What’s Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in the Age of Cultural Studies

Abstract

Abstract The gradual shift from literary studies to cultural and multicultural studies is probably the most useful change to have occurred within the American academy in the past decade. The literary studies approach, to the humanities tended to make a clear-cut distinction between works of art and works of mass or popular culture. Works of art were the primary field of study for the critic, whose secondary role was to explicate or illuminate these art objects. Yet it is difficult to provide a rule for distinguishing great art from cultural artifact, and the ideological biases of much of the prevailing literary and art connoisseurship have served literary studies poorly. In contrast, the cultural studies approach seems both more reasonable and more malleable. We start not with art and its others but with a variety of signifying practices. The field of possible attention is vast and might just as well include film comedies of the thirties as Dickens’s novels, Kewpie dolls as much as Picassos, although, for practical purposes, the focus of any given study will be narrowed. The shift to poststructuralist cultural studies has been precipitated by an intriguing variety of frames of interpretation theoretical, historical, psychological, and sociological-and within each of these frames there are a number of distinct, and competing, methodologies. The present crisis of cultural studies results from the seeming autonomy of the frames of interpretation from what they are to interpret; we have less objects of study than what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities.”