Caro Fowler and Will Schmenner investigate the museum as a recurring cinematic space. Moving from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Vertigo to Ghostbusters and Dressed to Kill, the conversation explores how films use museums as sites of attention, transgression, desire, and institutional critique. Fowler and Schmenner consider the relationship between cinema and painting, the politics of conservation and display, and the enduring tension between popular culture and “high” art, asking what happens when museums become spaces not only for education, but also for fantasy, memory, and social encounter.

Caro Fowler speaks with Joost Keizer about the consequential environmental histories embedded within seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Moving beyond celebratory narratives of realism and national identity, the conversation explores how war, deforestation, land reclamation, and colonial expansion reshaped both the Dutch environment and artistic representations of nature. Together, Fowler and Keizer consider whether landscape painting emerged not simply from an admiration of nature, but from experiences of ecological loss, environmental control, and human concepts of making.

Caro Fowler and Scott Nethersole discuss the evolving stakes of Renaissance art history amid the rise of “global” approaches. Rather than assuming seamless networks of exchange, Nethersole questions whether such frameworks can obscure the uneven, often disjointed nature of historical encounters, particularly in early European-African contact zones. The conversation revisits foundational disciplinary tools such as comparison and periodization, while considering how attention to moments of disconnection might reframe familiar narratives. Together, they reflect on the methodological and ethical challenges of writing art history that resists totalizing claims without abandoning interpretive ambition.