Recently, a colleague
alerted me that there was a crisis in art history. As she reminded me, art history is always in a crisis, and I
was unsurprised but sufficiently interested to dig a little deeper. That’s when I found out that not only
was a crisis brewing, but that the crisis was not just “a” crisis, but “the”
crisis. A session of the venerable
CAA annual conference was devoted to this in 2011 and the papers eventually
were collected in Visual Resources: An
International Journal of Documentation. If you have not read the papers, I
encourage you to do so as they are available online here. These papers self-admittedly form a “rough
draft of [the authors’] comprehension of the situation confronting art history
professionals today,” but now that some time has passed and we’ve all had a
chance to digest this material, I’d like to add my two cents. I’m not entirely convinced that there’s
a crisis in all of art history, as much as there is a crisis in some art
historians. If pushed, I’d have to
admit that I believe the crisis is not in
art history, the crisis is art
history.
The main crisis (and
one which unpacked into separate, smaller crises) identified by the authors is
the interest in contemporary art and its effect on the employment landscape for
art historians whose interests lie outside this field. It is a crisis, but perhaps not in the
way that this panel suggested.
Providing a very narrow training for jobs that are increasingly rare does
suggest fundamentally that the training art history programs provide to graduate
students is in desperate need of retooling. Yet, rather than address the limits of the educational
experience that the advanced study of art history often provides (and look for
ways to change this even), the panel demonized the popularity of contemporary
art, the art market in general, and offered little in the way of meaningful
solutions. Ironically, although
the popularity of the panel (even to the inclusion of a photograph of a
standing room only audience) was used to validate the self-evident nature of
its importance, the same courtesy was not shown to contemporary art, whose
popularity was presented as intellectual vapidity and a general decline of the
profession.
One of the themes
linking the papers together was the pernicious influence of the market and the
subsequent rise of contemporary and modern art in academia and museums as a
result. As Pat Mainardi stated in
her introduction, “The problem, as I see it, is that art history has become
part of the global economy, but not all art history can participate in this
economy: only contemporary art offers the kinds of economic benefits that can
be reaped by these international emporia.” For Mainardi, this is another indication of what she termed
the new generation’s “presentism,” an approach she defines as largely
ahistorical and one that threatens to undermine the field with the “risk of
producing one-dimensional and shallow intellectuals whose area of expertise is
already irrelevant by the time they complete their degrees, whether MA or
PhD.” Although a thoughtful person
might politely ask “irrelevant to whom?” (because certainly different audiences
may have differing ideas of relevance), this is not a question the panel
addresses.
To me, this signals
that the crisis within art history is but a straw man, a convenient fiction
that hides the fundamental fact that many art historians have no sense of who
or what their audiences are or have become. Schooled in the notion that a priori “art history matters” (and more over that historical art
matters) they fail to understand their place in history: art history and
historical art meant specific things at a specific time to the audience they
engaged. To emerging audiences, art,
art history, and historical art may mean radically different things; if you
want to connect with these new audiences, it will undoubtedly be on their
terms, and these are not necessarily consonant with ones previously learned in
graduate school. Many of the
papers lamented what Mainardi defined as “presentism,” the attention that
contemporary art and contemporary art history is receiving by an emerging
generation. Missing from the
dialog was the fact that art history often engages in this “presentism,” and as
a practice has been defined historically by the influence of markets,
contemporary concerns (which only recently have aligned with contemporary art),
and perceptions of cultural cachet.
Indeed, to maintain
that the influence of markets is perverting a purer type of art history is naïve
on a number of fronts, the most obvious of which might well be the notion of
pure art history. It also requires
that we ignore the vast history of markets and collections in order to
maintain—as many do—that the academic study of art exists separately from the
marketplace. The idea sounds nice,
but is it true? Are the works of
the Renaissance that many venerate not the result of wealthy private and state
patrons consuming the work of contemporary artists? Is Fragonard’s oeuvre less important because he refused
state patronage and thought he could do better for himself engaging private
patrons? Are the modern paintings
in the Metropolitan Museum given by the Havermeyers somehow less important /
useful / desirable because they were collected by wealthy patrons? And what about Albert C. Barnes? I think if we look closely throughout
history we will find not only that markets have always been integral to art,
but—because of the influence of the wealthy in establishing collections and
institutions—art history too.
This phenomenon is
not confined to the primary market—interactions between artist and patron—but
exists as a result of the secondary market too. Scholarship tracks closely with market forces and this is
neither bad nor new. How many
books on 19th century American Art history existed before Maxim
Karolik’s donation to the MFA in Boston?
Without Karolik’s money, and the subsequent interest generated in the
market—through exhibitions and research—would John I H Baur, Barbara Novak,
William Gerdts, Ted Stebbins, or John Wilmerding have had the same
opportunities in this field? Would
there be any sustained study of the American Arts and Crafts had the market for
these objects not picked up in the 1960s?
Would the American Wing at the Met have existed without pioneer
collectors and record prices being paid by collectors in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries?
It seems doubtful, since from the founding of the Met in 1870 all the
way up to 1908, the Museum had no Colonial American decorative arts collection. It wasn’t until the Hudson Fulton
exhibition (made up entirely of loans from private collectors) that the Met
began a sustained interest in American Colonial Furniture. The first major collection to enter the
museum was that of H. Eugene Bolles who sold his collection to Mrs. Russell
Sage for the unheard of sum of $100,000.
With a little perspective,
Patricia Rubin’s belief that “Invoking crisis in 2011 is a call to attend to
the precarious situation of art history as a commodity in a market of wildly
fluctuating values” is no truer now that it has been in the past. The main difference is that for the
first time in a long time there is a substantial number of art historians whose
interests are not necessarily attuned with those of contemporary
collectors. Never having
considered how their own research and employment was in line with market values
and the cultural cachet of their generations, they operated on the assumption
that the interests of their generation were universal facts, rather than a
temporary condition. Instead of
viewing these changes as a natural part of the human process to which we are
all vulnerable, it has become a “crisis.”
Please feel free to comment as you wish, knowing that I have chosen to moderate comments after receiving numerous commercial posts and one rather unprofessional post directed at a student and her work. Provided you are not selling something, I am happy to approve your comments whether you agree with my review or not. I'd even welcome some healthy debate on this topic.
