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Abstract
The future of art history has much to offer and much at stake. Recent references to the discipline in popular media have encouraged a critical assessment of the so-called humanities crisis, revealing it to be a red herring for the more systemic ailments that afflict higher education. Art history has a role to play in changing the conversation about the arts and humanities in society as a whole. In an effort to spur this change, this essay describes and contextualizes Art History That, a crowd-sourced manifesto for the future of the discipline. Inspired by Claes Oldenburg's 1961 statement “I Am for an Art … ,” Art History That is both a playful literary experiment and an earnest effort to advocate for art history and its future.
Notes
1 Walker Art Center Archives, “Claes Oldenburg with Martin Friedman and Margie McKhann,18 May 1974, Walker Art Center,” unpublished typed manuscript, 17; hereinafter Walker Art Center Archives, Oldenburg.
2 Oldenburg's statement is a living document; both text and title have been variously revised and reproduced. The statement was first published in Environments, Situations, Spaces (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961). We take our excerpt from an expanded version in Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, eds., Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962) (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 39–42. The precise title, “I Am for an Art . . .”, appears most often in reproductions of this text, including Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 335–37. The catalog page with Oldenburg's text is available online at http://www.aaa.si.edu/assets/images/johnelle/fullsize/AAA_johnelle_20904.jpg along with the original typed manuscript at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/viewer/claes-oldenburg-artists-statement-environments-situations-spaces-catalog-7971/20905.
3 Walker Art Center Archives, Oldenburg.
5 This is a reference to Ginsberg's 1955 poem “Howl.”
6 Jennifer Epstein and Carrie Budoff Brown, “In Wisconsin, Obama Orders Review of Job Training Programs,” Politico, January 30, 2014, at http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/wisconsin-obama-job-training-102868.html. See also Scott Jaschik, “Obama vs. Art History,” Inside Higher Ed, January 31, 2014, at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/31/obama-becomes-latest-politician-criticize-liberal-arts-discipline.
7 Jennifer Schuessler, “President Obama Writes Apology to Art Historian,” New York Times, ArtsBeat, February 18, 2014, at http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/president-obama-writes-apology-to-art-historian/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.
8 The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2014), DVD; based on the book by Robert M. Edsel (with Bret Witter), The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (New York: Center Street, 2009).
9 Mark Brown and Helena Smith, “George Clooney, Bill Murray and Matt Damon Back Return of Elgin Marbles,” The Guardian, February 11, 2014, at http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/11/george-clooney-bill-murray-matt-damon-elgin-marbles.
10 We acknowledge here our debt to this very publication, and the seven essays that appeared under the collective title “The Crisis in Art History,” Visual Resources 27, no.4 (December 2011): 303–43. The authors featured in this special issue included editor Patricia Mainardi, Maxwell Anderson, Elizabeth W. Eaton, Pepe Karmel, Stephen Murray, and Patricia Rubin.
11 Tina Rivers, “Against Playing the Short Game: In Defense of Art History,” The Toast, February 4, 2014, at http://the-toast.net/2014/02/04/in-defense-of-art-history/.
12 AACU (Association of American Colleges and Universities), New Report on Liberal Arts Majors and Employment, January 22, 2014, at http://www.aacu.org/leap/nchems/index.cfm.
14 Oxford English Dictionary, 2014, sv “manifesto.” Emphasis added.
Additional information
AMY K. HAMLIN is Assistant Professor of Art History at St. Catherine University, St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, visual culture, and women in art. Having received her BA in art history at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, she went on to earn her MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and her PhD from the New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. She is presently working on a book project “Max Beckmann: Allegory and Art History” and is the author of articles on Beckmann as well as on Jasper Johns and William H. Johnson.
KAREN J. LEADER is Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, where she teaches courses in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European and American art. She received her BA at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA and PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has published on Gustave Courbet and on French caricature, and has a book project underway, titled “Aesthetics of Laughter: Caricature and Art in Nineteenth-Century France.” Her most recent project explores contemporary tattoo culture.