What a Picture Cant Offer: Michael Gaudio on the Imaginative Work of Sound in Art History

Published: Nov. 2, 2021, 5 a.m.

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In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Michael Gaudio, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in visual arts in the early modern Atlantic world. Michael describes his early studies in literature and the influence of deconstruction as a theory that taught him to inhabit the contingencies and ambiguities of a work. They discuss the gap between pictures and sound and how audiences in earlier eras navigated that gap. Finally, Michael reflects on the \\u201cmelancholy work of being an art historian,\\u201d part of which he characterizes as the descriptive challenge of thinking, writing, and teaching about sound in visual art.\\xa0

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