Counter Culture

Jacob Burckhardt never wrote the book. His classes on the history of Italian Renaissance art might rightly claim to be one of the birthplaces of academic art history; yet, he never put their contents into print.[1]

Survey textbooks were written . . . by exceptional scholars like Fredrick Hartt, Ernst Gombrich, and Arnold Hauser. These writings were not ways of making extra money, vanity projects, or distractions from their “real” work, but thoughtful and sometimes argumentative contributions to broad methodological and philosophical debates.[2]

Feminist art history came out of collective consciousness raising activities. Learning and teaching the history of women’s art was a personal and political activity before it ever became a scholarly one.[3]

Visual culture studies started with great classes and teachers finding ways to introduce critical thought into students’ everyday lives.[4]

Until the turn of the twenty-first century, art historical teaching and scholarship were entangled in powerfully productive ways. Yes, all of these versions of art history have deep structural problems. And yes, we are now rightly reckoning with their legacies of blindness, prejudice, and privilege. But if there is a discipline to be saved, it will need to be one that is taught as well as published.

And yet, as we debate the global turn and art history’s complicity with colonialism, white supremacy, and nationalism, we promote the succinct scholarly monograph and focused journal article. There’s a mismatch in scale, not to mention a tendency to retreat into the comfort of our chosen fields.

Elitism lingers in not only the insular hierarchies of top university departments, but in the way access to archives, images, and travel is limited to those with “research funds.” The financial resources of the discipline are concentrated in a few institutions who largely trade them amongst themselves. Gaining admission means not only conforming to the unwritten rules of predominantly white and largely upper middle-class enclaves, but also prioritizing research over teaching and service.

The cult of productivity (the sacrosanct scholarly clock, the paper and citation count, the demands to account for “holes” in one’s publishing record) has meant that ideas are first presented in print or conference paper rather than in dialogue. Time spent teaching or even having conversations is time that could have been spent writing.

And all the while, enrollment in art history classes dwindles. We must adjust our priorities!

Teaching is counterproductive in the most wonderful of ways. It is time consuming, iterative, and always demanding refinement, while being almost completely ephemeral. It is at its best when students’ progress and collective learning are valued over the reputation of the instructor. It is synthetic and analytic rather than industrious. Teaching is about gathering available information, finding connections and holes, and figuring out how to present it coherently. In short, it is the never-ending cultivation and pruning of a shared knowledge. Yet art history today does not have many public conversations about how we do that.

Teaching is an encounter with the real world and new ideas, if you let it be. In order to teach students well, we must learn from and about them. The more we welcome diverse identities; the more we listen to people’s problems, concerns, and perspectives; the more we recognize that students come to us from intersecting, highly developed visual cultures; the more art history will evolve to include and reflect those things. Open discussions that allow for critiques of scholarly authority and a pedagogical commitment to seeking out histories that are relevant today are how instructors learn to think differently. Responsive teaching is the path to remaking the discipline.

The new new new (new new) art history will come from the classroom . . . or “it will not be.”[5]

[1] “It is the most serious difficulty of the history of civilization that a great intellectual process must be broken up into single, and often into what seem arbitrary categories in order to be in any way intelligible. It was formerly our intention to fill up the gaps in this book by a special work on the ‘Art of the Renaissance’—an intention, however, which we have been able to fulfill only in part” (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, S.G.C. Middlemore, trans. p. 5). So Burckhardt begins his great work with a lament that many of us have felt, especially those who like big projects (and spend time teaching). Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg were both students of Burckhardt and so for that matter was Friedrich Nietzsche. For more on Burckhardt’s general influence, see John Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000) and Maurizio Ghelardi and Max Seidel, eds., Jacob Burckhardt: Storia della cultura, storia dell’arte (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 2002). And for the specific influence on the art historians mentioned above: Evonne Levy, Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845-1945): Burckhardt, Wolfflin, Gurlitt, Brinchmann, Sedlmayr (Basel: Schwabe, 2015) and Emily Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). [2] Hartt’s broad survey Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture was originally published by Abrams in 1976. The Story of Art was published by Phaidon in 1950. Hauser’s Social History of Art and Literature came out in 1951. [3] The most centers where these activities occurred were the A. I. R. gallery in New York (founded in 1972) and the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of Art (begun 1971). [4] Top visual culture scholars often reflect on the origins of this field of study, for example Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016) and James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003). [5] A little shout out to that great writer of manifestos, Andre Breton, and reminder that Surrealism encouraged many twentieth-century scholars to rethink aesthetics and history. Also a chance to say that for all its faults, I still have Mad Love (originally 1937, Mary Ann Caws, trans., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 19) for this discipline and its practitioners.