Marketing Thanatos: Damien Hirst's Heart of Darkness

Distinguished Professor of History and Art History at UCLA and holds the University of California President's Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture. She has authored three books: Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America (Pantheon, 1986); Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (University of California, 1989); and Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). Professor Silverman has received ACLS, NEH, Guggenheim, and Getty Research Institute fellowships and she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2008, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences. Her book, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, co-won the 2001 PEN American Center/ Architectural Digest National Prize for outstanding writing on the visual arts; the Ralph Waldo Emerson national prize for best book in the Humanities; and the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major book prize in French History. She is the 2011-2012 Marta Sutton Weeks Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where she is completing work on a new book, “‘The Congo I Presume’: Tepid Revisionism and Art Nouveau Modernism in The Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium, 1910-2010.” Part of this research recently appeared in the Bard Graduate Center's West 86th Street.