by Jon Lackman | 12 April 2006 | Conferences
The UK’s Association of Art Historians just had its annual conference. University of London PhD student Charlotte Frost blogged it: “In my own session, ‘Does Art History Have a Future?’: the paper ‘Is There Life in Art History?’ by Gavin Butt … proposed the idea that many of the forms scholarly art historical endeavour takes are rather inanimate, and questioned whether such products might be reinvigorated/reinvented by making them more animate … This led him to discuss the ‘speech act’ in academia alongside experimental art historical approaches such as those by Rebecca Schneider (and later Matthew Goulish and Kate Phelan), and in his own recent work … Finally, in a session I was unable to attend (Institutional Critique as Institution) I heard reports that a spoof panel discussion was staged precisely to address the conference as a medium of art history.”
Art historian Rebecca Brown, who apparently did not get her fill of mega-conferences at CAA two months ago, also attended AAH, and it appears she may have made it to the spoof session. She quotes from a paper titled “White Box/Black Box: The Modernist Iconography of Art Historical Powerpoint Presentations.” She also notes that AAH “is very much unlike CAA in its dearth of non-western papers or panels. Certainly no panels entirely made up of non-western scholars or focused on a particular region, something you have all the time at CAA.”
