It's appalling to think that a book like this may enter classrooms and inflict itself on young minds with little or no acquaintance with art history. So I have a suggestion for parents of high-school students: Find out whether the college that your child hopes to attend plans to assign "Art Since 1900" in its art-history courses. If so, apply elsewhere.
the wsj

- bill 12-11-2005 3:35 am

As someone who once considered becoming an English professor but wound up writing about contemporary art, I've always been struck by the fact that while scholars who write about Shakespeare or Milton call themselves literary critics, those who specialize in Velázquez or David call themselves art historians. What does the art historian mean by disidentifying himself with the critic? In art writing, the distinction between historians and critics is generally based on a rough distinction, first of all, between the objects of their attention: Critics write about more or less recent things, while historians deal with older ones. Of course, there's inevitably some overlap. These days the art of the 1960s and '70s is being combed for dissertation topics by young historians who may not have been born yet, while critics remain loath to abandon it as no longer contemporary--after all, many of the era's protagonists are still hard at work.

But there's another distinction to consider: A historian is assumed to be a credentialed academic, a professional, while a critic may be something else altogether--what the art theorist Thierry de Duve once nicely described as someone "whose profession it is to be an amateur." Some critics may have scholarly qualifications--indeed, might themselves be historians on their day off, as it were--but those qualifications are of secondary importance. Instead, the critic is a self-appointed observer; all that counts is that he offers an articulate account of aesthetic experience: "painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind," as one of the greatest art critics, the young Charles Baudelaire, put it in 1846. Erudition is no impediment to the critic, but imagination and gusto are more essential; an aptitude for generating ideas and interpretations is more valuable than the ability to test and verify them.
schwabsky
- bill 12-14-2005 12:13 am [add a comment]


I wonder if Barry will take over for Danto?
- tom moody 12-14-2005 2:23 am [add a comment]





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.