Partisan Canons - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822341069 ISBN 13: 9780822341062

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change.

Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history.

Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Brzyski is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Kentucky.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Anna Brzyski's anthology "Partisan Canons" fills a long-recognized need in the literature on the history of art. The essays in this volume approach the canon of works of art on which the discipline is built from a variety of perspectives: how did it come about, on what principles is it built, does it have universal validity? These thoughtful and probing texts promise to afford art historians and others insight into one of the most deeply naturalized values of this profession."--Keith Moxey, author of "The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History"

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PARTISAN CANONS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4106-2

Contents

Introduction: Canons and Art History ANNA BRZYSKI..................................................................................................11. Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the Nineteenth-century Canon of European Art ROBERT JENSEN......................................272. Canon and Globalization in Art History JAMES ELKINS.............................................................................................553. Mere Exposure, Reproduction, and the Impressionist Canon JAMES CUTTING..........................................................................794. Imitation and Authority: The Creation of the Academic Canon in French Art, 1648-1870 PAUL DURO..................................................955. Chinese Art, the National Palace Museum, and Cold War Politics JANE C. JU.......................................................................1156. Masculine Reason or Feminine Spirit: Gender Battles in the Werkbund's Canonization of National Style DESPINA STRATIGAKOS........................1357. Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe's Modern Art JENNY ANGER...........................................1578. The Multiple Masculinities of Canonical Modernism: James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred H. Barr Jr. in the 1930s MARCIA BRENNAN.....................1799. "Gardner" Variety Formalism: Helen Gardner and Art through the Ages BARBARA JAFFEE..............................................................20310. The Rembrandt Research Project: Issues and Controversies Raised by a Canonical Oeuvre LINDA STONE-FERRIER......................................22511. Making Art in the Age of Art History, or How to Become a Canonical Artist ANNA BRZYSKI.........................................................24512. Kinkade and the Canon: Art History's (Ir)Relevance MONICA KJELLMAN-CHAPIN......................................................................26713. Canons Apart and Apartheid Canons: Interpellations beyond the Colonial in South African Art JULIE MCGEE........................................28914. Coda: Canons and Contemporaneity TERRY SMITH...................................................................................................309Bibliography........................................................................................................................................327About the Contributors..............................................................................................................................355Index...............................................................................................................................................359

Chapter One

Measuring Canons: Reflections on Innovation and the Nineteenth-century Canon of European Art ROBERT JENSEN

The Canon and Its Discontents

Atruism: intellectual disciplines are dominated by acts of convention. Or, as Hayden White once put it, "Every discipline, I suppose, is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do." This is no more or less true of art history. However, other disciplines, especially those outside the humanities, are better prepared by intellectual tradition to consider challenges to those conventions, to accept paradigm shifts where sufficient evidence makes opposition no longer feasible. Because the sciences especially employ the procedural model of hypothesis and verification, scientists (and many "hard" social scientists) have reasonably objective means to distinguish between personal values and tastes and what might be legitimate, if opposing, contributions to a field of inquiry.

Art historians, however, generally share in the recent humanist distrust of scientific methods and of the positivism they typically express. They assume that in culture all hypotheses or general statements are so ruled by contingency as to be ultimately unverifiable. Nowhere is this habit of mind more evident than in their general avoidance of quantitative methods, which proceed from evidence to interpretation. Faced with an approach fundamentally at odds with the normative procedures and assumptions of the discipline, their response has been either to marginalize the work (let sociologists and economists do it so long as it does not touch on issues perceived as core to the discipline) or to ignore it.

Art historians, of course, must generalize; however, they rarely pursue those generalizations in a systematic and ultimately verifiable way. The modus operandi in recent years has been to apply a theory or theories to a particular object of study, without seeking to examine the validity of the theory or theories in light of the evidence obtained. Rather, art historians often accept only such evidence as conforms to the assumptions upon which the applied theories are based. In this way, theories get treated as empirically valid findings rather than as descriptive models. Evidence contradictory to the hypothesis prima facie is either ignored or otherwise suppressed. Similarly, art historical interpretations, once established, are often treated as if they constituted factual knowledge. These parallel habits-the suspicion of generalization, the theorization that predetermines evidence, and the unexamined persistence of received interpretations-have been expressed so often in recent art history that it is now all too rare to find art historians generalizing about what they can factually demonstrate, but all too common to find them generalizing about what they believe. When, for example, art historians write about the "commodification of art" are they in fact submitting Marx's idea of commodity fetishism to serious critique or are they simply finding confirmation of Marx's perception in the material under study?

Nowhere are conventional beliefs and procedures more in evidence than in the discussion of canons. It is a subject as sensitive as a toothache, because the question of canons touches upon the biggest concerns the discipline now faces. Matters of race, gender, geographical location and cultural traditions, and so on are reshaping not only the objective field the discipline is working on, but also the attitudes and methods used to interpret the rapidly expanding arena of inquiry that some continue to call art and others "visual culture."

It is unfortunate, then, that art historians have tended to make of canons straw men, safeguarding outworn traditions, girded by privilege and by the force of capital, which are mechanisms of exclusion favoring the few at the expense of the many. Curiously joined to this oppressive view of canons is a long-standing conviction held by many art historians that canons are in fact highly mutable cultural institutions, matters of taste and changing fashions, and therefore subject to continual change and revision, truly made out of straw rather than oppressive marble. This alternating view of hegemony and instability arises from the discipline's insistence on approaching canons exclusively from the vantage of qualitative judgments. In the world of endlessly shifting perspective and uncertain standards of evidence, canons might naturally appear to be both impervious and gaseous.

It should be obvious, however, that individuals do not generate canons; whatever else they are, canons represent forms of consensus built up over time. In such cases, quantitative analysis is uniquely suited to understanding the collective perceptions of a discipline,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822341069
• ISBN 13: 9780822341062
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 376
• Herausgeber: Brzyski
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande