by Jon Lackman | 2 October 2007 | Americas
In the summer 2007 issue of American Art (published by the Smithsonian), editor Cynthia Mills writes:
… we can sense a shift in the questions scholars are bringing to the nation’s visual history … from inquiries into science and sensation to a “serious” attention to humor … studies of American art and artists, once considered “inferior” to research on Greek and Roman sculpture and works by Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso, are flourishing … [This] journal heads into its third decade amid a wealth of programs and resources related to American art history … we find people from a greater range of backgrounds, ethnicities, and income levels entering the field — with women far outnumbering men … they are not in general utopians, methodological ideologues, or provocateurs but more often pragmatic investigators and thinkers who are open to a wide range of approaches to study, irreverent about a “canon” of “masterworks” and often interested in “democratic” forms of visual communication … They seem impatient with debates about which single approach to interpretation is best — Marxist, feminist, lit-crit, or psychosexual — and especially eager to investigate how art functions as a system of representation.
Among the “hot” subfields within American art history, Mills identifies and discusses “boundaries, both chronological and national,” “science, mathematics, and philosophy,” “body, mind, and sensation,” “nature and ecology,” “photography and new media,” “material culture,” “race, class, and gender,” “faith and ethics,” and “humor.”
