A&O – ART HISTORY

ART & ORGANISM

ART HISTORY

Knowing the past can alert us to the biases that now inform our perceptions.  We are, of course, immersed in the past–carried along in this”river of time” (to use Oliver Sacks’ term).  Goethe was quoted by Tallman (2020) for his observation that beauty is never universal:

Excerpts from Tallman (2020):

A&O – ART HISTORY and its meaning for particulars and generalities. 

• For example, statues celebrating soldiers of the North and South after the American civil war were erected had messages …” delivered by whom they represent, not how they do that representing. Art history, on the other hand, is all about the how—about style and form and the shaping of perceptions beyond obvious subject matter. Divorcing content from presentation is what art history does.” [BUT more clearly it is a matter of an aide-mémoire to celebrate some specific individual or event OR the ideas —the deeper meaning beyond an item in the history book–the specifics or the generalities they represent]

…  “Vasari’s descriptions of artworks are cursory, his analysis almost nonexistent. But he established a canon—Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, et al.—and through it a sense of what makes good art: naturalism (making things look like real life) and disegno, a principle that Wood neatly defines as “the correct ratio between the real and the true.”

… “Winckelmann^[1] set in play two crucial concepts for art history: style as the basis for attribution, and art as the reflexive representation of a people. This, for Michaud, is where the trouble starts. He quotes the Austrian art historian (and facilitator of Nazi art-looting in Poland) Dagobert Frey: “It is with Winckelmann that, for the first time, ‘national character’ was seen to lie at the origin of differences in art.” And in Winckelmann’s equation of real bodies and fictive statues, Michaud identifies a pernicious equation between biology and culture:

Once Winckelmann had established this intimate and organic link between a people and its art, it became customary to see art not simply as a social activity…, but as a peculiarly natural function of the body of a people: i.e., as a sort of bodily secretion of the nation as a whole.

Goethe … “concluded that beauty is never universal:

The man who emerges from childhood and raises his eyes does not find nature, as it were, pure and naked around him…. He is so enclosed within imposed acclimatizations, conventional usages, favourite customs, venerable traditions, treasured monuments, beneficial laws, and so many splendid products of art that he never learns to distinguish what is original and what is derived. 

“ … Every handmade object involves decisions of style and form that can be categorized and that may be meaningful, and the fence posts between archaeology, anthropology, and art history were never clearly marked. In 1919 the Austrian architect Adolf Loos claimed:

If nothing were left of an extinct people but a single button, I would be able to infer, from the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.²

It is this sort of cultural phrenology—measuring the lumps and ridges of objects so as to diagnose the mental and moral characteristics of the people behind them—that Michaud finds so alarming. He senses the moral peril of viewing cultural differences as hereditary and immutable, and of understanding individual makers as mere instruments of biological destiny.”

… “Art history is, inevitably, a story imposed on a selected group of artifacts by people who, consciously or unconsciously, have predilections and agendas. Ideally, the story grows from the objects, and the question of which objects is what animates both conservative critics and the protesters in the streets. As Wood and Michaud demonstrate, the canon has never been static. New things come in, old things get weeded out and sometimes come back. As for the current row over monuments, memorials, and statues, a few things are clear. We cannot limit public art to works whose subjects and styles are in lockstep with our own ethics; our museums would be empty if we did. Neither, however, can we ignore the reality that certain forms of public display act as endorsements of the values of those who erected them.”

(Tallman 2020)^[2]