The crisis of "art history"

• Autores: Irving Lavin
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 78, Nº 1, 1996, págs. 13-15
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Part of a symposium on art history and its theories. The writer discusses the reorientation that has taken place in art history since he entered graduate school in the early 1950s. He argues that at that time, theory still had its classic sense of an abstract structure in which individual phenomena might be accorded a reasonably explicable place and within the parameters of which an evolutionary process might be discerned without value judgment or any other form of tendentious manipulation. Theory now, he maintains, has a very different meaning, of which tendentiousness has became, unabashedly, the very trademark. He discusses some of the consequences of this revision, including devisualization and instrumentalization, and outlines the principles of his own professional credo in an effort to help the field survive the recent assaults on its integrity.