2
" The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed. "
― , A History of Art History
3
" Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art. "
― , A History of Art History
5
" Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on. "
― , A History of Art History
6
" The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater's Studies in the Renaissance his 'golden book' and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler's and Hildebrand's doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic's power to shape the evolution of art. In Wilde's dialogue of 1890, 'The True Function and Value of Criticism,' the straight man Ernest contends that 'the Greeks had no art-critics': 'By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.' The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him:
I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.
According to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact 'a nation of art-critics.' The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: 'I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.' Art is secondary from the start. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has already been shaped by art? 'The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind. "
― , A History of Art History
11
" The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking. "
― , A History of Art History
19
" Historians, theorists, and critics of contemporary art do not directly study the proliferation of non-art images and things in contemporary society, nor do they examine from a sociological or anthropological point of view the interactions of modern people with art. They do not need to because advertising, fashion, celebrities, television, tattoos, toys, comics, pornography, politics, iPhones, and stuff in general, as well as all the many modes of beholding and possessing are already the content of so much elite contemporary art. The images, thing, and practices have already been filtered and framed by art, absorbed into artworks whose autonomy - unlike the autonomy of the premodern works - remains unchallenged. The main task of the art historian of the modern and the contemporary is to justify the value of those works. The paradoxical result is that the art history of the present has nothing to say about mass culture that art itself doesn't already tell us. So-called mass or popular culture ought to be art history's topic, but it proves too difficult to grasp. The image-surfaces enfolding us will not take on density; they melt or disintegrate too quickly, such that art is everywhere but nowhere. How should art history, with its specialized conceptual toolbox, solve the puzzle of entertainment, when society itself has two or more minds about everything, admiring, for example, Hollywood movies that break box-office records on their first weekend and at the same time revering Vincent van Gogh because he was unappreciated in his own time - and yet not knowing exactly what, if anything, differentiates a painting by van Gogh from a well-crafted movie. "
― , A History of Art History
20
" The main shift, and it has been obvious for decades, is that art history can no longer occupy itself in an innocent fashion with the biography of form because art itself is no longer preoccupied with form. The generation of classic art history, from the 1890s to the 1920s, as by no means out of tune with an artistic modernism that, for all its rhetoric of rupture, still reckoned in ratios of good form to bad form, form to non-form, form to content. That early twentieth-century paradigm has long since broken down as art redistributes itself in events, vectors, emotions, ideas, clusters or swarms of artifice. Art today is less about form than about the conditions of possibility of effective speech and action, the tension between enunciation and performance, the virtues of images. Today creativity itself is differently distributed in society: in the mass media and social networks, i amateur or outsider art, in fashion elite and democratic, in the proliferation of recognized but little-esteemed aesthetic categories - 'the zany, the cute, and the interesting,' for example. Even the sophisticated discourses of modernism that have dominated art-history departments over the last three decades - the 'classic art history' of our time - are not keeping pace. They are still organized by master-discipline chains reaching back into the 1960s, chains of psychic involvement that binds generations, despite everything, to the old courses of form. "
― , A History of Art History
