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March 12, 2015

At-risk collections to receive preservation and distribution support from Artstor

Artstor announces the first four recipients of a new initiative to preserve and increase the availability of at-risk collections. The selected projects are: The James Cahill Archive of Chinese art (University of California, Berkeley) Excavations and finds in Oaxaca by Judith Zeitlin, 1973 and 1990 (University of Massachusetts, Boston) Ronald M. Bernier Archive, Buddhist initiation rituals […]

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February 27, 2015

In the news: #thatdress

A poorly taken photograph of a dress and the simple question “what color is it?” spread all over social media and was picked up by several news outlets. Some people in our office saw black and blue, others white and gold, but we all agreed—enough is enough with #thatdress! The Artstor Digital Library offers you […]

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February 23, 2015

The secret names of Italian Renaissance artists

Have you ever wondered why you rarely see the names of the greats from the Italian Renaissance reoccur in art history?  Why do we not see more than one artist with names such as Ghirlandaio, Masaccio, or Tintoretto? It’s because a lot of these were not really names, they were nicknames! Some, like Verrocchio (“true […]

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February 18, 2015

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation awards $75,000 to Artstor

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has awarded $75,000 to Artstor in support of the James Dee Archives project. The Archives are composed of approximately 250,000 slides, transparencies, negatives, and photographs documenting contemporary art in New York City over the last four decades, and Artstor is digitizing and maintaining the archive for use in research and education. […]

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February 4, 2015

The infinite variety of artists’ books

Whether you consider illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages the beginning, or you start with William Blake’s self-published books of poetry in the 18th century, artists have been making books for centuries. But as Toni Sant recounts in his book Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-garde, the term “artists’ books” is fairly recent. […]

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February 2, 2015

The art of looking slowly

“I didn’t know how to look at art,” Phil Terry, founder and CEO of Collaborative Gain, confessed to ARTnews a few years ago. “Like most people, I would walk by quickly.” As the article points out, a study in Empirical Studies of the Arts estimates that museumgoers spend an average of just 17 seconds looking […]

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January 15, 2015

The Top Ten Posts of 2014

We had another busy year at the Artstor Blog, with 161,000 visits in 2014. What were people clicking on? Here’s the list of the top ten most popular posts from last year: From Babylon to Berlin: The rebirth of the Ishtar Gate Finding the phenomenal women in fine art Dürer and the elusive rhino The travels […]

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December 15, 2014

The endangered art of bookplates

This post has been updated to include new information about Artstor’s public collections, formerly made available on Shared Shelf Commons. Despite entreaties to the contrary, the debate about e-books vs. printed books doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Traditionalists frequently tout the sensual pleasures of paper (smell, which doesn’t have much to do […]

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