The post picks up on the fourth part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen over at Artrift.
Rick picks up on the calcified assumptions that underpin the way we regard artworks, artists and critical reflection from within the art institution. He asks whether these assumptions act to displace and marginalize Malraux’s account of art. Derek says that "...by its very nature Malraux’s account of art is neither art history nor aesthetics as those terms are generally understood today."
He then rightly says that this falling between two academic stools is not good grounds to disqualify Malraux’s account of art:
"The onus in such a case is surely on scholars to look beyond the boundaries of their existing systems of thought and try to come to grips with Malraux on his own terms."
Derek then makes some critical remarks about art history. Deservedly, because this particular discipline is one that gives the humanities a bad name. I remember art history as being about the mania for documentation, a cult of fine discriminationand very little interpretative criticism. Its academic practitioners were deeply hostile to theory (aesthetics, social science or the interpretation of texts), and they used biography to indicate autonomous art's social determination.
Thomas Crowe says that:
"...the received image of the discipline is of a genteel, barely intellectual pursuit, untouched by theory or even self-reflection, more about black-tie openings than shirt-sleeved intellectual debate, tainted by snobbery, social climbing, and the art trade, historically the soft option among the humanities."
This is downside of the humanities. Those like Invisible Adjunct, who righly defend the humanities in a corporatised university, do not consider that some of the disciplines of the humanities are not actually worth defending.
What the discipline of art history gives us is the linear development of art within closed sequences of an autonomous history of genres. This presupposes static social structures, which is an untenable presupposition today.
There is little chance of them reading Malraux and critically reflecting on their understanding of the aesthetic as there is of them reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory But things are changing for the better with recognition of the body as a legitimate way of knowing.
This loosening up of calcified assumptions may open up possibilities to explore ways of treating the history of images in a fundamentally different manner than we are accustomed to.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 9, 2003 12:31 AM | TrackBack