Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?

Abstract

economic significance. Art historians may therefore be distracted by this institutional and public success of their discipline from a critical examination of its scholarly foundations. From time to time during the past decades, there have been resolute attempts to redirect scholarly practice. Some came from a socio-historical point of view, others from psychological and philosophical vantage.' Independent of their relative merit, however, these correctives brought surprisingly little change into the mainstream of art historical scholarship and practice, which simultaneously reached a growing number of students and broad segment of the general public. It may be useful-not least for scholars in other historical disciplines-to examine some of the basic assumptions underlying art historical scholarship as it is now widely understood, taught, and institutionalized. The daily work of art historians appears to be founded on three basic concepts: history of style, artistic biography, and the tradition of imagery (or iconography). All three are constructs that provide a scaffolding around which a diverse and incoherent mass of information can be organized, but they have the disadvantage of being basically static in nature. Postulating internal developments is merely a means of restoring a semblance of change to closed categories, like the awkward linkages of transitional styles, ages and artists, or the sequence of phases in biography.2 Constant reference to style and artistic biography as given historical