by Jon Lackman | 19 February 2009 | Uncategorized
Tate Britain is marking the 40th anniversary of the book and television series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s “epic survey of one thousand five hundred years of western culture,” with a series of debates. Debate participant and Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones writes:
Reading Clark is like drinking champagne compared with the small beer of most art history. In the 20th century, art history became less eloquent and more academic than it had ever been before. Victorians had Ruskin and Pater and Burckhardt but by the 1950s, people were banging their heads against the iconographic school of art history whose greatest exemplars – Panofsky, Warburg, Gombrich – are still worth studying but only after you have already got a very good sense of the basics. In other words, art historians in Clark’s lifetime became specialists. Nowadays they’re even more obscurantist, having discovered “theory.”
Lawrence Weschler’s work is also enjoying a revisiting. The University of California Press is re-issuing Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, his 1982 book of interviews with artist Robert Irwin, and publishing True to Life, a book of interviews with David Hockney.
Responding to the question “What’s the last great book about art – not by you – that you’ve read?” Weschler tells the San Francisco Chronicle:
It turns out that English lit professors write great books about art that don’t get read by art historians. Edward Snow’s book about Vermeer is a great book. His book about Brueghel is even better – 15 years of looking at one painting. It is so smart. And then Richard Halpern wrote a book on Norman Rockwell that takes Rockwell seriously, claiming that Rockwell’s much more sophisticated than he’s given credit for. I did a whole conference around the book at NYU, which was called “Shocked! Shocked! Just How Many Times Can This Country Lose Its Innocence?” It turned out to be about Abu Ghraib.
I concur that art history has gotten increasingly academic and laden with theory, making it more inaccessible – and thus less interesting – to the general public. I’m all ears for proposed solutions!