by Jon Lackman | 27 October 2008 | Theory
In the October 2008 issue of Frieze, James Elkins has published “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Across the top half of each page runs one narrative, “Five reasons to be pessimistic about the art world”; across the bottom half runs a counter-narrative (printed upside down), “Five reasons to be optimistic about the art world.” The first page reads:
Visual studies has stalled. The field, which emerged in the early 1990s, had great potential: it promised to be the place where you could study images of all sorts, outside of fine art. The allegedly moribund field of art history was to be critiqued, and a new interdisciplinary space was to be opened between art history, anthropology, film studies, media studies, literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology and performance. Visual studies was to be trans-disciplinary, non-disciplinary, sub-disciplinary. It was to be the place where television, film, video, advertising and photography could be analyzed together, where Erwin Panofsky, George Kubler, Meyer Schapiro and Ernst Gombrich would give way to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Visual studies was to provide serious political critique, an analysis of the operator, a renewed interest in the gaze, a rethinking of post-colonial theory, a genuinely international scope, a reach beyond the art world and beyond the narrow precincts of the humanities. But that promise has been dissipated, and the field remains a collage of special-interest studies that fail to cohere into a larger project or extend beyond the familiar confines of fine art and mass media.
[upside down] Visual studies is triumphing. Visual studies is spreading around the world, with new programmes opening in Central and South America, South-East Asia, China, Eastern Europe and South Africa. There is evidence, from student enrolment, that visual studies is overtaking art history, and it is possible that visual studies may absorb and transform art history in the coming decades. Visual studies emphasis on agency and visuality, as opposed to visual objects, is a transformative re-reading of art history. It is genuinely trans-disciplinary, and if it doesn’t cohere, that is simply a sign of strength. Visual studies is open to film and media studies, visual anthropology, sociology, economics and other fields, and it has the capacity to become a unifying force in university life, bringing together people from various disciplines with a general interest in visuality. The diversity of journals that are concerned with visual studies – from the Journal of Visual Studies to Critical Inquiry – shows the strength of the subject. It would be difficult to point a field in the humanities that is growing more quickly or generating more interest.
In his conclusion, Elkins writes:
I put the optimistic [arguments] after the pessimistic ones so that the piece ends on a positive note, and also to create a little puzzle. I think that if you read the piece straight through, it appears that the optimistic arguments answer the pessimistic ones, but actually they don’t. The pessimistic arguments answer the optimistic arguments, and in fact the optimistic arguments are arranged so they misunderstand the pessimistic ones.
