
on in relation to Renaissance
painting is this juxtaposition
between Florence and Venice.
How Venice
is an art and a style of color,
whereas Florence is much more
linear. It's about disegno or
drawing, and it's much
more cerebral.
And so I wanted to think
outside of those boxes to
find a way to speak about
Titian's practice in terms of visual
philosophy.
So that was, in a sense, my starting
point.
That's a great point.
I can pick up on that because it
seems like one of the things that
you are most interested in doing
in this book, and you talk about in
the introduction to the book, is
presenting Titian as
a visual philosopher or
a philosopher with a paintbrush, is
another way that you refer to him.
Can you talk a little bit about what
that means? It's kind of thinking--
thinking
with Titian is something that you
kind of present to your reader.
And it seems like that's something
that is new that you're trying
to present here.
I think that artists are
more often than not at the
forefront of experimentation
precisely because they're not bound
by the demands of realism,
scientific accuracy, or
political expediency necessarily.
So much of their work is about
exploring the invisible
of trying to visualize that which
has not been seen for
Titian's generation
and for much of Renaissance art
in general. A lot of that is
Christian imagery.
How do you paint a convincing angel
when nobody has ever seen one?
How do you narrate the
assumption of the Virgin,
a story in which the
mother of Christ ascends
into heaven in her entire body?
That's a very kind of miraculous
but also a supernatural
event.
I think the closest parallel in
terms of modern, contemporary
formats and genres is
action-hero films.
Now, that's a category that we think
of as being very lowly, perhaps
to some, but it's actually
very similar to the kinds
of logistic
challenges that an artist like
Titian or his contemporaries, and
the Florentines involved as well.
I mean, Michelangelo's Last Judgment
is very much about how do I depict
something that is so full of horror
and dread in a realistic way
that will convince the spectator
that what he or she sees before them
is the real thing,
all whilst knowing that it is
ultimately a fiction.
It's paint on a surface, whether
it's canvas or a fresco wall,
but nevertheless, that same
desire to
push the spectator to suspend
his or her disbelief in the moment
of confrontation with the artwork.
And to that extent, the kind of
Christian narratives of the
Renaissance are almost
secondary.
I mean, they're very important, of
course. But the effect
of art is really to move the
spectator and demonstrate
to the viewer that
with the
meager
materials of the artist that
they're capable of creating this
vast world that
is beyond normal, everyday
human perception.
Yeah. Well, you begin the--
in Titian's Touch, you begin the
book by comparing
two of his portraits.
And there's one from the beginning
of his career and one from later in
his career. And portraits are
something you focused on extensively
in other parts of your writing, too.
In your second book, for example,
Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the
Transformation of the Old Master, is
the book that takes up portraiture
in a central way.
Titian painted so many different--
he had so many kinds of paintings.
So why begin with portraits?
I think again, with portraits, it's
one of the genres that art
historians tend to gloss over.
If it's a portrait of someone
famous, then it almost
immediately goes to the biography
of the famous person.
And if it's an unknown sitter, then
it's enough to say
this is a portrait of a lady or
portrait of a man and move
on. But I think one of the
fascinating aspects of portraiture,
especially in our
own context now, is with
the rise of selfie culture, which,
I mean, even at the moment of
recording this, a podcast is already
on its way out, I think.
But the idea of portraying
yourself, of performing yourself,
of allowing your image
to speak on your behalf in a world
that is beyond your control and that
is also beyond you, is
something very fascinating to me in
terms of all of these
anonymous faces that we
have lost, perhaps, the thread of
who they were.
But certainly, when they were
painted, they were painted
of someone and for someone.
And those memories may
have been lost to history, but
they were very active
at some points in the past.
So I think of all of the-- I
think of all of the thousands
of selfies that most people have on
their phone.
And one
day, archeologists might discover
all of these images and wonder who
these people were.
I remember speaking with my students
at one point about selfies, and
I said, "I think I only have about
seven of them on my phone."
And most of them are actually--
I used a selfie
mechanism to take photographs of
ceiling paintings, so I don't have
to crane my neck mostly.
And they were shocked.
They said, "You only have seven
selfies on your phone?" And
it never occurred to me that was a
strange thing. But obviously, I grew
up in a different moment when that
kind of technology wasn't
immediately accessible.
And so that's part of my interest in
portraits because portraiture is a
genre that, to
such an extent, is more relevant
now than it ever was before.
Yeah, thinking about
your work and talking with you here
had me thinking about-- I got to
thinking about portraits.
And so I went and just kind of
like-- the big news
in the US over the last year in
terms of portraits is the Obamas,
and they're new. And there, too, the
portraits of them in the National
Portrait Gallery in D.C..
Attendance has nearly doubled
in the last year because of these
portraits. They're massively
popular.
I was thinking about the way that
you write about portrait
painting as being an interaction
between an artist and the sitter,
the person who's
the subject of the painting.
But I think, and this is kind of an
assumption, although we just kind
of talked about it a little bit,
most people think of portraits as
being just kind of an objective
point. As you said, you go right to
the biography of the person
that is there.
I don't know.
How does any of this-- does any of
this relate for you to the massive
popularity of those portraits?
Does this help you think help us
think at all of why so many
people have gone there?
Is it just the Obamas?
Is it the particular-- Kehinde
Wiley and Amy Sherald, who painted
them, are they responsible
in some way as figures
for the popularity of the paintings?
I think, yes, because you have the
double celebrity of the artists as
well as the sitters in that
particular case.
Celebrity is something that
becomes-- I mean, that becomes
not invented, but certainly, it
becomes expanded in the Renaissance.
One of the first celebrities
whose portrait circulated
across Europe was, in a sense,
Calvin and Luther because
their supporters wanted to see the
face of these great thinkers,
and their haters wanted to see the
face of these great thinkers as
well. So it was a very interesting
moment where suddenly the face,
attached to the ideas
that were circulating, became
equally of interest
to people
who, in all likelihood, would never
meet these figures.
And I think that's a bit of the same
thing with portraits of
Michelle and Barack Obama.
There is a sense of being near
them. And that is why people tend to
go into museums and take selfies
with paintings as well.
It becomes a self-portrait of
themselves with the celebrity, which
in some cases is an
image of someone famous,
but in other instances, is a famous
painting such as the Mona Lisa
or any other number of
artworks in museums
that are subjected to these nonstop
selfies.
So, on the one hand, there's the
question of surrogacy.
The portrait itself stands in for
the famous person that is absent.
And on the other hand, there's the
issue of celebrity.
These are famous people
that one wants to be photographed
with.
Yeah.
And then, one other thing maybe
to kind of add to this or just to
continue off of that idea - I'm
thinking again about some
of the goals of your new book - is
that you talk about the fact
that people normally spend - what is
it - 27.2 seconds in front
of an artwork.
And you're working to try to get
people to work more slowly, to
spend more time, and to teach people
how to spend more time in certain
ways with art.
But then you also acknowledge that
it's hard that--
well, that people are often daunted
by the amount of contextual
knowledge they assume they need to
have a meaningful experience with
paintings of the distant past-- from
the distant past.
So how would someone navigate
those two things?
And you could maybe talk about it
with regard to Titian, but others
too if you like.
What would you say to someone who
doesn't know anything really about
Titian and instruct that person on
what should that person do in
standing in front of a painting?
Well, they could start by doing a
degree in the humanities.
I mean, so many
people often ask me, "What's
the use of the humanities anyway?
Can I just sit at home and read a
book on my own?" It's like, yes, you
could, but you probably won't.
And even if you do, you don't have
anyone to discuss it with.
And that's part of the pleasure of
reading, of going to museums, of
culture, in general, is that moment
of sharing. I mean, we're sitting so
close to the Cathedral of Learning,
and it is such a monument to
a earlier
American vision of what education
and culture meant, what it meant to
be a human.
And that is, ultimately, well, the
subject of your podcast, but also
the importance of the humanities.
I always tell my--
well, I come from a family of a lot
of computer scientists and
an extended family of
doctors and
people in the hard sciences.
And at the end of the day, do you
want to watch a Game of Thrones
or do you want to watch and listen
to C-SPAN for 3 hours?
Because without the humanities, you
don't have-- we are, in a
sense, in the process
of making dreamers.
And without dreamers, you don't have
fantasy. Without fantasy, you can't
envision a better world.
And that is why the humanities are
so important. It helps you think
about a possibility,
a kind of a world
to come.
And people draw on
both political utopias, whether
that's a Marxist fantasy, or
Christian utopias, whether that's a
kind of paradise in the distance.
But both of these segments
of society are bound by a desire
for a better world.
And that is, at bottom, what the
humanities provide for us.
Now, with someone like Titian,
a painter who's working in a
Christian idiom through a Christian
vocabulary much of the time when
it's not portraiture or mythological
images, a lot of that is about
bringing the gods a bit closer to
the everyday person.
And that's important in a moment,
such as the 16th century, which is
marked by constant war,
constant plague, constant
inequality, constant
divisions between society,
and also moments of
terrifying discoveries.
And I don't mean just the
new world, a kind of
a politics of moving into
a whole nother continent that was
previously unknown to the Europeans,
but also just in terms of within
Europe itself, within political
divisions to do with religion.
But also, we forget
how terrifying mapping out
the anatomical body was.
Finding new origins, trying
to figure out how the circulation
of blood works.
I mean, that's not something that
happens to the 17th century.
So there are a lot of unknowns.
And to a certain extent, an artist
is able, like
the science fiction novelists,
to envision something that has not
yet come and that might
one day be possible.
And in that regard,
a painter like Titian is able
to provide
his immediate audience with a sense
of visual possibilities of
worlds that they may or may not
ever encounter or experience.
Yeah. Would there be-- and
that's for his immediate audience.
You mean people who would have seen
his paintings then at the moment.
How about now?
I think every time you engage with
a portrait or
a religious image or a mythological
tale, even if you don't know who
that sitter is, even though
you don't know the story,
you don't know the passage from Ovid
or Catullus or whatever ancient
authority, or which Bible
book a particular
scene is from.
The point is, it's a work of art,
and like poetry, painting is there
to engage, to have a conversation,
to push and challenge the spectator
rather than to tell him
or her everything they're supposed
to think. Now, that is a commercial.
And in a sense, a work
of art, a painting, a
piece of music, or a
poem is there to push
you to be a bit puzzling
so that you ask yourself, "What is
this supposed to mean?
What am I supposed to get out of
this?" And in
that process, it kind of makes
you-- it's mental acrobatics
and intellectual yoga.
It strengthens your ability to face
the unknown and to
think on your feet, which is really
important.
If the artist or
the poet or the musician wanted you
to know exactly what they thought,
they would say so.
And then that would be the end of
the conversation.
There would be no room for you to
respond or to question
the kind of opacity
sometimes that we are faced with.
Yeah. It seems to
me like, you can tell me if this is
true or not, that the period
that you write about, that is
Renaissance in early modern work,
that maybe is particularly
susceptible to people assuming
that these are masters who we
can only learn from, and they tell
us everything, and we venerate them,
and worship at their feet.
That kind of thing. And it seems to
me like one of the things
you enjoy is kind of undermining
that idea and showing how these
works continue to live in the
decades and centuries after
them with people taking up
their work. I'm thinking, in
particular, of your first book here,
Titian Remade, in the way that
you focused on someone who
followed Titian and who wasn't very
well known at the time, but the way
that that painter kind of brought
Titian - Remade is the title -
and remade Titian at that point.
Is that something that sounds
right to you?
Describing your work in that way,
that this is something you enjoy
doing?
Well, I had never thought of it that
way, but I suppose so.
I'm very interested in the ways
that we can recycle and upcycle
things. And I don't mean that
necessarily just in a green
or eco sense.
I mean, that, of course, is
important for,
especially, the younger generations.
This is something they're extremely
invested in for good reasons.
But I also just mean in terms
of efficiency and frugality
and pragmatism.
I come from an immigrant family
where everything was recycled or
reused, and I think there's a lot to
be said in finding new uses
for old things.
I suppose, at bottom, I'm very
interested in the
connection between anxiety and
technology as well.
The renaissance
is very similar to our own times
in the sense that it was a moment
in which the printing press enabled
ideas suddenly to be everywhere
all at once.
Now, one of the great surprises
for people in the 15th and 16th
centuries was that when
great masterpieces, as you
mentioned, such as
Homer's writings and
the kind of
the trials and tribulations of a
hero like Odysseus
were translated, suddenly people
thought, "Oh, that's not very
heroic. This is just a story about a
man who can't get home, who's
running off and hanging out with
nymphs on islands, and who has
abandoned his men, in a sense.
Who's lost his men."
There's nothing particularly heroic
about that.
And for generations to come, in the
16th century, that is why Virgil
became so much more important
as a literary figure
because Aeneas was a good hero.
Here's a hero who's really trying to
keep it together, who's got his
eye on a goal,
and is not dillydallying through all
of the Greek islands in the
slow return home to his poor,
besieged wife, who's fighting
off suitors left, right, and center.
And so it's very interesting that in
these moments of technological
sophistication, works
start to become demystified.
And certainly, in our own time, with
the facility of disseminating
things across the Internet,
there is a moment of information
overload where people start
becoming saturated by both
texts, new stories,
and images as well.
And the rise of skepticism
towards media, the idea
of fake news, is not unfounded
because there's just so much
material, and it becomes difficult
to know how to sort through
it all. Which, again, is why the
humanities matter.
The humanities prepare you for
thinking on your feet, thinking
before an image, of drawing on
your experiences with history
and past patterns, events,
and revolutions, and
moments of both enlightenment
and darkness to think through.
What are the possibilities of what
it is I'm looking at, and what might
it mean to me now?
And how will future generations,
future historians look back upon
this artifact, and what will they
say? And that is, in a sense, very
much at bottom what
I'm interested in, in all of the
different subjects I've been looking
at.
Yeah, well, it makes for
really exciting writing.
I will say one thing it does for me
when I read it. And
just to kind of like follow-up or to
have a kind of particular question
that seems like a follow-up to
me there, is that one of the ways to
me that it seems like you
make sense of the paintings
and the art history that you deal
with is by using contemporary
film. And this is seems like such
an interesting, in some ways,
I wouldn't say necessarily contrast.
I mean, you show that it's not
really a contrast, and one can be
used to understand the other
in quite interesting, and important,
and engaging ways.
But when people write about your
work, sometimes it comes like, oh,
this was unexpected, but it was
really great that you're using this
film in this way to understand
early modern painting.
Can you talk a little bit about
that?
Why film is useful to
you in that way?
I think I'm just a film nerd.
I love watching films.
I love watching
movies of all kinds and also
thinking about how a film
is constructed.
The great art historian
Erwin Panofsky had written
an essay about film, which
is more often cited by film
scholars, not surprisingly, than art
historians, who stick with his more
iconographic material.
And Panofsky really
thought that film was the medium of
today.
And I absolutely think
that if our Renaissance painters
were today, they would all be
filmmakers because film enables--
well, it's about modern
technologies, and, ultimately, it's
about storytelling.
How do you tell a compelling story?
How do you hold onto the
tension of the spectator for more
than 27 seconds?
And how do you move
them to the point that their lives
are somehow transformed and changed
after their encounter with the
artwork? It doesn't have to be in an
extremely life-changing way, but
just in a way that has somehow made
them think differently about their
lives and about their
surroundings in
the interval of having come into
contact with these artworks.
Yes, so for Renaissance scholars,
bringing in things that are
not of the period is often
considered extremely anachronistic.
I think, well, so is bringing in
photography.
A photograph of
a sculpture is as anachronistic,
in some sense, as thinking
about parallels that might be drawn
with the way filmmakers construct
a narrative and manipulate
the viewer. Because there's so much
manipulation that is always going on
in the visual arts in terms of how
do we guide the spectator
through a given visual
artwork?
I used to always joke with
my students that
the three great Venetian Renaissance
artists - Titian, Tintoretto,
and Veronese - if they were to come
back now, Titian would be somewhere
between Spielberg and Hitchcock
because nobody can tell a story
and set up a composition the
way that Titian can.
Tintoretto would definitely be a
special effects man.
He would be the James Cameron or
whatever equivalent you want to draw
on of today.
Because special effects, lighting,
color, the unexpected,
the implosive, the immersive, those
are qualities that you really find
when standing before a Tintoretto.
At which point, I might make just a
quick plug for all
of the exhibitions that are in
Washington, D.C., at the moment
to do with the 500th
anniversary of Tintoretto.
Because Tintoretto is certainly an
artist whose works need to be seen
in person in order to understand
their effect upon the
beholder.
And, of course, there's the third
painter, Veronese, who's often
written off as a
man of elegant fabrics
and someone who's really good at
dresses.
Whereas I think Polanski is, in some
ways, the most chilling of the
three, and his aesthetics
is very similar to Polanski.
It's a slow chill.
You kind of see a beautiful image,
and you're not quite sure what's
going on, and before you know it,
the kind of sinking eeriness
of the painting has somehow set in.
And these are different
stylistic approaches.
These are different spectral
responses.
And each of these artists has a way
of crafting their image in
their manner that speaks
to the beholder in a different way.
And that's very similar to the types
of filmmakers we have today.
Yeah, it seems like if you were
trying-- not that this is
exactly why you're doing it.
But if you were trying to write
about Renaissance painters
in a way that was accessible, then
it would be hard to imagine a better
way to do it than by taking like
directors like that and applying
them.
Yes, because ultimately, it is about
storytelling, even when it's the
most esoteric
Christian narrative.
A lot of my students,
my young students, sometimes say,
"Oh, I just can't really get into
this art. There's so much religion."
I guess, but religion had some of
the best stories, and
that is why these paintings are
still compelling.
And same with the mythological
tales. You don't have to have read
Ovid's Metamorphoses to be
frightened or
shocked by a story about
a woman who turns into a tree,
or a man who turns into a flower,
or, in the case of
Diana and Actaeon, a man whose
hubris leads him to be
metamorphosed into a
deer and then torn apart by his own
hunting dogs.
That's a great story now
as then.
Right.
I mean, mentioning the kinds of
these stories and that kind of
brutality and violence that are
in a lot of them reminds me of
another question I wanted to ask
you, which comes
from a--you
have an introduction to an issue of
a journal on early modern horror.
And in that
introduction, you write about
you enjoy horror because it helps us
move beyond the moralizing discourse
of beauty and the edifying context
of humanistic learning.
I wonder if you could just say a
little bit about why it's important
to do that.
I think it's important to allow
yourself to be moved by artworks,
and this is something that
aesthetics has often pushed
aside.
The idea of empathy, the idea
of effect, the idea that
you might be tricks emotionally
by a work of art.
I mean, this is why Plato banished
artists from
his republic.
But to a certain extent, one needs
to feel safe to
feel in front of an
artwork because that enables
us to then feel safe to feel
in life as well. There's nothing
better than a good cry in a movie
theater.
And when you leave, you feel
transformed.
You know it was just a fiction, and
you can get back to your life.
But there's something very
not necessarily cathartic because
catharsis often enables you to let
go of things, and then it's gone.
Whereas with artworks, with really
good artworks, they stay with you,
and they haunt you afterwards.
And perhaps that's why I'm
interested in horror films.
I'm not a fan of horror films by
any means, but as an art historian,
I'm so interested in the way they
latch on to you and they
stay with you.
And for
spectators in the 16th
century and even in antiquity,
a lot of these types of stories
to do with the gods or
with history
were about
inspiring,
instilling a sense of humanity, kind
of generating a
feeling of community
that you are part
of a larger spectatorship,
that you are part of an audience.
And that's important.
With the new forms
of entertainment
distribution such as Netflix,
or even before with
DVD rentals.
If anyone still remembers that.
I mean, Blockbuster.
One of the things that I always
found very--
I suppose one of the things we lost
in that shift was the sense
of going to the movies, of being
in a darkened room with
an audience of people from
all different backgrounds,
who, in the light of day, you might
not share the same opinions with.
You might find them offensive
people. You might find them very
attractive people as well.
But nevertheless, in that one moment
in the darkness of the cinema, you
become a collective whole,
an audience that experiences
the movie together.
And that's something really kind of
wonderful. To be scared
out of your minds with a bunch
of other people is something very
uplifting in some sort of strange
way because there is a sense of
being together with these
other
spectators.
And I think these
are a collective forms of
experiencing art.
And the museum remains one of those
places where you can still do that.
I know people often say, "You
know what good is art history
anyway?
Why would you study art history?"
But every time you go into a museum,
and certainly, in New York, where
I'm teaching now, every time
you step into the Metropolitan
Museum, it's crammed and so full
of people trying to make
sense of things that have
come from centuries and
cultures and geographies so far
from themselves.
And there is something hopeful about
that because museums still
enable people to come together
and to experience something beyond
themselves in a way that might
not give them an answer if that is
what they're looking for.
It's there to
shift their ways of thinking to
perhaps temporarily let them
step out of their own anxieties
about their everyday lives and to
think about something that has
somehow survived centuries,
wars, famines, floods
and has ended up in the
Frick collection, in the Carnegie
collection, in all of these
collections that were assembled by
the early pioneers
of American capitalism,
who really believed in the
importance of culture and
the place of culture in narrating
the American story as well.
Yeah,
well, let me just-- maybe just kind
of one more question for you.
We were talking earlier about kind
of the engagement that artists
have when they're painting portraits
as a kind of interaction between
an artist and
somebody that artist is painting.
And I guess I wanted to
end by asking you a question about
how you see your engagement
with the things you write about
through your writing.
Because one of the things I mentioned
earlier that it was really-- I found
your work really engaging to read.
And I think it's also really
energetic, as I would say.
The intro to the new book that
you've got almost reads like a
detective novel, and that
there are certain sections where
it seems to me like you try to kind
of like invoke the process
of creation.
You're talking about kind of pencil
or chalk skipping across a blank
page. This is important to kind of
recall these moments for you when
you write about the paintings and
art that you're writing about.
So I thought we could just end by
asking-- I'd ask you about that.
Like, what do you want when you
write? What kind of relationship do
you want to create to the work that
you're writing about?
Wow. Okay.
I think in academic
scholarship, there's always an
anxiety of
misstepping or making a mistake.
There's
a lot of pressure, especially on
young scholars, to be right
and to be best.
And I think those are certainly
goals one should strive towards.
Nobody wants to be wrong or be
worst, but one
should also be open.
And I think with a lot of my own
scholarship, I
know that I will make mistakes, and
I'm ready for that because somebody
who is more capable will come and
correct those mistakes.
And that is part of what scholarship
should be.
You should never have the last word
in any given subject because,
again, that's like a commercial.
You either go out and you buy it, or
you don't buy it.
But if you throw something
out there, a kind of a
willingness to be vulnerable and
open and humble
as well, I think that
is, in a sense, the best way of
proceeding
with my own scholarship.
Again, I'm not saying everyone has
to necessarily follow my
path, but certainly, in
my own work, I think that being
open and being humble and, I guess,
being human is, in a sense,
the most important part of
scholarship. It's an ongoing
conversation.
You will never have the last word,
and people will always come
afterward.
And the more open you are to
those future voices, the
more productive that
conversation will be with
generations to come.
So I think being open
is perhaps the most important thing
in academia. It's difficult
because one doesn't necessarily
readily enable oneself to be
vulnerable.
But there's always someone smarter
out there than you.
That's just inevitable.
And hopefully, that
smarter person will come and look
upon your work with a bit of
intellectual generosity to say,
"Oh, you made a mistake here.
And actually, I can help you make it
better by saying this." And that is
what one really wants from
an intellectual conversation.
Not to be shouted down and say, "Oh,
you are wrong," or, "Oh my God,
you're absolutely right.
This is the most right thing that
anyone has ever said," because then
that ends the conversation and
there's nothing more to learn.
Yeah, I mean, I will also just say,
and I hope this is consistent with
your way of thinking about your
writing, too, is that it kind of
seems fun.
Your writing seems fun, I mean.
Why be anything-- if
you are going to be an academic,
there's a lot of-- teaching
is the fun thing you do between
meetings. Meetings are necessary to
keep the university running,
but somewhere in between, there has
to be fun. And I think once
students understand
that learning is fun,
then they really fly, and they take
off with it. And you don't have to
teach them that much more because,
ultimately, as teachers, and I know
you know this very well, teaching is
to enable young people to teach
themselves and understand why
learning is something they will be
doing for a lifetime beyond the
one or three hours that you might
have with them per week.
Maria Loh, the new book is coming
out any week.
It's called Titian's Touch: Art,
Magic, and Philosophy.
And thank you so much for coming out
and being human.
Thank you very much.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human. This episode was produced by
new Pitt alum Noah Livingston,
Humanities Media Fellow at the
University of Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned next time when my guest
will be Caspar Pearson, professor of
Art and Architectural History at the
University of Essex.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
Visual Possibilities of Worlds to Come: An Interview with Maria Loh
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Loh, Maria H., 1971- (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
May 3, 2019
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0042
Description
An interview with Maria Loh, Professor of art history at CUNY Hunter College. The interview focuses on Professor Loh's life and career, particularly her work on Titian and early modern painting. Her newest book is titled "Titian's Touch: Art, Magic, and Philosophy."
Extent
37 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Painting--History
Art--History
Loh, Maria H., 1971-
Titian, approximately 1488-1576
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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Visual Possibilities of Worlds to Come: An Interview with Maria Loh

In collections