by Jon Lackman | 21 October 2008 | Asia
In her introduction to the recently published conference volume Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, Asia Society director Vishaka Desai writes:
More than a century ago, great luminaries of Asian art Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Kakuz?, and Ananda Coomaraswamy … began to argue for the rightful place of Asian art in the field of art history … None of them focused on the emerging art practices in Asia that looked to the West for inspiration. In fact, they decidedly derided such efforts as impure and not reflecting the “true” essence of arts of Asia …
[Today] Not only is Asian contemporary art taking center stage in terms of museum acquisitions and as a preferred field of inquiry for many incoming graduate students; the spiritual or unique contrasting qualities of Asian art, so prized by our early predecessors, are now of lesser interest …
At the end of a full day of presentations and talk … A number of us were struck by the fact that much of the intellectual energy now focused on the study of contemporary art … for the first time I felt the need to make a case for the study of traditional, premodern arts of Asia.
