Masterdisciplinarity and the "pictorial turn"

• Autores: James D. Herbert
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 77, Nº 4, 1995, págs. 537-540
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Part of a symposium on interdisciplinarity. The writer argues that the most promising role for visual culture within the humanities lies in the interrogation of disciplinarity itself. He observes that, historically, certain disciplines at certain moments emerge as master disciplines, whereby they manufacture and disseminate the analytic tools deemed necessary to exploit the raw materials supplied by subordinate fields. If history was the master discipline that colonized the history of modern art in the 1970s, he asserts, then literary criticism assumed the role in the 1980s. He argues that at its most intriguing, this waning of one master discipline and waxing of another consists of an exploration of the fundamental incommensurability, yet mutual dependence, of existing disciplinary categories of knowledge. A critique of the autonomy of disciplines, he contends, may be best articulated from the perspective of the marginal field of art history.