by Jon Lackman | 26 October 2009 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terry Smith considers David Carrier’s 2008 book A World Art History and Its Objects:
“Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” … [Carrier] sets out to ask if such a world history is possible, decides that it is, and proposes a structure for it. The feeling that the history of art as a discipline should encompass all the visual arts of the world has been coming back into focus for a decade or more … Carrier aims to “demonstrate what art historians can learn from historians and from analytic philosophers” … [Carrier creates a] “basic structure for a world art history”. It consists of four parallel lines indicating the evolution of the art of Europe, China, India, and the Islamic World as occurring in parallel, with diagonal arrows indicating points of major contact … About these, Carrier believes, art historians should write “parallel stories,” thus producing “a “multicultural art history” … The problem is that a pile-up of parallels would bring his account perilously close to the essentialist generalities of the “the clash of civilizations” thesis … Carrier concludes that a multicultural history of world art will not become possible until Chinese, Indian, and Muslim art historians write their own narrative histories … Although he claims to offer a “political” analysis, the implications of postcolonial critique, now three decades deep, are not grasped … A worldly art history would, surely … devote considerable energy to tracing the trafficking in artifacts, the exchanging of artistic ideas, the differentiation and fusion that have occurred for millennia as cultures come into and go out of contact. The interaction between these regional and global flows and local art traditions and inventions is the core “object” of any world art history worth its name. An approach akin to this is identified as “intercultural” in what is probably the most useful publication to date on these questions, World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008) … The journal World Art, currently being prepared for its launch by the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, will channel these and other approaches.
