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Is Art History Global?
This is the third volume in The Art Seminar , James Elkin's series of conversations on art and visual studies.
Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.
Is Art History Global? stages an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. Participants range from Keith Moxey of Columbia University to Cao Yiqiang, Ding Ning, Cuautemoc Medina, Oliver Debroise, Renato Gonzalez Mello, and other scholars.
- GenresArtArt HistoryHistory
472 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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About the author
James Elkins
101 books220 followersJames Elkins (1955 – present) is an art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 6, 2024
This book offers a colourful spectrum of views about the discipline of art history. That makes it a lot more refreshing and instructive than other art history tomes I’ve read and in some cases reviewed here on Goodreads. Motivating this book was the editor’s sense of urgency: “Far and away the most pressing problem facing the discipline is the prospect of world art history”.
Fortunately for the reader, that fixation didn't block dissenting voices. Many contributors, and the editor, exprress concerns about “conceptual imperialism”. They see needs to de-throne Eurocentric approaches to art and its history – let’s say, the dead white males dominating discussion and the production of knowledge for centuries. For the editor that reformation should bring on “Scholarship that is attentive to non-Western concepts and methods is arguably the most promising and intellectually difficult future for a world art history.”
Some contributors don't share the urgency of creating global art history, given other more pressing issues. In arguments for a world-spanning discipline one writer sees traces of essentialism in multiculturalist and postcolonial critiques of art history. Two contributors, Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray, express even stronger doubts:
How then can “world art history” ask the non-West to feign amnesia and return to a past “untarnished” by the West? For whose benefit? Despite its best intentions, then, this project is dependent on a territorialized binary: the (multicultural) “West,” contained within a geopolitical space called Euro-America, and its Other, a (monocultural) “non-West,” that is, the rest-of-the-world.
Apart from the cut-and-thrust of critique and counter-critique, the book presented for me dozens of new insights and facts, such as that Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, massively influential in university courses and beyond, was written for children!
In short, as a forum for informed and diverse views, this book has a lot of thoughtful things to say about how art and culture more broadly can be studied and appreciated beyond dominant paradigms.
Fortunately for the reader, that fixation didn't block dissenting voices. Many contributors, and the editor, exprress concerns about “conceptual imperialism”. They see needs to de-throne Eurocentric approaches to art and its history – let’s say, the dead white males dominating discussion and the production of knowledge for centuries. For the editor that reformation should bring on “Scholarship that is attentive to non-Western concepts and methods is arguably the most promising and intellectually difficult future for a world art history.”
Some contributors don't share the urgency of creating global art history, given other more pressing issues. In arguments for a world-spanning discipline one writer sees traces of essentialism in multiculturalist and postcolonial critiques of art history. Two contributors, Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray, express even stronger doubts:
How then can “world art history” ask the non-West to feign amnesia and return to a past “untarnished” by the West? For whose benefit? Despite its best intentions, then, this project is dependent on a territorialized binary: the (multicultural) “West,” contained within a geopolitical space called Euro-America, and its Other, a (monocultural) “non-West,” that is, the rest-of-the-world.
Apart from the cut-and-thrust of critique and counter-critique, the book presented for me dozens of new insights and facts, such as that Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art, massively influential in university courses and beyond, was written for children!
In short, as a forum for informed and diverse views, this book has a lot of thoughtful things to say about how art and culture more broadly can be studied and appreciated beyond dominant paradigms.
November 9, 2010
An interesting collection of essays and perspectives on the subject of art history, and whether or not it can--and maybe whether or not it should--be a global discipline.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews