Spectres after Marx: Contemporary Art's Contiguous Histories

Abstract

This essay stems from a scepticism about a core prospect for a 'twenty-first-century art history'. Specifically, it derives from doubts about the constitution of a global art history that at least until James Elkins published his renowned and polemical review in The Art Bulletin was perhaps not quite 'the most pressing problem facing the discipline' (as Elkins fired in the review's opening salvo). This is the deep concern that we can talk about 'a' note the singular here global art history, and it is a concern that aligns me with the numerous criticisms of Elkins's discourse in recent years, including those published in the anthology (edited by Elkins) titled Is Art History Global? By what criteria, for instance, are we to demarcate this art history from the supposedly distinct disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, or, more slippery still, art criticism? Who defines these criteria so that institutional norms and forms may, in Elkins's words, be 'compatible wherever they are taught', as though heading towards a conceptual homeostasis driven by consensus, the compatible, or even the revenge of universality? Does this still smack of a certain teleology, one that shifts from conflicting local and national art histories to a more harmoniously global art history a trajectory that draws art history's future a little too close, perhaps, towards the supposed 'end of history', and the end of conceptual or ideological conflict, as trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama two decades ago? Or is a global art history, as Elkins on occasion implies, more synonymous with histories of non-Western art, such that a split re-emerges between an art history of the globe and a Western art history that, in reality and by virtue of its subsistence, still has global reign?