A couple of years ago, through the mailing list network of today (Twitter) I
met an extremely interesting and inspiring independent art historian. By
day, Hasan Niyazi was a physiotherapist, by night he was an avid art history
scholar and blogger. In addition to being his friend, over the past couple
of years I've been observing and writing about Hasan's work. He featured
heavily in a paper I gave at CAA in February, I am writing about him for my
book, and (in a pile of projects we were working towards) I have drafts of a
paper we were co-authoring on art history blogging. Despite often
struggling to get access to libraries and institutions he built a blog,
Three Pipe Problem: http://www.3pipe.net/ that now features on many art
history department resource lists the world over, more recently he has been
invited to speak at several universities in Australia, and his vision for a
more open art history is demonstrated in the equally successful Open Raphael
project: http://www.openraphael.org/ and the countless times he was invited
to speak (and blog) in Florence.
Of course I had planned that Hasan would take part in this conversation here
on New Media Curating. As a long-time lurker on many discussion lists, he'd
written to me off list with a number of points and concerns. One such
concern being that, as he saw it, lists can be pretty exclusive places too.
For example, he felt the reminiscing that had gone on was valuable but
perhaps off-putting to newcomers who have no reference point. To resolve
this, he decided he would post his own response to the topic on his blog,
where other non-list-user art history bloggers might feel comfortable to
comment, and asked me to point others there too>>>>>
http://www.3pipe.net/2013/10/art-history-in-age-of-internet.html
On top of fighting to be taken seriously by the establishment and putting a
tremendous amount of work into making art history accessible, he was
incredible at bringing people together. And so it was that through his tight
network of friends, collaborators and admirers I was informed that Hasan had
passed away suddenly at the weekend as a result of his epilepsy. In 2012 I
served as a reference for Hasan's application for a grant to attend the CAA
annual conference. Despite all his work (and, as I often told him, being a
far better art historian than me!) he was rejected on the grounds that he's
not a proper art historian (no art history degree, no institutional
affiliation, no refereed papers). Well, don't worry buddy, we've got your
back. All of us who knew and worked with you know that there was never a
more solid art historian or more generous spirit. And when I'm over the
shock, I'll finish what we started. (I wish you'd seen CAA Tweet your latest
blog post yesterday though!)
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