The Language of Art History

Abstract

A WEIRD THING about last ten years has been quite how many art historians have been beating their breasts about theoretical inadequacies of activity, and New Literary History has admirably registered that thudding, with a more representative spread of opinion than any of art historians' own journals I see. To take three types: Kurt W. Forster,1 who represents a line found in a rather fuller and sharper form in journal Kritische Berichte, deplores our formalism, our assimilation of art history to history of ideas, our breathless affirmativeness about works we study, our concentration on high art at expense of genres like film and poster, our lack of self-awareness about our own preconceptions and their social roots, our failure to develop a genuine social-historical approach: The only means of gaining an adequate grasp of old artifacts lies in dual critique of ideology which sustained their production and use, and of current cultural interests that have turned works of art into a highly privileged class of consumer and didactic goods. James S. Ackerman,2 by contrast, sees root of our trouble in a hybrid philosophical base: Without knowing it, my colleagues have grounded their method in tradition of nineteenth-century positivism conceived to justify scientific empiricism. But then we have absurdly taken into this an unconscious value system inherited from Neoplatonic idealism of Renaissance. No wonder, then, if we are torn between form and content, social and aesthetic, history and criticism. What we need to do is to replace present irrational collage of traditions that constitute our basic value premises with consciously articulated principles that correspond to what we actually believe. We should evaluate art, and in light of something called the concept of humane values, preliminarily described. David Rosand3 offers moderate recommendations in a line running immediately from an influential article by Leo Steinberg called Objectivity and Shrinking Self,4 which worries about us compromising our individual selves in attempt to see other men's or periods' works from