Posts by Laurie Fendrich

December 7, 2007, 12:11 PM ET

Girls, Dolls, and Physics

By Laurie Fendrich

When my daughter was born in 1983, my mothering was driven by late-70s feminist ideals. I believed that if I dressed her in overalls, cut her hair as short as a boy’s, and gave her trucks instead of Barbies, she’d end up a nuclear physicist. I got my comeuppance right away. Among her first words were, “What’s that?” We had just passed a desultory-looking store window in downtown L.A. She was in her stroller, firmly pointing her pudgy index finger at a sorry-looking Barbie, alone and dusty, sitting atop a tower of toilet paper.

With some girls, the lust for dolls begins well before two. The doll industry considers the sweet spot for girls and dolls to lie between the ages of seven and nine. After that, girls become increasingly uninterested in dolls until, by 13, they would rather be dead than be caught playing with a doll.

For all the hours of happy role-playing dolls offer,...

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December 4, 2007, 04:37 PM ET

Drawn to Seurat

By Laurie Fendrich

Thirty-one. That’s the pitiably young age at which Georges Seurat died, in 1891 (most likely from diphtheria), an age when most of us are just beginning to wake up to the idea that life isn’t forever.

An avant-garde artist when such a thing was possible, Seurat achieved fame during his short, urgently lived artistic career, primarily as the inventor of Pointillism — dot paintings based on 19th-century positivist theories about optics and color. Seurat’s most famous pointillist painting, A Sunday on the Grande Jatte (1884-86), hangs solemnly (and forever — it’s not allowed to travel) at the Art Institute of Chicago. In modern iconic resonance, it ranks as high as Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Not so the drawings. Like many artists, I only found out about Seurat’s drawings years after I had seen his paintings. Because drawing always has to fight for attention with painting, ...

November 30, 2007, 11:36 AM ET

Outcome Outcome Wherever You Are

By Laurie Fendrich

“Do you have time to type something for me today?” I asked the student aide who works several hours a week in our fine-arts-department office.

“Sure, no problem,” she answered. Apollonia is an unusually good-spirited young woman, never complaining about her boring job of typing, working the copy machine and sorting the mail.

“OK, so here’s what you do,” I said, placing my index finger on the notes that I’d laid out in front of her on her desk.

I was asking for Apollonia’s help that day because, as Chair of our department’s Outcomes Assessment Committee, I was the one who had put together a six-column rubric and I needed it typed. That way the fine arts department would have as spiffy a six-step chart as all the other university departments. The mandated column headings were: Step 1, Mission statement; Step 2, Learning goal; Step 3, Map to courses; Step 4, Assessment tools; Step 5,...

November 27, 2007, 04:06 PM ET

Damien Does Death

By Laurie Fendrich

This past October, the super-famous, 13-foot, 22-ton formaldehyded shark (“created” in 1991 by a British supernova in the art world, Damien Hirst, when he was a mere babe) blessed with the brilliant surreal title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a three-year visit. Director Philippe de Montebello welcomed the shark to the museum by saying, “It should be especially revealing and stimulating to confront this work in the context of the entire history of art” — which was a way of washing his hands of the entire matter.

Now comes Hirst’s newest work, School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, a morbid (literally) menagerie in the lobby of Lever House in midtown Manhattan, on view through February 16, 2008. (In Carol Vogel’s International Herald...

November 20, 2007, 02:03 PM ET

Silent Socrates

By Laurie Fendrich

Here’s a good Socratic question for you: Can a professor teach a seminar without a voice? Forget “dialogue” — that’s baby’s play compared to the challenge of speechlessly prodding a group of undergraduates into talking seriously (i.e., having a high-level discussion after they’ve done the reading) about the subject of the seminar (which in this case happened to be the emergence of modern art). And forget the trendoid baloney about a professor’s no longer being “a sage on the stage” but rather “a guide at the side.” My students pay a lot of tuition money for a leader, and they don’t want somebody who merely tags along like an older classmate.

You see, right now I can’t speak a single word out loud. For more than a week I’ve been suffering from acute laryngitis. Like all good Americans, I wanted a quick fix. So I went to my doctor, hoping for a prescription ...