A. Serrani and N. Pitto, The List and the Birth of the Art Historian. Barcelona, September 22, 2021 (original) (raw)
Conference Booklet 'Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities' - The Making of the Humanities IX.
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The conference seeks to examine the shaping of art history as a discipline during the 19 th century in relation to artistic training and exchanges between artists and scholars. The development of art history has been associated with an array of socio-political and economic factors such as the formation of a bourgeois public, the politics of national identity and state legitimacy or the needs of an expanding art market. This conference aspires to explore yet another, less studied dimension: the extent to which the historical study of art was also rooted in an intention to inform contemporary artistic production.
The Revaluation of Art History
Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics
Recent debates on the content and objectives of a global art history have been accompanied by an increasing number of questions about its historical foundations. Is the degree of attention that is now devoted to non-Western art really such a new phenomenon, or does it have its own history? Is it the case, as one often reads, that people only started looking at art from a global perspective after the profound economic and geopolitical changes of the late twentieth century, with the year 1989 generally being cited as the decisive caesura? Was it really the present generation of art critics and historians who first recognised the Eurocentric bias of their subject and started to clamour for its revision? And lastly, is there any truth in the notion that all prior art-historical research was confined to national historiographies and as a consequence never even tried to replace the national paradigm with the idea of an international art, a global art or a world art? No small amount of energy has been dedicated to answering this question of late, and though our historiographical knowledge remains fragmentary there can now be no doubt that the current concern with non-Western art is by no means new. On the contrary, it is quite easy to show that art historians have been looking beyond the borders of Europe and seeking to explain and understand what they found there ever since the formation of the discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. In the years around 1900 in particular there were many researchers who started to go beyond mere descriptions of the alterity of non-European artefacts and actually began to concern themselves with the multifarious relationships between European and non-European art, that is, with the mutual influences, dependencies and interactions between them, even if the resulting value system was often very rigid and generally tended to present European art as the apogee of global development. 1 In any case, from around 1890 to 1930 the topic was an extremely popular one among art historians, and it is a striking fact that most of the researchers who were interested in world art came from the German-speaking countries.
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