Art Historians and Their Place: A Critical Examination
Should Art Historians Know Their Place?
No
Deference: Avoid being overly deferential or adhering to aesthetic norms that perpetuate existing power structures.
Politeness: Refrain from blindly accepting institutional definitions of art, which may compromise access to private collections and other resources.
Commodification: Resist the commodification of culture driven by monetarist realism and commercial populism.
Institutional Niches: Avoid settling comfortably into pre-defined roles within institutions.
Colonialist Discourse: Do not perpetuate colonialist narratives that reinforce Western superiority and subjugate other cultures.
Normative Culture: Shun subservience to normative notions of authentic culture or defending established rules and codes.
Isolation: Avoid isolating art history from broader social processes and relevant discourses.
Insularity: Challenge the insularity of art history by acknowledging its own institutional histories and connections to other intellectual practices.
Professional Status: Do not prioritize professional status and hierarchical divisions within the discipline.
Theoretical Site: Avoid staking out a privileged theoretical position or seeking fixed solutions.
Marginalization: Resist being marginalized within academic definitions or peacefully coexisting as a mere alternative specialism.
Anglo-American Social History: Do not repeat the claims of an Anglo-American social history of art that seeks unifying ambitions and rejects diverse debates.
Historicist Schema: Avoid conjuring up historicist schemas with teleological principles that secure the historian's position and guarantee meaning.
Real History: Refrain from an imaginary return to Real History or viewing the institutional base as a determinant façade.
Singular Act of Knowing: Do not assume a singular act of knowing or a unified subject with a fixed common place.
Yes
Recognizing Power Dynamics: Acknowledge how art histories reinforce social hierarchies by validating displays of wealth and power.
Grappling with Contradictions: Engage with the contradictions of late capitalism and its impact on cultural interventions.
Institutional Histories: Turn attention to the largely unwritten institutional histories of the discipline and its role in both libidinal and political economies.
Comprehending Domination: Attempt to comprehend the economy of domination and the trade in cultural artifacts, acknowledging the limitations of Western intellectual traditions.
Grasping Stakes: Begin to grasp what is at stake in disciplines like art history, which constitute the object ‘culture’ and exercise discrimination to produce values and exert powerful effects.
Engagement with Visual Representations: Leads to engagement with the ways visual representations, as part of the production and circulation of meanings, are themselves a modality of pleasure and power, subject to but also generating multiple relations of domination and subordination.
Specificity of Institutions: Recognize the specificity, conditionality, and effectivity of art history institutions to challenge insularity.
Linking with Functionaries: Clear the way to linking up with functionaries of all kinds—curators, schoolteachers, tour guides, leisure officers, National Trust officials, and so on—who make up the complex contemporary economy of art history but occupy less privileged places than professional academics.
Engagement: If it means not closure, solutions, positions, careers, but engagement; and if this engagement runs to asking when, where and by whom art history is allowed to be done, under what conditions, and to what ends, and how the answers to these questions have been decisively altered by changing conditions of intellectual production.
Strategic Debate: Insist on a strategic debate at the convergence of diverse analyses with different theoretical statuses and levels of application.
Recognizing Failures: Recognize the failures of the past social history of art movements, particularly their neglect of institutional limits and power relations.
Engaging with Closure: Engage with the ways such closure of historiographical truth, like its seeming opposite, the proliferation of particularist histories, does not float conditionless.
Complex Relations: Allow that the relations of institutions, practices, discourse, and agents, in art history as in any other domain, are highly complex—that there is no neat division of text and context.
Political Calculation: Calls instead for continual, conditional political calculation; if it generates specific knowledges and representations, analyzing their conditions of existence and calculating their specific effects, without being caught either in fetishistic closure or its utopian denial.