Art History, Ph.D.
Concordia University

Mark Clintberg is a part-time faculty member and Ph.D graduate of the Department of Art History at Concordia University, and also works as an artist. His doctoral thesis, which he defended in September 2013, examines twentieth and twenty-first century artworks that have taken the form of food service sites of varying scale, menu, clientele, and duration, and it proposes an interpretation of artist’s restaurants as a contemporary extension of the historical still life genre. Also foundational for this thesis project are the relationship between aesthetic taste and gustatory taste as taken up in eighteenth-century philosophy, as well as nineteenth- century gastronomy and restaurant practices. While still life has been consistently denigrated in philosophy and art history as a lowly genre tied to bodily impulses of appetite, this thesis investigates these very qualities as motivating factors for contemporary artists who are reinventing the genre through edible, performative still lifes.

He has contributed to scholarly journals and periodicals including The Senses & Society, C Magazine, ETC., BlackFlash, Canadian Art, The Art Newspaper, Border Crossings, the Fillip Review, Photofile, Arte al Dia International, and Art.es Magazine. His writing has also been included in several exhibition catalogues, including: Romantical: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Owens Art Gallery); The Domestic Queens Project (FOFA Gallery); Jonathan Kaiser’s Celestial Bodies (Art Gallery of Alberta); and David Spriggs: archeology of space (Southern Alberta Art Gallery). Public and private collections across Canada and in the United States – including the National Gallery of Canada and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts – have acquired his work. In 2013 he was Shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.

Mark defended his Ph.D. thesis with distinction in September 2013 and graduated at Fall Convocation.