Fake Friends: A Symposium on Art History and Comparison

A day-long series of presentations and discussions broaching the operations of comparison and similitude in the methods and practices of art and its histories, with plenty of incursions into other disciplines—notably comparative literature, religion, architecture, music, and philosophy, among others.

The symposium will be opened at 5:30 M on November 29 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia, with a screening by visual artist Andrew Norman Wilson and a panel discussion featuring Caroline A Jones (MIT), Joan Kee (University of Michigan), and Jaleh Mansoor (University of British Columbia), moderated by ICA curator Alex Klein, to be followed by a reception.

The program-proper will commence at 10:00 AM on November 30 with a morning keynote by Caroline Walker Bynum (Institute for Advanced Study, emerita), entitled “Dissimilar Similitude: How do Religious Objects Look Like and Look Alike,” and conclude at 6:00 PM with a reception in the foyer outside McCormick 106.

Advanced registration for the conference is encouraged; please visit the conference website for a full speaker-list and schedule of events.

Co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the Graduate School, Humanities Council, Department of Classics, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of French & Italian, Department of English, Department of Music, Program in American Studies, East Asian Studies Program, Program in Latin American Studies, Lewis Center for the Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania Department of the History of Art