Tutorial 4: Global Art History

James Elkins, ‘Art History as a Global Discipline’ in Is Art History Global? (2007)

Problems in art history

1. Art history remains focused on a specific canon of artists

• 1999 statistics of the scholarly output of the discipline according to the artists who were being written about

  • Almost all artists in the top 100 are ‘dead white males’ (European & North American)

  • Michelangelo, Leonardo & Raphael in the top 10

    • Similarly praised by Pliny the Elder, Vasari & Winckelmann

  • Art history is still quite intensive: there is a canon of artists who are still studied disproportionately more than the many artists who have only been studied recently

2. Art history remains guided by a stable series of (Western) narratives

   • Familiar sequences leading from Greece & Rome —> medieval —> Renaissance ‘suvivals’ —> Postmodern ‘appropriations’

   • E.g. books about non-Western art inevitably fall back on Western comparisons & artistic influences, & Western frameworks of naturalism/antinaturalism

3. Art history depends on Western methodologies

   • Interpretetive strategies & forms of argument

   • Even in non-Western practices of art history

   • E.g. in 2000: art academies in China were applying Western art historical frameworks to Chinese art

     • E.g. Chinese translation of Wölfflin, Panofsky, Gombrich

     • E.g. formal analysis, periodisation, iconography

     • E.g. framing & supporting their ideas in Western ways (e.g. abstracts, summaries of previous scholarship, footnoted arguments)

     • Shouldn’t indigenous Chinese terms and methods be used to explicate Chinese art?

       • BUT Craig Clunas: this is happening

Keith Moxey, ‘Art history after the global turn’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (2007)

Current problems in Western art history

1. Art history as inherited colonial/neocolonial experience

   • Art history is inextricably tied to the history of the nation state

     • The idea of the nation state as one of the most dynamic & durable colonial exports

       = impossible to experience a truly global art history as we would have to dismantle the idea of the state

2. Presumed universality, defined on the colonial powers’ own terms

   • E.g. the idea of art itself

   • Art history’s fundamental assumptions are culturally determined

   • Instead, we need to study cultural differences and understand that some cultures are incommensurable (and hence should not be judged in terms of their relative value)

3. We cannot completely disregard the Western narrative but rethink & re-incorporate it

Finbarr Barry Flood & Beate Fricke, Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms (2024)

Historical context

• For a long time, art history has assumed the primacy of written records as evidence of history

  • Rather than artefacts & images (material culture)

• Today: increasing interest in integrating the documentary value of texts and things AND acknowledging the objecthood of all kinds of archives

Key arguments

1. Proponents of object-oriented histories of globalism

   • Offers new perspectives on histories of connectivity between Africa, Asia, and Europe in the early Medieval period

   • The circulation & reception of objects defined aesthetic, economic, and technological networks that existed outside established political and sectarian boundaries

     • Many of these histories are NOT documented in the written sources on which historians usually rely

Craig Clunas, ‘The toolkit and the textbook’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (2007)

• The largest quantity of work on Chinese art is now happening in China

  • In the Chinese language, fizzing w/ neologisms

  • In a few years there will have come into being in China an art historical world which will operate quite comfortably without the medium of English

  • Vs. a global art history should be globally accessible & legible

Christina Normore, ‘Editor’s Introduction: A World within Worlds? Reassessing the Global Turn in Medieval Art History’

• 2-day conference in 2015 about problems surrounding global medieval art

• Selection of scholars w/ a variety of expertise in different art-historical subfields

  • Absence of specialists in Indian Ocean & Baltic studies

  • Vs. comparatively higher representation of scholars specialising in contacts within the Mediterranean basin & Silk Roads

• Reflects current priorities of academic art history in North America

Carol Duncan, ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’

• Art-artefact divide justifies a a hierarchy of cultures

• Today: efforts to ‘elevate’ non-Western cultures to art

  • BUT this only reinforces hierarchy

  • Enables non-Western art to compare, compete & serve as a foil to Western civilisation

• Proposed solution: collapse distinction altogether

Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips, ‘Our (Museum) World Turned Upside Down: Re-presenting Native American Arts

• ‘The totalising construct of primitive art obscures differences among colonised peoples that are worth remembering’

• E.g. Plains Indians

  • Have objects in the Canadian Museum of Civilisation

  • Requested that menstuating women not come in contact with certain medicine objects

  • Virtually impossible under contemporary, Western guidelines; gender equity & protection of privacy

Reading List

Key Readings

Supplementary/Related Readings

Key Readings

1. James Elkins, ‘Art History as a Global Discipline’ in Is Art History Global? (2007)

2. Keith Moxey, ‘Art history after the global turn’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (2007)

3. Finbarr Barry Flood & Beate Fricke, Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms (2024)

4. Craig Clunas, ‘The toolkit and the textbook’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (2007)

Supplementary/Related Readings

1. Christina Normore, ‘Editor’s Introduction: A World within Worlds? Reassessing the Global Turn in Medieval Art History’

2. Carol Duncan, ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’

3. Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips, ‘Our (Museum) World Turned Upside Down: Re-presenting Native American Arts