6 Imagining art history otherwise

caa.reviews, 2010

is on the process of disciplinary professionalization as art history's most important technique of diffusion and administration of its tenets. She sketches out the history of this complex and ambivalent process, one that is closely intertwined with early twentieth-century developments in "nationalism and social mobility" (3). These both broadened and limited the discipline, granting wider admission to its cultural authority, transforming the supervision and direction of art's history into a career, and standardizing methods and objects of study. Art history as professionalized practice helped shape national identities. Art historians in newly established university departments and museums catalogued and imbued artifacts and monuments with meaning, in the process demarcating areas of expertise. This deployment of analytical skills led to the spread of the discipline's reach, the most important result of which may be that art history has become a "core component of higher education in many Western countries" (2). At the center of this enlargement of influence is a cluster of ideas about art and art history's "representational 'adequacy,'" as articulated by Donald Preziosi in his essay in part 2, "Unmaking Art History," particularly the notion that artifacts represent the character of their makers, and related ideas concerning the human faculty for artmaking as well as art's power to "transform our lives" (124, 127). Equally fundamental, as Dan Karlholm demonstrated in Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History In Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), is the creation of a single self-identical subject called "art" that has a continuous history.

This is an excerpt from a 30-page essay on the history of the department where I work, from 1980, when it was founded, to 2010, when the full version of this essay was written. Some of what follows is specific to our department, but I'm posting it on academia because it makes a larger point: I'm interested in the way that art history is becoming normalized, not only in North America, but worldwide. I have a book on that subject coming out, called The Impending Single History of Art. One aspect of the increasing uniformity of the discipline is the way art history is taught. Because I've spent my career teaching in a large art school, I have been able to observe the increasing dominance of a set of ideals for the discipline that comes largely from a half-dozen principal research universities in North America and the U.K.. When I started teaching, my colleagues' interests and methods were well suited to teaching artists, and less compatible with disciplinary norms. Several of them probably couldn't have found jobs in larger universities. Over the last two decades I've watched as art history departments that serve mainly visual art students (not just in North America but also Latin America, Europe, and Asia) have become more closely aligned to the model of art history as it's practiced in the principal North American and European research universities. The Impending Single History of Art is mainly about how art history is written, but there is a parallel in the ways it is taught: we are losing diversity in the name of disciplinary norms.

When 1 entered graduate school in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York in the early 1950s, theory was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, for me and for many of my cohorts, theory was a rather suspect concept, tainted as it was by theories of race (which dassified human beings hierarchically) and theories of quality (which dassified works of art hierarchically). We read the dassic works of the founding fathers, especially Aloïs Riegl and Heinrich WôlfHin (always on our own, never as part of courses). But no one sought to follow them in their quest for the foundations of the discipline-an enterprise that in any case seemed uninspiring compared with the joy and excitement of working with the "objects." Moreover, theoretical structures risked limiting the range and depth of individual creativity, or even collective creativity in the case ofregional or period styles.

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2019

Art History enrollments at the college level are declining as students flock to STEM majors and perceive Art History as dated and of little use in today’s modern, scientific world. Yet Art History classes can teach valuable skills. When taught in a broad context, the objects art history studies engage critical thinking and can generate new forms of knowledge. However, the pedagogical structure and content of introductory art history survey course does not always offer students the creative leeway to make these connections. Instructors at the college level often retreat to the methods and content that have been a part of the discipline since its inception in the late 19th century; the professor as expert authority on the western canon of objects and the grand narrative of progressive development that accompanies them. As university students are becoming more ethnically and socially diverse, the objects covered in the survey continue to speak to a white, European audience that is no longer the only audience listening. While art history remains useful, its canon of objects has become problematic, and reinforces the othering of the non- western world. This essay will first examine how the modern canon and art history’s pedagogical practices came to be by examining the history of the discipline, and the theories, methods and texts that developed alongside academic art history. It will then take a brief look at how modern philosophy, primarily the conceptual ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, can provide a new framework for examining how the teaching of art history can be globalized and taught in a more meaningful way.

de arte, 2017

the #RhodesMustFall campaign that began at the University of Cape town in early 2015, called for the decolonisation of south African university curricula, among other transformations. As a result, many south African academics are questioning the epistemologies that underpin their disciplines. What does the decolonisation of university curricula imply for disciplines in the humanities, art history among them, which were born at the time of colonial expansion and the categorising of knowledge that came with the enlightenment? In this paper I explore some implications of the decolonisation of art history for the ways in which we practise and write art history today. I begin by briefly exploring the origins of the discipline, in order to create a platform from which to consider contemporary art history writing. I then consider the ways in which the decolonisation of the discipline could be understood as the end of art history. A reflection of some of the affordances and limitations of the postcolonial rhetoric in which calls for decolonisation are framed, leads me to consider methods of writing art history that could be construed as acts of decolonisation. I conclude by suggesting that one way to decolonise the discipline is to foreground the author's subjective voice when writing arts histories.

Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, 2016

Many of us in the academy find ourselves confronted with the constant refrain of "relevance." This "Age of Relevance" has developed out of a reaction to the ever-evolving variety of educational movements, theoretical positions, and administrative mandates given slightly obscure acronyms or futuristic titles such as: "QEP-Quality Enhancement Programs" "Learning in Zeros and Ones," "Big Data," "MOOCs-Massive open online courses," or maybe least threatening, the now almost-ubiquitous status of the "Digital Humanities." 1 The question for those of us in Medieval Studies is, where do we stand in this changing environment? How can we help our students in this era when, by all accounts, they are swimming upstream. Knowing what we are up against is a start. The public rhetoric of the academy-at least at the state level-seems now to be linked to the business model of Clay Christiansen, in a book co-written with Henry Eyring, entitled The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. 2 Critics note that the line of

Daedalus, 2006

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries positions university museums within the broader museum context as follows: While all museums are educational in purpose, academic museums are unique in their mission to teach and train succeeding generations of students. We couldn’t agree more. The CU Art Museum is a vital resource for object-based pedagogy at CU Boulder, providing opportunities for formal learning and curricular engagement beyond the typical classroom. The art museum fosters a participatory learning environment through its collection and staff, creating a bridge between academic research and professional practice. By supporting and expanding curricular activities, the art museum upholds values outlined in the chancellor's strategic imperatives to shape tomorrow's leaders by "understanding, sharing and engaging diverse perspectives," and positively impacting humanity through "broaden[ing] and expand[ing] research, scholarship and creative work and articulat[ing] the positive societal outcomes they advance."