Perhaps in contrast to Benjamin Lima’s more scenographic and pleasurable experience at the Westin, I arrived this morning at the Wilshire to find my room unready and the concrete valet breezeway a cold bleak cylinder of art historians and parking officials. The quickening of my heart at seeing many of my own kind was mitigated by a familiar professional shyness, a voyeuristic hesitancy. After all, isn’t it more fun to stare at other people’s clothes than actually interface with them? (more…)

A little sleepy this morning and without coffee (did anyone successfully manage the Starbucks line and if there is free coffee somewhere, please tell me), I went to a variety of talks of varying quality. It was a good morning, but I think we were all just trying to get ourselves warmed up. Lots of tired eyes in the rooms – I’d hate to be one of those first presenters. Even though this is a geek woodstock, early in the morning is still early in the morning. (more…)

The post below was co-written by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris

We’re very excited to be heading to LA for CAA, and we are writing from American Airlines flight 19 somewhere over the midwest. This is the first flight either of us have been on with in flight wi-fi. We spent the first hour or so, perusing the CAA website and looking at the sessions we want to attend. With appointments to see colleagues, interesting sessions to attend, an Emerging Professionals Brown Bag (where we were graciously invited to speak by Maria Ann Connelli), our own talk about Smarthistory.org (the first of many shameless plugs), and a host of fabulous museums, our schedule is pretty packed — 3 1/2 days will fly by.

We’re particularly interested in sessions that explore ways that the discipline of art history is responding to social networking, and beginning to the harness distributed knowledge made available by Web 2.0.