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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Kluge

“Although Johann Joachim Winckelmann is often called “the father of modern art history,” that paternal claim belongs by now to another generation. For the German-educated refugees who escaped to London and the United States before World War II and effectively created the discipline of art history for the English-speaking world, Winckelmann, a German resident in Italy in the eighteenth century, was certainly a symbolic father for their own displacement and their own passions. Like Winckelmann, the bibliophile banker Aby Warburg, the onetime lawyer Erwin Panofsky, and the art historians Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich, and Richard Krautheimer all believed that the study of art was an activity for everyone, an enterprise to be communicated to a greater public with the utmost clarity, enthusiasm, and wit. And this they (and many others) did, both in their native German and in their adopted language, to memorable effect.

That generation of mid-twentieth-century refugees was a generation of intellectual giants, and like most giants they were also tyrants. It is not entirely surprising that their much-put-upon successors have followed their lead with less than perfect docility. Superbly educated in a plethora of languages ancient and modern, those elders of the twentieth-century diaspora had learned how to use language as a means of persuasion. Their epigones, less confidently erudite, often use words to shield their own insecurity, bandying about terms like “ekphrasis” when “description” will do, creating such lumbering Greco-Latin sports as “contextualize,” or transferring Platonic abstractions such as “the good” uncomfortably to English (…)

No useful connection, paternal or philosophical, can link the piercing clarity of Winckelmann’s ideas to academic art history’s current penchant for simplistic thought clad in pompous language. As Winckelmann himself observed of such “debased taste” in another era: “Its prime attribute was the pestilence that in our time is called pedantry. [Poets] strove to appear more the scholar than the poet and to establish themselves with archaic and foreign words and expressions…to appear possessed rather than inspired and to be understood after sweat and tears rather than to please.” There is much to be said, therefore, for having History of the Art of Antiquity in English, as limpid and persuasive in Harry Francis Mallgrave’s translation as Winckelmann is in his own German. Two and a half centuries on, his writing is still a breath of fresh Enlightenment air.”

Read the rest of the review of a new translation of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity here.

http://boiteaoutils.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html

http://www.cgdigest.com/how-to-add-depth-of-field-using-a-zdepth-pass/

http://www.saic-media.net/video/saicmedia_video.php?vFile=wired/modernmonday/092809_StaffanSchmidt1