The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives 3110681102, 9783110681109

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The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing

James Elkins

The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives

Picture Credits: Chapter 8, Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7: James Elkins: Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America, in: Transcultural Studies, Nr. 1, 1 (2010) (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-ts-19283): Fig. 4, 6, 8, 10, 11. Fig. 5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rihard_Jakopi%C4%8D_-_Pri_svetilki.jpg. Fig. 6: https://www.bellasartes.gob.ar/en/collection/work/2694/, © Foujita Foundation/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021.

ISBN 978-3-11-068110-9 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072247-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948118 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Layout and typesetting: hawemannundmosch, Berlin Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  13 1. The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17 2. Leading Terms: Master Narrative, Western, Central, Peripheral, North Atlantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  39 3. Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  63 4. The Example of Art Since 1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  95 5. State of the Field: Six Current Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 6. Reasons Why Escape is Not Possible  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  145 7. Finding Terms and Methods for Art History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  153 8. Writing about Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  165 9. The Most Difficult Problem for Global Art History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  193 Envoi: Writing Itself  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Main Points  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  209 Index  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  215

Introduction

This is a book about the ways people write about the history of modern and contemporary art in different parts of the world. From the vast art world and art market, I want to look just at the writing about art; and within art writing I want to consider only texts that are concerned with modern and contemporary art history; and within those texts, I am mainly interested not in what is said about art but how it is said. This may appear to be a specialized topic, but to adapt William Gass’s phrase, I think it is the heart of the heart of the matter for understanding the impending globalization of art. The subject variously called “global art history” or “world art history” has become a concern in art history departments worldwide. Sometimes global art history focuses on the practices of art around the world: how they differ from one region or nation to the next, whether they are becoming more uniform in the age of international curation, how cultural practices disseminate and produce new combinations. But my title phrase does not refer to what is studied—the “master narratives” of art history, freshman survey courses, and introductory textbooks—but how it is studied. The dissolution of the introductory “story of art,” as E. H. Gombrich called it, is impelled by interests in decolonization and identity, and by the ongoing introduction of unfamiliar art practices into the art world. But as the art world is becoming more diverse and inclusive, writing about art is becoming less diverse and more uniform. There is, I think, a single model for how art history and theory should be written, and it is spreading, largely unremarked, around the world: that is my subject in this book. The question of how to write art history is at a crucial point: it is recognized as a central part of the discipline of art history, but discussions of how art history is written around the world still rely on incomplete, local, and even anecdotal evidence. The study of the writing of world art history—again, in distinction to the study of how art has been practiced around the world—seems at once indispensable in an age of increasing globalization, and also optional, something that might be added to a student’s curriculum or a scholar’s itinerary.

7

Introduction

I think that the increasing worldwide uniformity of scholarly and critical writing on art is the single most important problem in the field of art history, and I think we need to consider it first, even before we write on our various specializations. Paying attention to the how of writing—our theories, narratives, and points of reference—is crucial for judging whether or not our thinking about the history, theory, and criticism of modern and postmodern art are becoming uniform worldwide. There is a great deal of attention paid to global and national art, to competing accounts of modernism, and to the contemporary. All that can obscure the fact that the talk itself—the way we use theories, the theories we choose, the ways we discuss modern and contemporary art, in short the how of art history—is widely taken as given, as an unproblematic lingua franca. For example there is a fair amount of scholarship on Gutai and other postwar practices in Japan, and in that scholarship there is ongoing discussion of which moments in Japanese postmodernism are most important, which have been mis­ represented, and which have yet to be adequately described. But the literature that debates those questions is itself written in a very uniform manner: the style of the writing, the theorists who are brought to bear, the scholarly apparatus, the forms of argument, the values accorded to what is taken as historical significance, and the places the work is published, are all in what I will be calling a standard North Atlantic idiom. Cultural difference, hybridity, translation, misrecognition, and the circulation of ideas are very much at issue, but the manner of the writing is remarkably uniform. Talk about modern and contemporary art is at risk of being flattened into a homogeneous world discourse, despite the fact that scholars continue to emphasize the importance of the local and the diversity provided by mixtures of national, trans­ national, and regional practices. It is a paradox that just as attention to identity becomes more intensive, and as the subjects art historians study become increasingly diverse, the writing that articulates those identities and subjects is itself losing the relatively small degree of variety that it still has. The impending single history of art will be very sensitive to difference, but unless it also reflects on its own lack of diversity, national and regional variations in art historical writing may become extinct. This book is an attempt to slow that unfortunate tendency. I have three purposes in mind with this book: first, to set out what I think are the principal conceptual issues in the worldwide practices of the writing of art history, theory, and criticism; second, to describe the dominant practice, which I will be calling North Atlantic art history; and third, to propose a new source of diversity in art writing, one I have not yet seen in the literature. (Here as everywhere in this book, “diversity” applies to the forms of writing, not its subjects, which are multiplying exponentially.) The field of writing on worldwide practices of art history, theory, and criticism is chaotic, full of incommensurable viewpoints. Chapters 1 and 2 set out a dozen or so of the most pressing issues. I begin with a practical look at the study of global art history, including questions of funding, access to books and artworks, and the crucial fact that

8

Introduction

English is the de facto language of art history. Global art history depends on unstable terms, including “Western” “non-Western,” “Euramerican,” “North American,” “Eurocentric,” “global,” “local,” “glocal,” “international,” “central,” “marginal,” “peripheral,” “regional,” “provincial,” and “parochial”; these are introduced in chapter 2. Issues like these cannot be definitively resolved; the purpose of chapter 1 is to acknowledge the institutional, economic, and political limitations of the study itself, and my aim in chapter 2 is to sketch usable meanings of some of the principal concepts for the purposes of the arguments in this book. I will present a case that certain habits and expectations of scholarship have effectively captured the world’s major academic institutions, so that there are few alternatives to the canonical readings of artists and artworks, the expected forms of explanation, narrative, and scholarship. The sum total of those habits, theories, valuations, and narratives comprise the norm in art history departments in places like Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Harvard, the Courtauld, Leeds, Sussex, Berkeley, or the University of Chicago. I call that set of practices, with many qualifications, North Atlantic art history. I do so because the usual ways of specifying the kind of art history I have in mind are either too biographical (this kind of art history could for example be associated with Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Griselda Pollock, and several dozen others), too institutionally specific (it could be associated with The Art Bulletin, Art History, Octo­ ber, Texte zur Kunst, and a dozen major US and EU university presses), or too vague (it could just be called “Eurocentric” or “Western” art history). Of those unhelpful or treacherous definitions, the commonest is the identification of this kind of art history with the journal October. Among the many difficulties of that identification is the fact that, in my experience at least, it’s common among art historians to deny the influence, the coherence, or the relevance of “the October model.” Still, if the reductive identifications with October, the other journals and presses, the individual scholars, or the individual universities are unhelpful, it’s not much better to think of art history as a single discipline, or to divide it into “Eurocentric” and “other.” We are left with the choice of multiplying art historical practices to the point where each art historian would embody their own scholarly practice, or gathering practices to the point where regional or national differences can no longer be discerned. That is why I have opted, somewhat reluctantly, for the expression “North Atlantic art history,” which I will develop in chapter 2. It is intended to be historically, politically, and geographically delimited, so that it can intervene between the October model, which is both overly precise and elusive, and the notion of a “Eurocentric” or “Western” art history, which is vague and not analytically useful. The principal reason to risk a neologism like “North Atlantic art history” is to show that there is, in fact, an uncodified consensus about the way art history should be written. There is dwindling diversity in the writing of art history and related fields, because the North Atlantic model attracts concerted emulation in virtually every center of art

9

 Introduction

history in the world. Like global capitalism, it is spreading everywhere, and attempts to keep minor practices alive have not usually been viable. Chapter 3 explores analogous trends toward global homogeneity in the cases of art criticism, art theory, and art instruction: my sense of those fields is that they, too, are becoming less diverse. I also want to be able to argue that there is no undiscovered continent of art historical writing that is outside this paradigm. It is often assumed that art history, theory, and criticism worldwide comprise a set of diverse, mutually intelligible languages. I do not think that is the case. There are no “non-Western,” “undiscovered,” local, national, or regional ways of writing art history that can join their voices to North Atlantic practices and form a diverse community of ways of writing. In other words, it isn’t likely that North Atlantic art history will be saved from homogeneity by the voices of other traditions. There is an idea, held by some scholars in Europe and the Americas who specialize in the art of those regions, that there are traditions or styles of art historical writing elsewhere in the world, and that Euramerican scholars need only acknowledge them in order to ensure art history’s diversity. I do not think this is so: the age of discovery is over, and scholars who identify themselves as art historians look—whether critically or in emulation—to a small number of institutions and scholars in western Europe and the US. I don’t know any art historians who identify themselves with October. I know some who deny that the circle around October was ever coherent, others who think the “model” is long superseded, and many who do not recognize or acknowledge their indebtedness to October. In my experience most art historians and theorists in the major institutions in western Europe and North America say they are independent of the influence of October and the various scholars and concerns that were associated with it in its first two decades. I will be arguing that isn’t the case. Even the most experimental contemporary art history, which appears least concerned with the interests of the previous generations of art historians, remains dependent on the model it ostensibly rejects. This dependence is ongoing and commonly unacknowledged, largely because the dependence is deeper and more general than it seems if October is associated only with a couple of scholars and a small number of generative papers. What follows from this is that a relatively small number of scholars, universities, journals, publishers, and books continue to provide the model for the world’s art history. The most important agent in the international spread of North Atlantic art history is not any individual person or institution but a textbook: Art Since 1900, the subject of chapter 4. Even in its expanded edition, this book has virtually no time for modernisms outside the North Atlantic, and even though its subtitle proclaims that its scope includes Modernism, Antimodernism, and Postmodernism, it gives little space to Soviet and National Socialist antimodernisms, and none to the many belated and provincial practices that are tacitly antimodern, and which comprise the majority of art produced worldwide.

10

Introduction

It’s likely that in the next couple of decades the number of art historians, theorists, and critics who engage world art writing practices will increase, and the subject of global art history (under various names) will become more common in departments worldwide. At the same time I think the practices of art writing will become more homogeneous. As this happens it may be particularly tempting to identify local or national art practices with differences in art history, theory, or criticism. Yet as different as local and national practices can be, they do not produce or represent differences in the ways art history is written. That brings me to this book’s third contribution, a problem I think has so far gone unnoticed. Some scholars hope that there are undiscovered or lesser-known practices of art writing that comprise art history’s real diversity. Others emphasize the necessity of being attentive to individual practices of art, to local languages and forms of production. Still others focus on hybrid and transnational art, or on postcolonial or decolonial contexts. There are a number of such strategies to increase art history’s attention to the fine grain of individual practices. I do not think any of them have succeeded in working against art history’s impending uniformity. From my point of view, art history’s real diversity is hiding in an unexpected place: it can be found in the many small inequalities between art historical practices of writing in different places. By “small inequalities” I mean discrepancies between different authors’ engagement with the literature, their uses of theory, their knowledge of translations, their differing styles of argument, their senses of proper reference, their writing tone, or their use of archives. Each place art history is practiced varies slightly, in these “small” ways. What counts as a proper conversational opening to an essay in one place may seem too informal in another. What counts as a useful review of the critical literature in one place will seem overly contentious in another. What counts as an adequate engagement with the secondary literature in one country may seem insufficient in another. What seems to be an interesting use of a theorist in one institution may seem misinformed in another. These differences are the sorts of things that instructors correct in their students’ papers, and that editors notice when they read submissions to journals. Correction of such differences comprise the everyday business of teaching and publishing art history everywhere. These small discrepancies, I believe, actually are the remaining diversity in worldwide practices of art history. They are the forms of cultural distance that we have left to us. My last claim in this book is that we need to start paying attention to these apparently practical, minor, contextual deficiencies, absences, infelicities, solecisms, and awkwardnesses, because they are the precious remnants of cultural variety when it comes to art history, theory, and criticism. This argument is made in the final chapter. This book is also my last contribution to the field of art history. Partly that is because this book says everything I want to say, and partly it is because I am moving into the wider study of writing itself, apart from its function in the description of art.

11

 Introduction

I started as an art historian, but I found myself less engaged in producing new interpretations or making new discoveries than in understanding what has counted as persuasive or compelling interpretation. At some point my practice moved from art history (the study of artworks) into the study of art history (historiography, or art theory). It became clear to me that art history is limited unless it considers its own medium of writing, because writing creates the conditions for sense and meaning. And although it took me a long time to realize it, I am hardly the first to conclude that disciplines in the humanities are only tenuously aware of the writing that supposedly serves them so efficiently. The book’s Envoi sets out the reasons why it might be fruitful for art history, theory, and criticism to turn their attention inward, to the writing itself. Without an entirely rethought sense of writing, there are limits to what an analysis of globalization in art writing can accomplish. At the end I have appended a list of the principal positions I take in this book.

12

Acknowledgments

This short book is the result of a large amount of traveling. Since 2000, I have visited approximately 50 countries, looking at how art and art history are taught. Some years I traveled almost every week; in 2012 for example, I visited 18 countries, not including repeat visits to 5 and about 20 trips within the United States. My total at the moment is 76 countries. Some international curators, collectors, and artists travel much more; but scholars, critics, and philosophers of art tend to depend on conferences and fellowships for their knowledge of global practices. The result is a disparity between curators’ and artists’ accounts of the international art world and art market, on the one hand, and academic descriptions of worldwide practices of art history, criticism, and theory, on the other. I hope the observations I have gathered in this book can be useful for those who are developing their own sense of what writing about art might be in different parts of the world. My largest debt is to the many people who taught me something about their country’s institutions, and patiently explained how their sense of art history, theory, and criticism differed from mine. The following list is only a sample. I hope I am not insulting the many other people whose names are for one reason or another not included this listing. In Bogotá, Colombia: Patricia Zalamea Fajardo, Lina Espinosa, Claudia Montilla, and Carolina Franco. In Lisbon, Portugal: Mariana Pinto dos Santos and Joana Cunha Leal. In Lhasa: Pema Yangchen, Wangmo, Tseden Namgyal, Tsarong Dhundrub, and (for travel advice) Leigh Miller and Rob Linrothe; In Hangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai: Fan Xiaoming, Cao Yiqiang, Gu Ling, Qigu Jiang, Yubing Shen, and Ding Ning. In Nanjing: Chang Nincheng. In Plovdiv, Bulgaria: Zhivka Valiavicharska and Anastas “the Culture.” In Helsinki, Finland: Minna Törmä and Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse. In Mumbai: Jyotsna Joshi, Amrita Gupta, and K. Sridhar. In Delhi: Seetha Venkataraman, Jyotindra Jain, O.P. Jain, Roobina Karode, and Vivan Sundaram. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan: M ­ uzaffar

13

Acknowledgements

Tursunov, Natalya Mussina, Negora Akhmedova, Bakhodir Jallalor (Jalal), Faizulla Akhmadaliev, and Kochi Okada. In Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic: Gulzhan Ybysheva, Almash Naizabekova, Rifkat Bukharmetov, Gulchehra Toktosunova, and especially Jamby Djusubalieva. In Almaty, Kazakhstan: Baitursun Umorbekov, Richard Spooner, Amandos Akanayev, and Abdrashit Sydykhanov. In Moscow: Victoria Musvic and Elena Khlopina. In Kampala, Uganda: Venny Nakazibwe. In Sofia, Bulgaria: Zhivka Valiavi­ charska, Kamen Balkanski, Iaroslava Boubnova, Luchezar Boyadjiev, and Diana Popova. In Cape Town: Pippa Skotnes, Fritha Langerman, Andrew Lamprecht, and Stephen Inggs. In Budapest and Eger, Hungary: Miklós Peternák, András Zwickl, Krisztina Szipőcs, and Melinda Szakóly. In Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia: Peeter Linapp and Heie Treier. In Valletta, Malta: Raphael Vella, Theresa Vella, and Dennis Vella (none of them related). In Bucharest, Romania: Horea Avram, Ion and Teodora Stendl, Marilena Preda-­ Sanc, the Uniunea Artistilor Plastici din Romania, Adriana and Liviu Crainic, and Ioana Vlasiu. In Prague: Ludvik Hlavácek, Katerina Pavlíčková, Lenka Bydzovská, Vojtech Lahoda, Petr Wittlich, and Tomaš Vlček. In Skopje, Macedonia: Vladimir Janchevski and Safet Ahmeti. In Kyoto: Shigehisa Kuriyama, Shigemi Inaga, and John Teramoto. In Tokyo: Mina Ando, Jung-Yeon Ma, Hoshina Toyomi, Omuka Toshiharu, and Michio Hayashi. In Tromsø, Norway: Svein Aamold. In Singapore: Jeffrey Say, Ian Woo, Kwok Kian Chow, Lee Weng Choy, and Joan Kelly. In Coimbra, Portugal: António Olaio, Joana Cunha Leal, and Filomena Molder. In Tbilisi, Georgia: Mariam Didebulidze and Anna Mgaloblishvili. In Iceland: Einar Garibaldi Eiriksson (for the many invitations), Hjálmar Ragnarsson, Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir, and Hulda Stefánsdóttir. In Kumasi, Ghana: George Intsiful and Ato deGraft-Johnson. In Mexico City: Pablo Helguera, Laura María González Flores, and Tobias Ostrander. In Puebla, Mexico: Xavier Recio Oviedo, Karen Cordero Reiman, and Luis Xavier Cuesta Hernandez. In Buenos Aires, Argentina: María Lía Munilla Lacasa, Maria Costantini de Silva, Alejandra Aguado, Jorgelina Orfila, María José Herrera, Laura Buccellato, Silvia Marrube, Américo Castilla, Daniel Maman, Cecilia Caballero, Diana Saiegh, Riccardo Coppa, Marina Pellegrini, Malena Castelo, Teresa ­Riccardi, and Valeria Fiterman. In Monterrey, Mexico: Julio César Rodríguez-Cuervo. In Stockholm, Sweden: Charlotte Bydler, Hans Hayden, and Mårten Snickare. In Kraków and Poznań, Poland: Mariusz Bryl and Andrzej Szczerski. In São Paulo, Brazil: João Grijó (1949–2003), a wonderful observer of the Brazilian scene. In Asunción, Paraguay: Olga Blinder and Meme Perasso. In Montevideo, Uruguay: Fernando Martinez Agustoni, Luis Fernando Gadea Pinienta, Anhelo Hernández, Miguel Angel Guerra. In Santiago, Chile: Margarita Schultz, Daniela Rosenfeld Grossman, Milan Ivelic. In Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia: Heie Treier and Peeter Linnap. In Vienna, Austria: Friedrich Teja Bach, Manuela Ammer, Heike Eipeldauer, Elisabeth Fritz, Agnes Hannes, Rolf Wienkötter, and Wolfram Pichler. In Oslo, Norway: Torild Gjesvik. In Ljubljana, Slovenia: Tugo Šušnik, Zdenka Baldovinac, Adela Zeleznik, Tomaž Brejc, and Nadja Zgonik. In Bratislava, ­Slovakia: Ján Bakoš, Mária Oriškova, Katarina Benova, and Richard Gregor. Thanks also

14

Acknowledgments

to Juan Carlos, for information on contemporary painters in Papua New Guinea; to Leua Latai, for introducing me to Samoan painting; and to Bohdan Gorczynski, for help with Polish painting. There are many others, in each city, who helped make arrangements, recommended people for me to contact, and even offered their houses to me before we had met— many more people than I can thank here. Most of the travel for this book was arranged by writing letters to people I had never met, and proposing lectures in return for accommodation, tours, and introductions. I was offered extraordinary hospitality in almost every country; many times people gave up days of their own time to introduce me to their country’s universities, academies, and art. Part of the joy of this book has been discovering that the supposedly Greek virtue of hospitality is a worldwide phenomenon. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 were written online, live: I embedded sketches for chapters live on my website, and then I announced them on social media, so that people could comment as the chapters were being written. The idea was to resist the temptation to write more-or-less finished drafts, and to acknowledge the open-endedness of the subject by inviting criticism at all stages. I benefited tremendously from the comments on the website and on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Academia, and I have acknowledged everyone who contributed. This entire manuscript was read carefully and thoughtfully by Keith Moxey and Kitty Zijlmans, both of whom I think of as models for collegial scholarship. Parts of chapters 2 and 5 were half-written before Cathérine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel asked me to write an afterword to Circulations, the first book produced by their research group called Artl@s. The first half of chapter 5 abstracts the principal issues from the afterword to their book. The second half of chapter 5 is rewritten from another source, Art and Globalization, co-edited with Zhivka Valiavicharska and Alice Kim, vol. 1 of The Stone Art Theory Seminars (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2010). Part of chapter 6, beginning “The comparison of historical perspectives…” is rearranged from the conclusion of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, with an introduction by Jennifer Purtle (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). Several pages of chapter 7 have appeared, augmented by a dialogue, in “The Homonymic Curtain,” co-authored with Richard Gregor, Umění 63 no. 3, 2015, pp. 150–55. An unpolished version of chapter 8 appeared as “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” in Compression Versus Expansion: Con­ taining the World’s Art, edited by John Onians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 188–214; then a revision was published online as “Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America,” Transcultural Studies [Heidelberg University], 1 no. 1 (10 Nov 2010; tinyurl.com/k5nrg5g); the version here is more fully argued.

15

 Acknowledgements

A related subject, which I have had to omit from this book, is what might be done with art practices that are widely devalued in art history even though they are not restricted to specific regions or countries—practices like conventional realist sculpture, still life, and marine painting. I think those are just as important as the more historically positioned practices I am concerned with in this book. For that please see “Two Forms of Judgment: Forgiving and Demanding (The Case of Marine Painting),” in Jour­ nal of Visual Art Practice 3 no. 1, 2004, pp. 37–46.

16

CHAPTER 1

The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

The ways art history is written around the world is an unusual subject, in part because it is a study of writing, and not art, and in part because it is unusually scattered and difficult to access (in the sense that it exists in dozens of languages). Hence my reason for starting with some observations that bear on how such a subject can be studied, the people who study it, and the limitations of the study. The economics of poorer and more isolated universities constrain art history, and it is a crucial part of the study of global practices of art history—but it needs to be considered along with the complementary problem of the economic positions of the people who can afford to travel widely. This is a kind of Heisenbergian problem, in that the economics of privilege that permits some scholars to travel widely, is both affected by the conditions in economically and politically constrained institutions, and also affects those conditions. The last of the topics in this chapter—the fact that English is the language of art history worldwide—is especially vexed, because while it is in many ways unfortunate that any one language dominates the worldwide conversations on art history, it is just as important to study the fact that relatively few scholars are fluent in reading, writing, and speaking English, and those three skills determine how professionally mobile art historians can be. These are not the sort of problems that have solutions, but the kind that define some of the conditions under which the larger subject of this book can be studied.

1. Should the study of worldwide practices of art history be a concern of art history in general? How is the study of global art history related to art history’s traditional topics—its specialties, such a Roman or Japanese art, or its methods, such as iconography or semiotics? Is it a subject principally for scholars who write on broad geographic areas,

17

Chapter 1

or is it also pertinent for specialists whose subject matter is focused on local or regional practices? Should it concern scholars who do not actively engage “theory”? Is it properly part of the historiography of the discipline, and therefore mainly a matter of interest to those concerned with the discipline’s history? Or is it a framing question for the entire discipline, which can also shape the study of historiography itself ? The reasons these questions do not have clear answers, I think, is that the study of world art history as it is currently constituted is itself relatively new, so it lacks a recognized, organic relation to the discipline of art history. I suspect that in the next few decades, the study of worldwide practices of writing about art will come to appear as a subject that includes particular practices of art history as special cases. If it becomes possible to characterize regional or national ways of writing art history, then it may seem appropriate to study them along with the art of different regions or nations. If that happens, then local, regional, and national art practices will come to be seen as determined by the local, regional, or national practices of art history that are used to describe them, and global art history will be a subject that is different in kind from either the project of writing about a given specific practice of art, or the project of writing a history of art history. This is of course just a guess. But it seems clear that questions like the ones I posed in the first paragraph are not “well formed” in the logical sense of that expression, because they can’t be adequately answered until we have a clearer idea of the history and place of the study of world art history.

2. World art history, global art history, and their mixtures Most discussion about the expressions “global art history” and “world art history” has to do with the difference between the study of the contemporary art world, on the one hand, and the project, which originated in 19th century Germany, to study all of the world’s art. The best way of naming this difference, I think, is Wilfried van Damme’s adaptation of Bruce Mazlish’s distinction between “global history” and “world history.” “Global art history” is then the study of the recent and contemporary worldwide dissemination of art, and “world art history” is the study of all artifacts produced in any culture from prehistory to the present. (van Damme, “Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies,” in Mazlish, “An Introduction to Global History,” in Conceptualizing Global History, 1993.) A root-level confusion, however, stems from the simple fact that the expression “the study of art history” usually means the study of the objects of art history, but grammatically the expression indicates the study of something called “art history,” which is an academic discipline. Both “world art history” and “global art history” share this

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grammatical ambiguity between the study of the objects, periods, practices, and cultures, on the one hand, and the study of the academic discipline or discourse that articulates that study, on the other. In the sentence at the end of §1 I wrote “the study of world art history.” To some readers, that will sound like the study of the art of Egypt, the Maya, or the Ife. To others, it will sound like the study of figures like Hegel, Alois Riegl, or David Summers. The confusion is therefore double: between “global” and “world,” and between the study of art’s history and the study of art history. This produces four possibilities: (A) The study of world art history. From the inception of Kunstgeschichte in ­Germany in the mid-19th century (one of several contested points of origin for the discipline of art history, a subject I am avoiding here) there has been interest in the possibility of a “universal” art history. From Karl Woermann’s Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker (three volumes, 1900–05) through the mid-20th century, including scholars such as Alois Riegl, universal or world art history was a matter of locating principles, themes, and common patterns in the evolution of art. More recent synoptic studies of world art, such as David Summers’s Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (2001) have gone in new directions, but kept to the central purpose of understanding “world art” as a coherent phenomenon. An interdisciplinary alternative to the awkward phrase “study of world art history” is “world art studies.” John Onians’s School of Art History and World Art Studies (originally the World Art Research Programme, which he directed from 1971 to 2007) in East Anglia was the first such initiative. The book World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, edited by Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans (2008) is a crucial resource here. (B) The study of global art history. Following Mazlish, this expression—and some others, such as “globalization in art history” and the “globalization of art”—normally denotes the study of the art market and the art world in the age of increasing international exchange and “biennale culture.” Exemplary texts on this subject might include John Clark’s “The Worlding of the Asian Modern” (Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibi­ tions, edited by Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner, pp. 67–88), T. J. Demos’s Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), Caroline Jones’s The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience, or Julian Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (2004). (C) The study of the writing of world art history. This is typically the study of the history of writing on world art history. In art history, such study is known as historio­ graphy, the history of the discipline. Examples include historiographic studies of world art histories by Matthew Rampley, Jan Bakoš, Richard Woodfield, and others. It seems possible that art history, as a discipline, is turning increasingly in the direction of the study of its own history: in my experience, it has become more common to encounter PhD dissertations that take episodes in the history of the discipline as their subject,

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including the development of world art history. Thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Rampley, Bakoš, and Woodfield, the history of world art history is much better known now than it was in the mid-20th century when such histories were more commonly produced. (D) The study of the writing of global art history. This is less common than the study of the writing of world art history, presumably because writing about global art history is itself relatively new. I do not know any books, including the ones I have edited such as Art and Globalization (2010)—which was intended to be about the writing of global art history—that keep to the subject of writing and don’t stray into the subject of the history of the globalization of art itself. In forums on global art history, the writing itself is normally taken as transparent in the sense that it is not problematic. Artists’ practices, institutions, and theories are under discussion, but texts written by scholars, which report on those practices, institutions, and theories, tend to be treated as source material. I would like to propose that the studies of writing about art (topics C and D) are separable from studies of the history of art itself (topics A and B). Writing done on the subjects I have labeled (A) and (B) is about artworks and artists; writing on the subjects (C) and (D) is about texts written by art historians. Yet given these four nearly synonymous practices, it is no wonder so many contributions end up arguing in several different directions at once. In the book Is Art History Global? (2006), my own interest, along with Andrea Giunta and some other participants, was in topic (D): I had intended to explore the ways that art history varies in different parts of the world, and that would include histories of those variants. Other participants, including Summers, were more interested in what I have labeled (A): they wanted to find viable ways of writing about world art history, and they were minimally engaged in looking at practices of writing about world art history. In the book Art and Globalization all four topics are woven together. Some of the participants, for example Susan Buck-Morss, were interested in the globalization of art (B), while others, including Michael Holly, Keith Moxey, and Shigemi Inaga, were more concerned with the possible globalization of art history (D). Occasionally we also talked about books like David Summers’s, and at those moments our conversation was also an example of (C), talk about the ways art history has accounted for world art. Several of the contributors to the book were more interested in the possibility of writing world art histories, so their contributions would be examples of (A). Often, in that book, it isn’t entirely clear which subject the participants are exploring. Arguments are made about global art without taking into account modes of writing about the art, and arguments are made about writing histories of art, but using art practices, rather than writing, as evidence. (For example, the many discussions about how to structure introductory art history textbooks tend to pivot on which cultures and ideas need to be

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

included, rather than on the practices of scholarship that made those cultures or artists available to begin with.) There are some very difficult passages in both Art and Globalization and Is Art History Global?, because participants make assumptions about the transparency or unproblematic nature of the writing in order to make claims about the history of the art, or, conversely, they assume unproblematic access to the pertinent properties of the art in order to make claims about the history of writing on art practices. (The long history of the awareness that a text isn’t transparent, which goes back before poststructuralism to New Criticism, appears in art history as a set of practices, methods, and interests directed at artworks and art practices. It’s a constitutive paradox that art historians who are at home with poststructural critique tend not to picture their own texts as productive objects of that critique. Where, for example, are there literary critical accounts of art historical texts?) This issue isn’t confined to these two books: it appears in books such as World Art Studies, edited by Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans (2008), and Elaine O’Brien’s edited volume Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (2012), which are mainly about the globalization of art (B) but also, intermittently and seamlessly, about the writing about global art (D). When this mixture of subjects is not thematized, it can come to seem as if there is no good reason to try to separate them. Yet the study of world art certainly relies on different examples, and raises different problems, than the study of recent and contemporary global art. I hope that by watching for these differences it may be possible to clarify some claims about art, by showing that they are in effect addressed to art writing.

3. Studies of worldwide art history are still mainly written by “older white men” David Carrier made this remark at a meeting of the College Art Association in February 2011. I co-chaired that session with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann; our panelists also included Iftikhar Dadi and Michael Ann Holly. At least two of those aren’t “older white men,” but Carrier’s point was not inaccurate. A panel discussion on the subject of global art history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in February 2013 included Mark Jarzombek, Terry Smith, and Victor Margolin; it was moderated by Esra Akcan. Aside from Akcan, the panelists were white men with white hair. “Older white men” describes a fair percentage of the scholars who write on worldwide practices of art history. (When I arrived in a workshop in Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, one of the faculty said, “Oh, that’s a relief, at least you don’t have white hair too. I would have had a hard time relating to you.”) Carrier’s remark was offhanded, but there are at least three ways to turn it into a serious issue.

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First, as he himself noted, studying worldwide practices of art history requires extensive traveling, and that is something that takes time. So by the nature of the problem, people who write the most on the subject tend to be older scholars. The historiographer Matthew Rampley, who has made a comprehensive study of European art history, is an example of a scholar who has wide experience within Europe. A half century ago, the models of internationalism in art history included Jan Białostocki (1921–1988) and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968). (See Białostocki’s estimation of Panofsky in Simiolus, 1970.) In the intervening half-century since Panofsky’s death it has become possible to travel much more, but the means and opportunity are not always present. Second, traveling is a privileged activity even in the age of global contemporary art. Most people who have access to traveling on that scale are from western Europe and North America. I am acutely aware of this myself. I travel on average almost once a week, but the number of countries I’ve visited is growing very slowly because most of the world’s remaining 125 or so countries do not have art historians, art history departments, or even universities. In order to continue to visit places with limited practices of art history, I need to raise money; I fund those trips using speaker’s fees I charge when I go to places in the United States. For this it helps to be based in North America. The EU does not have the custom of paying speakers more than €1,000; but in the United States even smaller state schools can often afford to pay speakers $2,500 or $3,000. I use that money to fund visits to countries like Ghana, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, and Belarus that either have limited funds for speakers, or (as in the case of Iran) have political or institutional barriers that limit the number of international scholars. I think of this as a practical matter, but it is also an obligation: people who can travel should. Otherwise the world is whatever comes to me, in the form of international panelists at conferences, or people who apply for fellowships or lectures at my institution. A number of academics at the larger North American institutions, for example, tend to judge the world of art history outside their specialty by the people who visit their institutions. But a scholar working in her context, in her city and her institution, surrounded by her colleagues and students, is a very different person from that same scholar in an antiseptic hotel conference room in North America. (Academics are sensitive to differences of gender and ethnicity, but that sensitivity is a very different thing from the sometimes overwhelming experience of those same differences when they occur in situ: sensitivity does not substitute for experience.) Third, the “older white men” tend not to be critical of one another. This is mostly by choice: you’re less likely to write a critical account of someone you will probably see every year, or several times a year, in public venues. The people who have been most active in the 21st century theorizing world art history—say Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, Terry Smith, Andreas Huyssen, Whitney Davis, Caroline Jones, Kitty Zijlmans, David Carrier, Parul Mukherjee, John Onians, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey,

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

Timotheus Vermeulen, Susan Buck-Morss, several dozen others—have rarely engaged one another’s’ work in an extended manner. (There are counterexamples: Whitney Davis has elaborated a trenchant critique of David Summers’s Real Spaces; Mieke Bal has critiqued a number of writers; and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has been critical of my work—more on that in chapter 4.) This sort of collegiality is common enough in the humanities, even if it’s rare in the sciences, but it can prevent productive development of a contentious field by making it appear that everyone is engaged in a cooperative venture. In fact some accounts are radically at odds with others. Of these three issues, I think the most serious might be the second. Institutions with a lot of funding (Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, University of Chicago, and a dozen others) often host international scholars. The senior scholars in such institutions tend to rely on their experiences at such events to give them a picture of art historical practices worldwide. The international scholars who end up at major universities tend to be very well versed in the interests and expectations of those universities, producing a misleading sense of the quality and homogeneity of art history worldwide. The same can be said of scholars who research the global art market: smaller institutions and countries that don’t participate in that market tend to be invisible. What is needed is more traveling and more inventive destinations.

4. Art history is not a worldwide phenomenon simply because people in many countries lack access to books and online resources Despite the most vigorous efforts at inclusiveness, art historical conversations on worldwide practices of art history tend to be limited to places and institutions that have a modicum of money: they have some books, some of their faculty travel, some publish. It is difficult to get past those constraints when it comes to international grants, conferences, and fellowships, because art historians who work in places without resources are not always connected enough to know how or where to apply for funds, and people outside those places may find it difficult to find occasions to visit. The basic lack of images, internet, and books has visible and less visible aspects. It’s a well known problem that people in developing countries may not have access to books or internet resources that are behind paywalls. Two things are, I think, less well known: (A) Many universities in first-world countries also lack crucial resources. At a university where I taught in Ireland, there was discussion about which of the more expensive databases could be bought. Should students have both Nature and Science? Could we afford JSTOR? Many mid-range and smaller universities in the EU lack some of the most important electronic resources. A Spanish art historian (whom I can’t

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name here) wrote in a grant application that “very often it’s difficult for professors in Spain to accede to the latest books or publications in Art History.” The same is said in countries like Estonia (in 2014, the EU’s most digitally connected country), Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. A first-world university is no guarantee of resources. Art history departments in smaller universities in the EU may have annual book budgets on the order of 1,000 Euro, which means that students will only have access to a few of the books in their specialty. The EU has an interlibrary loan service, but that is not a substitute for a well-stocked library. North American art historians tend to be unaware of this issue, because even small state schools in the US routinely have all the major electronic subscriptions and a large stock of books in the library. For students, too, the lower living expenses of some countries and regions means that money goes farther—but that doesn’t affect the cost of foreign books or software. Hence the prevalence of torrent sites and illegal online sources for texts. In 2013 there was a discussion on Facebook about the disenfranchisement of firstworld art historians who are unemployed: they often can’t get access to JSTOR and other paid databases. But that problem is only a small version of the much larger issue of fully employed academics outside the US who cannot get access to those same databases. (B) Many universities in developing countries are effectively cut off even from the internet. I find there is an assumption on the part of first-world scholars that the internet can solve a fair percentage of these issues of access. There are several reasons why this is not always so. First, in developing countries internet access is often nearly nonexistent outside of institutions. In some African countries such as Congo, Eritrea, and Niger, internet access is between 1.5% and 4%. (This is according to sites like Internet World Stats.) In villages in Africa, internet access is generally only available on cell phones, in a truncated form that makes it effectively useless for research. In universities, internet and email access can be unreliable, and downloading can be so slow that large quantities of information can’t be accessed. (It would be salutary for art historians to sit at computers in smaller institutions in developing countries: in my experience what is promised as internet access is effectively too slow or unreliable to be useful. There is a big difference between a filthy internet café with no paid academic subscriptions and a connected laptop in a major university.) Even major universities in developing countries are not likely to have Oxford Art Online, ARTbibliographies Mod­ ern, JSTOR, or other standard databases. All this is aside from the lack of books. That situation is also more dire than it is often imagined. Even major universities in developing countries typically have art libraries comprised of second-hand art books from the mid and late 20th century. It may be effectively impossible for a scholar to form an understanding of the recent reception of an artist or theorist, and that is a direct cause of the common state of

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

scholarship in countries like India, where scholarly essays on Western artists may lack recent references or any awareness of the secondary literature. What counts as art history is crucially determined, in any given place, by what books and other resources are available. In some places the discipline can be in effect unrecognizable by North Atlantic standards because of the lack of resources. Recently I met a professor in a developing country who is interested in semiotics. He knows Peirce and Saussure (although he pronounces his name “Suss”), but mainly from a book by Umberto Eco; he told me proudly he had gotten most of his information from a “difficult theory source,” which turned out to be The Da Vinci Code. If you laughed at that last sentence, you might want to reconsider: it isn’t an unusual example, and when scholarship strays that far from what North Atlantic practice might recognize as reliable or scholarly, then it becomes unclear exactly what might count, in that place, as art history. It would not be straightforward to fill in the gaps in that particular scholar’s knowledge: he is an established, full-time faculty member, who would not be in a position to begin his studies with a freshman survey. A scholar from Cuba wrote me in 2013 that “In art, we still depend on the old forms: impressed magazines that eventually somebody bought in another country and brings in, some documentary that somebody downloaded from the internet and spread among friends.” Another scholar, in Nigeria, wrote with possibly intentional humor, “Africans are the most culturally disoriented people.” An applicant from Cameroon wrote that the grant money would help him “redress the critical imbalance of factual information about some part of the world art history inside books, museums and on the Internet.” That may be true, but travel does not internationalize art historians as swiftly as it internationalizes contemporary artists. An artist who visits the Venice biennale will quickly get ideas about how to make her practice internationally viable; a scholar who visits NYU or the Courtauld will encounter a very different learning curve. Even in first-world countries the internet is not necessarily a useful source for buying books. North Atlantic scholars tend to assume that Amazon, eBay, and other companies mean students can get many books cheaply. But in Russia, for example, students may choose not to buy books on the internet, because shipping and customs costs are prohibitive, because used book dealers in the EU may not ship to Russia, and because shipping takes so long the books may not arrive until the semester is over. I have myself bought commonly available books and sent them to students in Moscow. (There is also the question of what is available digitally: it is often assumed that sites like Google Books, Scribd, Aaargh!, Library Genesis, or other illegal sites can provide most materials, and that with proxy servers people anywhere in the world can access them, but that depends entirely on what is being searched. Local and less popular materials of interest to studies of world art history are commonly not available except as physical objects.)

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5. Open-access art history has a complex relation to the worldwide spread of art history It’s a common hope that the internet will facilitate the global dissemination of art history, theory, and criticism, and that is no doubt true. Beginning with MIT and the Harvard Open Access Project, there have been a number of initiatives to make all scholarship open access, and to eliminate subscriptions and paywalls (the MIT project is at tinyurl.com/p8k9tbw). The Directory of Open Access Journals listed nearly 10,000 titles as of 2014, and another site, JURN, listed 5,000. Peter Suber’s Open Access (MIT Press, 2012, available online) is a good introduction to the subject. The subject is especially pressing in the face of evidence that the top universities continue to hire one another’s graduates, and scholarship is increasingly concentrated in exclusive uni­ versities. (Aaron Clauset and others, “Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks,” Advanced Science, February 12, 2015; Joseph Duggan, “Global South Scholars Publish Without Cost, With Global Reach and Royalties,” 2014.) In art history there are a number of open-access journals, including Artsjournal, Contemporary Aesthetics, the Revista de História da Arte, InVisible Culture, Seachange, and Visual Culture and Gender. An open-access document assembled by Charlotte Frost lists over thirty (tinyurl.com/kkkwbqd), and there is an essay on the subject, “Discovering Open Access Art History: A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals,” by Siân Evans, Hilary Thompson, and Alex Watkins. One of the issues here is the extent to which open access journals and other online sources are indexed by the standard art history databases, which are themselves available only by subscription. According to Alex Watkins’s online essay “Discovering Open Access Art History,” the percentages of open access resources indexed by the main databases is rising, but it is still low. In 2013 the College Art Association decided to remove the password protection on its book reviews site; in 2014 the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesau­ rus became freely available. Arthistoricum.net is an initiative at the University of Heidelberg to provide open-access publications to scholars. The Art History Guild, founded in 2012 by Victoria H.F. Scott, has as one of its goals open access job listings for art history; Scott is also interested in gathering and disseminating information about ­salaries, standards of living, and working conditions of art historians worldwide. Charlotte Frost’s book Art History Online and her website digitalcritic.org are aimed at open access research and career advice. It is reasonable to anticipate that a large number of resources for art history, theory, and criticism will eventually be open access, so it may be useful to take open access as a given and ask, instead, about its consequences. In this book I will be arguing for a distinction between first world issues and those that pertain more to the developing

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world, smaller countries, and more isolated institutions; open access affects those parts of the world differently. For first world scholars, open access should help unemployed (“independent”) scholars and part-time or hourly lecturers who are underpaid and sometimes lack full access to the resources of their institutions. Online open access publishing and other “digital art history” ventures will speed communication and let both enfranchised and disenfranchised historians, critics, and theorists discover a substantially wider and less predictable range of writing. I support Victoria Scott’s efforts to advocate for part-time and hourly lecturers and “independent” scholars, and to gather and disseminate materials about the economics of the profession. As I mentioned in the Acknowledgments, much of this book was written online, and I posted drafts as I wrote them. When I had something legible, I embedded the live page on my website, and posted the URL to the live document or the website page to Facebook, Twitter, Academia, and other sites. Often I got immediate responses, so I found myself writing and responding to comments at the same time. This book has benefited tremendously from that kind of crowdsourcing. I have written or revised four other books in the same way, and my impression is that few comments and suggestions that come via social network sites are not potentially pertinent: at the least they remind me what readings are possible, and they prompt me to consider how I might accommodate alternate viewpoints. (The key to the usefulness of the internet in this regard is to post texts that are nowhere near polished—not even as finished as a typical blog entry— because it’s at that stage that unpredictable online comments are most useful.) But this all has to do with first world practices. Outside the principal centers of art history in western and central Europe and North America, the uses of online resources change. Many scholars around the world do not have English as their first language, and that imposes variable and often severe problems. (On the hegemony of English, see section 7 below.) Historians and critics who are not wholly fluent in English, who do not have ongoing access to high-speed connections, or who are isolated from larger scholarly communities, may interact with online resources in what may appear to be partial and unpredictable ways. It is not easy to put this accurately. A scholar in China, for example, who reads English with some hesitancy might choose just one or two results of an internet search. She may understand some of the arguments she reads, and miss others, and she will probably be unfamiliar with the context that produced the essays she finds and the range of references the authors bring to bear. This kind of partial, truncated interaction is typical of the general formation of discursive fields. The concept is Foucault’s, and he used it to describe the production of knowledge: all knowledge is partial and mobile, and contingent on the stability of its communities of users. (A helpful source here is John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, 1990.) The question is how such uses of open access sources are imagined to operate over the long run. I think the principal position on

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this subject in art history and other humanities is that open access will eventually minimize such partial overlaps between discursive fields, disseminating knowledge increasingly evenly around the world. Discursive fields that were interestingly distinct, like disjunct circles in a Venn diagram, will tend to overlap, and their intersections will become more extensive. At the same time I think it is widely assumed that there are local traditions of art history, theory, and criticism that can remain distinct under the pressure of increased communication. As I will argue in this book, I do not see evidence of that. In the Venn diagram model, the largest circle attracts the others, and the overlaps become so extensive that the smaller circles—the once isolated discursive fields—become coextensive with the central circle. Open access plays a role here by facilitating the amalgamation of distinct practices. Here is an introductory example. In the span of a month in 2014, Academia.edu notified me that my work was being “followed” by scholars in some very diverse locations: the Université de Mostaganem (in Mostaganem, Algeria); the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design (Ramat Gan, Israel); the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula (Croatia); Ss Cyril and Methodius (Skopje, Macedonia); Mansoura University (Mansoura, Egypt); Universitas Syiah Kuala Banda Aceh (Indonesia); University of Muhammadiyah Malang (East Java, Indonesia); Universidad del Valle (Sede Central Cocha­ bamba, Bolivia); Nilton Lins (Amazonas, Brazil); Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (Maputo, Mozambique); Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary); Bocconi University (Milan, Italy); University of Muhammadiyah Malang (East Java, Indonesia); Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey); UFJF, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (São Pedro, Brazil); Sekolah Tinggi Teknologi Tekstil (Bandung, Indonesia); Vignan University (Vadlamudi, near Guntur City, Andhra Pradesh, India); Uludağ Üniversitesi (Bursa, Turkey); Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki, Greece); University of Sri Jayewardenepura (Gangodawila, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka); Universidade Lusófona (Lisbon, Portugal); Zagazig University (Zagazig, Ash Sharqiyah, Egypt); BIOLA University (Los Angeles, US); University of the Philippines Diliman (Quezon City, Philippines); University of Southern Denmark (Funen, Denmark); Mapua Institute of Technology (Intramuros, Manila, Philippines); Brawijaya University (Malang, Indonesia); European ­University of Moldova (Chisinau, Moldova); International Culture University (online, icu-edu.org, but based in Dhaka, Bangladesh); Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI, Tanjong Malim, Perak Darul Ridzuan, Malaysia); University of Cassino and Southern Lazio (Cassino, Italy); Institute of Archaeology “Vasile Parvan” (Bucharest, Romania); Christ University (Bangalore, India); Universiti Sains Malaysia (Kelantan, Malaysia); Quaid-i-Azam University (Islamabad, Pakistan); Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan); and the Université Saad Dhalab (Blida, Algeria). Many of these institutions, if not cities and countries, are well off the beaten paths of art history. Yet I don’t draw too many conclusions from this list. After all, there

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would presumably be many reasons these scholars found my page on Academia.edu: a certain percentage are simply “following” the way people do on other social networks. I can’t tell, in each instance, what kind of scholarship each person is teaching or producing. But in the cases where the scholars are artists, critics, or historians, their writing is closely related to the norms and ideals of what I will be calling North Atlantic art history. The aspiration to uniformity is generally quite clear, and there is a decided absence of unusual kinds of writing among these “followers.” Aspirational art history tends toward uniform art history, and open access art history accelerates that uniformity. This is not an argument against open access initiatives, because the worldwide spread of European models of art history has been underway since the 19th century. But I am concerned that the rhetoric of open access is almost all about empowerment and inclusion, and not about the loss of diversity and difference. I will return to this in chapter 8.

6. There are unexplored degrees of commensurability between practices of art history Another large and largely unstudied problem is how to assess the degrees of compatibility or contradiction between alternate accounts of art history. Here is an example, taken from Terry Smith’s work. In the book What is Contemporary Art? (2009) Smith proposes there are three “world currents” in art. (He is speaking of art practices, not ways of writing about art.) The first is “the aesthetic of globalization, serving it through both a relentless modernizing and a sporadic contemporizing of art”; the second is the “postcolonial turn,” which has generated a “plethora of art shaped by local, national, anticolonial, [and] independent values (diversity, identity, critique)”; and the third is also a miscellany, comprised of younger artists “in small groups, in loose associations,” seeking “to grasp the changing place of time, place, media, and mood today.” Smith thinks these “three narratives” will “compete,” but that no “synthesis” will be forthcoming. They are at once, he says, “irreconcilable and indissociable.” They comprise the condition of contemporaneity, and they can neither be separated nor merged (pp. 264–68). The virtue of this model, I think, is neither its classification (which is intentionally inexact, especially given that the second and third “currents” are both described as multiple and mobile) nor its content (because crucial traits of each of the three “currents,” and especially the third, are undefined), but the abstract relationship between the three “currents.” The idea of three kinds of contemporary practice that are dependent on one another, and neither reducible to one another nor susceptible to being combined, is distinct from several other models currently on offer.

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Smith has also argued (in a conference in February 2013) that there is a “very rich art discourse,” involving “at least one hundred” people in different parts of the world who are writing using new concepts and methods. (He was speaking, in this case, about ways of writing about art, not practices of art.) There are people, he said, who are working on modernisms in New York that haven’t yet been widely studied. Different national and regional traditions of art history can coexist, he said, “co-temporally”; there can be “Asian art histories,” for example, “African art histories,” and others. Such work, he suggested, points to a “synthesis in the making.” I won’t elaborate on Smith’s positions here; I’ll return to his work in chapter 4. But note the contrast between the two positions: the idea, in the 2009 book, that there are three streams of contemporary art; and the proposal, in the 2013 conference, that a number of regional and national art histories can coexist. This kind of difference—a difference between accounts of art’s diversity—is common in the historiography of modern and contemporary art. The book series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (2005– 2012) is another example. The first volume was my own Master Narratives and Their Discontents, and the idea of the series was to provide a leisurely forum for the authors to compare their differing ideas of the shape of 20th century art. The series failed to do that, both because the authors were polite to one another, and also because their sense of what “master narratives” might be differed not only in number and chronology, but in kind. The sense of historical narrative in Stephen Bann’s contribution, a book called Ways Around Modernism (2007), is entirely different from the forms of narrative in my book. Both books are different once again from what counts as interesting narratives in Richard Shiff ’s volume Doubt (2008), and all three of us—all older white males!—are different from the concerns voiced in the last volume in the series, Pamela Lee’s New Games: Postmodernism After Contemporary Art (2012). The four authors speak almost entirely past one another. The incommensurability between theories of the diversity of art history is an abstract problem. I present it here at the beginning of this book to signal the trouble lies in wait for theories such as the different versions of multiple modernities, the dozen or so senses of the contemporary and contemporaneity (and contemporaneities), and other accounts of the regional, local, national and global. In the course of this book I will be considering a number of such theories where they impinge on the ways art history is imagined. Each account naturally has its strengths and weaknesses: what remains invisible to the discipline is the fact that they are themselves not easy to compare.

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

7. The language of art history is English The last of these framing problems regards English. If you live in a country whose language is not English, you may need conversational English in order to attend conferences and meet scholars from other countries. If you’re a teacher and your students don’t speak English fairly well, they may face limited job choices and mobility. If you don’t speak English fluently, you may have difficulty as a student in English-language seminars and lectures, and it will be hard to gauge what you are missing. If you don’t read English easily, you may favor art history written in other languages, which will have an effect on your research. And if you do not write English reasonably well, you may not be able to publish outside your country or region. Speaking, teaching or learning, reading, and writing are mixed together in a typical art historian’s career, and each may be more or less important depending on the context. Each raises sensitive and interesting cultural, political, and institutional problems. It’s strange that so far, disciplines like art history, visual studies, art theory, and art criticism do not often discuss these issues except when it comes to deciding which languages will be spoken at a given conference or symposium. Speaking and teaching (or listening) are often open for discussion, and there are institutional precedents for decisions that are made about them. Scholarly societies adopt policies about the languages of their meetings; smaller conferences do the same; sometimes it’s necessary to budget for simultaneous translators, and that affects the viability and composition of conferences; and admissions officers adopt standards they hope will ensure students understand their teachers. (There is a large difference between simultaneous and alternating translation in lectures: often, I’ve had to rewrite lectures so they fit the form of translation, even aside from the translators’ skills, the institutional context, or the probable interests and knowledge of the audience.) There is a great deal to be said about each of these abilities, but I want to concentrate here on the ones I think are the least talked about and the most pervasive: reading and writing. I will divide the subject of English reading and writing into three separate issues: art historians who do not read outside their principal language; art historians who do not read easily or often outside their language; and art historians who do not write fluently outside their language. (A) Art historians who do not read outside their principal language. It is often said that scholars from the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand are especially likely not to speak other languages. That is a complaint voiced in many countries, but it may be especially common among German-speaking art historians. Scholars like Horst Brede­ kamp, for example, have long maintained that most art historical writing is German,

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and Anglophone scholars ignore it at their peril. Actually, English-language art history is published in more journals, produces more books, and is practiced in more departments than German art history by a ratio of about two to one. (The statistics are in the book Partisan Canons.) But on the other hand, the UK has one of the worst records in the EU of monolingualism. A 2004 poll found that only 1 in 10 Britons could speak a second language. (A 2000 poll found 1 in 4 Americans could carry on a conversation in a second language, and 1 in 5 speak a language other than English at home.) Enrollments are down in UK language departments, and internationally its scholars are among the most likely to be monolingual. At least in the UK, the situation is getting worse: the number of departments in the UK offering modern language degrees dropped from over 100 to 62 between 2000 and 2013. The general lack of Anglophone readers of German-language art history is significant because German-language art history is the largest tradition outside of English, and over the last half-century or so it has developed its own concerns, leading concepts and methodologies, traditional points of reference, and interpretive traditions. The distance between German Bildwissenschaft and Anglo-American visual studies, for example, is often difficult to assess because of the lack of scholars who read in both. (This is a principal subject of the book Farewell to Visual Studies, 2015.) These issues apply equally to Anglophone scholars’ ignorance of writing in Spanish, Chinese, and other major traditions. The Anglophone practice of bypassing Spanish-­ language writing may be even more monolithic than the habit of not reading German, but it is less often noted. (One of the few Spanish academics to explore this is Vicenç Furió, especially in his Arte y reputación, 2012.) French and Italian may be the principal exceptions to Anglophone monolingualism, because so many North American art historians specialize in French and Italian subjects. Yet the monolingualism of American and English art historians, along with those from Australia and New Zealand, is a trope within art history—a traditional complaint. As such it obscures more complicated lacks of English. In Ghana I met some art historians and critics who spoke 4 or more “local languages” and also spoke English, but did not write it well enough to publish outside Africa. At the University of Cape Town, the Michaelis School of Art has to work hard to support some of its black African students whose languages may include Zulu, Xhosa, and other Bantu languages but only basic English. The trope of English-language monolingualism also deflects attention from other monolingualisms. Several traditions around the world are effectively monolingual. Aside from English-language scholarship produced in the UK and the US, another principal example would be Latin American scholarship with the exception of Brazil. Many Central and South American art historians speak a small amount of English, but in general the literature is isolated. A Chilean scholar put this concisely in an application I recently read: “from a Latin American point of view,” she wrote—and I’m quoting

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verbatim to give a sense of the texture of the problem—“it seems that lack of knowing another languages has stopped contribution.” A second principal example of non-English monolingualism is China: of the hundred or so most active Chinese art historians, theorists, and critics, something on the order of twenty speak English well enough to carry on scholarly discussions. In my experience co-organizing conferences in Beijing from 2009 to 2011, Chinese scholars have a general, if uneven, awareness of writers like Panofsky, Warburg, and especially Gombrich (whose books were extensively translated in the 20th century), but little knowledge of more recent figures. Together with a Chinese graduate student I have been compiling a list of all art history books translated into Chinese, and it shows that the dozen or so most prominent Western art historians active in the last few decades are likely to be represented in Chinese by just one or two books each. Those books, in turn, are sometimes translated so inadequately that the books are not read or are grossly misinterpreted. Hal Foster came to one of the conferences I co-organized in Beijing; only three or four Chinese scholars in our group of about thirty knew who he was, and only one mentioned trying to read his one translated book. On the other hand, none of the Western scholars who attended those conferences—except for those already specialized in Chinese contemporary art—knew a single one of the Chinese art historians, theorists, and critics. (I will explore this in chapter 3.) A third example of non-English monolingualism is Russian. Russian-language art history is especially isolated, with relatively few scholars working in English or other languages. In some ex-Soviet countries the situation is better: in Belarus a small group associated with the EHU (European Humanities University) work in English; in Romania art historians know French and German; in Bulgaria there is some knowledge of English; in Turkey there is variable knowledge of English, and older scholars who learned in French and German. But in countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, the second language (after Russian) is likely to be Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek, and not English. Another largely monolingual country is Iran, where a small number of historians and critics speak English. (As in China, there is an asymmetry in translations: when I visited I tried to collect examples of art history and criticism translated into Farsi, but it wasn’t easy, mainly because the print runs are so tiny that even the few venues that carried the books did not have complete collections.) Effectively monolingual traditions call for a special kind of intervention. It would be a good use of Getty or Mellon funds if lists could be compiled of books and essays translated into selected monolingual traditions: that would be a first step toward understanding what counts as “European,” “Western,” or other art history in those traditions. Without a good knowledge of the shapes of art history in different countries, it is impossible to gauge how texts written in different languages are read—how they are understood, against what historiographic background, in relation to what sense of the discipline. Translations from effectively monolingual traditions into Eng-

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lish are more commonly funded, but I am not convinced that is a good strategy. The journal AIT, Art in Translation, tends to find essays whose methods and scholarly habits are already familiar—they are already close to the North Atlantic model. Monolingualism is not the most serious issue in the languages of art writing, but it requires a special study, and not just translations into English. (B) Art historians who do not read much, or often, outside their principal language. Many scholars are effectively monolingual because they do not read easily in languages other than their own. The qualification here makes all the difference: it turns this from an apparently trivial condition into a very difficult problem. It is not true, for example, that German-language scholars are unproblematically or perfectly aware of English-language scholarship. A typical contemporary publication written in German might well make reference to the principal works on its subject in English, but there might not be any extended encounter with those English-language texts. German scholars do read English, but it is an open question how much is read, and there are many instances in which the literature in English is cited more than actually engaged. German Bildwissenschaft and art history have not developed the Anglo-American interest in identity, for example, even though authors like Judith Butler appear regularly in German publications. The many large edited volumes produced by Eikones, the image research center in Basel (2005-2017), are a good example. I served as a site panelist there for five years, and each year I reviewed dozens of essays, mono­ graphs, and edited volumes. When the topics overlapped those that are traditional in postwar English-language art history and theory, such as gender, sexuality, and identity, the German-language authors would usually cite the pertinent sources, but after the citations the authors tended to return to their own concerns and follow lines of thought that were more dependent on German-language art theory and art history. A good example of an attempt to bridge this gap is Birgit Mersmann and Alexandra Schneider’s Transmission Image (2009), which includes a number of texts on gender, identity, and ethnicity, and—from the German-language tradition—a number of texts that carefully discuss image reception. Another example of German scholars reading some, but not much, English literature, is the influence of Tom Mitchell in Germany: it went up sharply after the publication of an anthology of his work in German, even though in my experience German scholars often say they had known his work for some time. A similar example is Scandinavian countries’ relation to French. Students in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden tend to read English and German by preference over French. I have seen third-level syllabi in visual studies departments that have almost no French readings. This isn’t because the students don’t know French, but because they are not fluent enough to read French easily. These slight lacks of skill can have significant consequences: entire scholarly traditions can be deflected from one literature, one nation’s scholarship, to another, and that can change the entire tenor of

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

research in a country. In this case Scandinavian Bildvetenskap and allied disciplines are influenced by Anglo-American and German writing, but less so by French writing. I think Spain may have a higher percentage of English-speaking art historians than South America, but a version of this problem still applies. Spanish scholars who do not read fluently in English are largely dependent on just a few publishers, such as Akal; similarly Portuguese scholars who are not comfortable in English are dependent on just a few publishers such as the Brazilian journal Arte & Ensaios. Czech scholars have the journal Umění and several volumes of theoretical essays edited by Ladislav Kesner, but there are large gaps. The result of these limited translation programs is an idiosyncratic sense of English-language art history, formed mainly by the translations that happen to be available. (C) Art historians who do not write easily in English. This, I think, is the most interesting of these issues. It is difficult to define what it means to say scholars in a country don’t read “much” or “easily,” but it is clear when scholars do not write well enough to submit their essays to the principal English-language journals. Any number of accomplished scholars in countries like France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Balkans, Poland, and Russia write English well enough to communicate, but not quite well enough to publish. I find this problem is more or less unknown to Anglophone scholars, but it is a subject of intense concern in parts of the EU and elsewhere. (This issue does not exist as such in English-speaking countries outside the EU such as Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, and the Philippines, because the distance between their scholars’ practices and North Atlantic norms can be great enough so that the content of their scholarship, aside from their language, makes it difficult for them to be published in US or UK journals and books. I will return to this question under a different heading.) French scholars in particular often have good conversational English, but don’t write quite well enough to submit essays to The Art Bulletin or Art History. This subject has been discussed by Matthew Rampley in his excellent anthology Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (2012), and it is a concern for Francophone groups such as the Artl@s initiative. A slight deficiency in written English can effectively hobble a career. French scholars may not want to publish only in French journals (which do not have wide circulation outside Francophone countries), but they may be effectively prevented from writing for the world Anglophone press. Scholars who do not experience this problem often don’t know about it, and I have heard it said that art historians who face this issue can just employ translators. But that is actually quite difficult: translators who can deal with art history, theory, and criticism can be difficult to find. Hans Belting, who has an elegant written style in English, still felt the need for finding English translators, and in 2011 he told me that finding good translators was one of the principal obstacles in getting his work into

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English. In addition, of course, translators are expensive, and English-language publishers will often require a completed chapter or entire book manuscript in English before they will even consider sending a manuscript out for review. It is not an exaggeration to say southern and eastern Europe have many scholars whose work is not known outside their countries because of a slight lack of English. Exceptions to this problem are, I think, mainly localized in northwest Europe: scholars in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and to a lesser degree Finland and Estonia may well have written English good enough to submit essays to any of the principal English-language journals and publishers. But outside that geographically narrow compass, the world is full of scholars who can read some, and perhaps a great deal, of the English-language literature, but cannot easily publish their work. It is sometimes said that scholars from “unusual” places can’t submit articles to English-language journals. One Croatian scholar complained that people who “come from so called ‘margins’ barely have the opportunity to submit papers or to publish in the prestigious scientific journals.” But the reason such applications might be turned down without serious consideration is not the place the scholar lives but the language of the cover letter. Even before the editor has seen the essay, she will have an idea of how much work (and expense) it may require to turn the essay into English in the “house style” of the journal. When I edited a book series involving a number of international contributors, I tried to address this problem by permitting people to write in whatever English they could command, and then undertaking extensive “translations” from broken English to fluent English. I did that kind of work myself because the process often takes more time than an ordinary translation, and it can only be done by someone who knows the nuances of the subject matter. A professional translator would miss many of the inflections that matter so much in scholarly work. But that kind of work is prohibitively expensive for most presses, so essays in less than adequate English tend just to be rejected. Before I conclude, there’s another aspect to the language issue that is not often discussed: the question of multilingualism, and its effect on the discipline. Major universities in the North Atlantic are effectively multilingual: each of their art history faculty speaks and writes fluently in several languages, and their students are expected to do the same. In North America, only the very top tier universities achieve this, and they do so by accepting only the most qualified students, and by advising them to increase their language skills. Anthony Grafton tells me that Princeton students are encouraged to write and give lectures in their research language; most universities in North America would not ask that of their American students. But in the EU, especially in smaller countries, there is a different kind of issue to do with multilingualism. Heie Treier tells me that several of her Estonian colleagues have studied abroad, in Paris, London, New York, Berlin, and Helsinki. When they come back home, she writes, “they

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The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied

speak Estonian but think in the categories that come from the country and university where they studied. These are different traditions of thinking and analyzing art. So, the result is that colleagues sometimes can no longer speak about art with each other in Estonian! They all think in different language traditions, but speak Estonian.” That is a polylingualism issue seldom seen in larger countries. Similarly, a Chinese scholar told me that because she learned her art history through English, her Chinese style is recognizably “foreign.” It’s not clear to me whether that might be a common issue for Chinese editors and publishers. These three subjects—lack of languages, lack of fluency in languages, and lack of fluency in writing—are divisive problems in art history worldwide. They are, perhaps, not the most profound problems: those have to do with content, the subject of this book’s final chapter.

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CHAPTER 2

Leading Terms: Master Narrative, Western, Central, Peripheral, North Atlantic

It is a sign of the unsettled nature of the study of worldwide practices of art history that most of the basic terms are contested. Some scholars prefer “global”; others prefer “worldwide,” “transnational,” or “international.” In some places the modifiers “Western” and “non-Western” are common; in other places they are proscribed as overdetermined. “Central” and “marginal” or “peripheral” less likely to be seen as problematic, but they are difficult to avoid. In this chapter I consider several overlapping sets of these qualifying words: 1. Canon, trajectory, master narrative 2. Western, non-Western, European, Euramerican, North American, Anglo-American, and American 3. The choice of North Atlantic for this book 4. Central and peripheral or marginal 5. Regional, provincial, parochial 6. Decolonial theory I will not attempt to provide fixed definitions for these terms, but I hope to settle them in the informal sense of that word, the way a person might settle a restive animal: I want to describe them in such a way that they can be useful in the context of this book, and hopefully prevent them from leaping out of context and ruining the arguments they are meant to articulate.

1. Canon, trajectory, master narrative I begin with a set of concepts that is relatively easy to frame. “Canon,” “trajectory,” and “narrative”—as in “master narrative”—are used interchangeably, but it helps to make some simple distinctions between them. In this book, a canon is a set of artists,

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artworks, periods, places, styles, movements, or other categories that is considered, in some interpretive context, to be both essential and irreplaceable for a larger sense of the pertinent history. A canon in itself is not a temporal object; it is a list. When chronology is added a canon becomes a trajectory, history, genealogy, or lineage—I will mostly be using those terms interchangeably. The central trajectory of modernism includes the sequence Manet → Cézanne → Picasso

and it also includes the branching sequence Postimpressionism → Cubism → Abstraction → Dada → Surrealism → Abstract Expressionism.

Either one of those also comprises a canon. I will be using the expression “master narratives” to evoke the sum of the texts that articulate and justify canons and trajectories. The “master narrative” of modernism, in its simplest form, is this branching sequence; but the term narrative is a reminder that this is not a list, but a story or a series of stories, together with all their supporting values and instances. “Master narratives” is a way of gesturing toward a sum total of justifications and interpretations: some arguments later in this book, especially in chapter 6, depend on the entanglement of the full complement of texts that support and articulate canons and trajectories. (Par­ tisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski, 2007; Master Narratives and Their Discontents, 2005.)

2. Western, non-Western, European, Euramerican, North Atlantic, North American, Anglo-American “Western” and “non-Western” are perhaps the least useful terms in the discussion of the worldwide practices of art history, theory, and criticism. The reason isn’t that they are inaccurate or outdated, and it isn’t that they are irremediably biased or that they rely on overdetermined assumptions. Nor is the problem their generality. The reason these terms are not useful is that there is an impasse between communities who use these terms and those who do not. On the one hand, scholars in Europe and North America often wish to shelve talk about “Western” and “non-Western.” The concept of “Western art history”—or Western scholarship in general—is widely rejected, for several of the reasons I gave in the preceding paragraph. “Westernness” is under- and over-defined: writing on art from the 18th century to the mid-20th century has in effect proposed many detailed definitions of what counts as Western art, while also leaving the nature of that art implicit. “Westernness” is also ideologically loaded, meaning it does work that those who use it may not intend, defining their own identities and implicitly also the identities of their readers. Claire Farago has researched what might be said and done without words like “Western” and “non-Western.” Her Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe

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Leading Terms: Master Narrative, Western, Central, Peripheral, North Atlantic

and Latin America 1450–1650 (1995) was an influential marker of the turn in art history toward global studies. The program called Art in the Contemporary World and World Art Studies, at the University of Leiden (begun in 2005), the program Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia (1992), and the program for Arty History in a Global Perspective at the Freie Universität Berlin (2008), were founded on the conviction that it was time to pay attention to the world’s art practices without categorizing them into “Western” and “non-Western.” (More on this is in Ulrich Pfisterer’s “Origins and Principles of World Art History,” World Art Studies, 2008, pp. 69–89.) Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), and other critiques in political theory and area studies have effectively removed the concept of “Western” from serious discussion. But on the other hand, terms like “Western,” “non-Western” and “Oriental” are routinely used in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe. (And note that all four of those terms are European or North American in origin, and a couple, like “East Asia,” are not used in the places they designate.) For example, as Xenia Gazi points out, “oriental” is widely used in the Middle East to designate characteristics of art such as the use of calligraphy and geometric patterns. (Its use in other parts of the world is an entirely different matter.) Even in as geographically close a country as Turkey, the concept “Western” is commonly used to refer to European art and scholarship. The same is true in Morocco, which is geographically west of most of Europe. Piotr Piotrowski uses “Western” to talk about art history as it is practiced not only in Art Since 1900, but art history to the west of the area he studies (“On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” Umeni, 2008, p. 379). The opposite of “Western,” in some of those contexts, is not “non-Western” but African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Chinese, or any number of specific regional and national labels. When I am traveling, I sometimes find myself in discussions that take “Western art history” as a given: it isn’t always well defined or geographically precise, but it is useful in those contexts because it corresponds well to the ways that scholars think of themselves and their places in the world. But “Western” and “non-Western” are non-starters in western Europe and North America: and that difference is itself one of the most interesting, and intractable, problems with the words. The challenge, then, is double: it is necessary to find terms that can bridge that gap between the rejection of “Western” and its routine use outside western Europe and North America; and to find working synonyms for “Western” that will allow conversations about different parts of the world to go forward in western Europe and North America. It is my preference to take this double bind regarding “Western” and “non-Western” as a starting point in conversations, even though the western European and North American resistance to the qualifier “Western” is so strong that it’s sometimes necessary to abandon it, even though that means playing false with the self-descriptions of

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historians and other art writers elsewhere in the world. (My own book Chinese Land­ scape Painting as Western Art History is aimed principally at Western scholars of Chinese art who have experience of this use of the word “Western.” But that book should probably have been titled Chinese Landscape Painting as North Atlantic Art History, because it is a study of mainly European scholars’ reactions to Chinese literati painting. The book says nothing about Chinese landscape painting itself: my subject is European and North American scholars’ interpretations of Chinese landscape painting, so I don’t make any judgment about the painting itself or the many Chinese interpretations.) In addition I use “Western” and “non-Western” in several carefully defined contexts when I lecture. One of the restricted uses of “non-Western” that I find particularly helpful in conversations outside Europe and North America is what I call the narrative definition of Western and non-Western. There is a common pattern in books that recount the histories of art in their countries or regions: the author says she will not rely on styles and movements from western Europe or North America, but the book ends up describing artists by reference to western European or North American examples. A Filipino painter might be said to have a style “reminiscent of Bernard Buffet,” for example, or a Hungarian modernist might be said to work in a manner indirectly influenced by Cézanne. That narrative form, in which an artist from outside western Europe or North America is described, if only provisionally, in terms of a western European or North American model, is common and in some contexts unavoidable. For example, in Modern Art in Eastern Europe (2001) Steven Mansbach mentions the Hungarian modernist Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, and remarks that Csaba was influenced by Cézanne. He reproduces Perlrott-Csaba’s Bathing Youths, saying simply that its composition “[stems] from the work of Cézanne and Matisse” (p. 271). At first glance—and even in front of the original, which is in Budapest—Mansbach seems entirely correct, but the form and the economy of this kind of reference drains Perlrott-Csaba’s painting of its interest by making it conceptually, historically, and artistically dependent on an artist at the center of the narratives of modernism. This is a complex problem, and I will return to it in chapter 8. (See also the longer account of Mansbach’s book in The Art Bulletin (2000), 781–85.) It can be useful to say that the form of such references makes the narratives of which they are a part “non-Western.” A “Western” narrative in this sense is one that avoids being dependent on references outside its own subject—in this case an introduction to Hungarian modernism. In this sense a “non-Western” art historical account would be one in which interpretations of the country’s art depend on the conceptually or historically antecedent artists, concepts, and practices from western Europe or North America. “Western,” from this perspective, would be whatever narratives are sufficient in themselves and do not require references taken from outside of their purview. Examples of “Western” art histories in this sense would be Gombrich’s Story of Art, or the book Art Since 1900.

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Leading Terms: Master Narrative, Western, Central, Peripheral, North Atlantic

This isn’t a sufficient conceptualization of “Western” and “non-Western”—far from it—but it has the virtue of clarity, and it can be a provocative and fruitful way of thinking about art historical accounts of different national traditions. The narrative defini­ tion makes it possible to study a wide range of books that tell the history of national art traditions, by flagging places where the historian has chosen to let her narrative lean on an existing narrative of art outside her country or region. This narrative definition is also useful in discussions that take place outside western Europe and North America, because this sense of “non-Western” corresponds well with the ways that some nations’ historians understand their geographic and historical position. I have experimented with this in other books. Readers who are interested in the practice of writing the history of one nation’s art, or of trying to balance such a history with an account of the art of the rest of the world, might be interested in the book Stories of Art (2002, reprinted 2013), which surveys textbooks of national and global art history written in the Soviet Union, Japan, Iran, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. Just looking at the tables of contents of such books can be an interesting exercise in dislocating what seems culturally natural. Burhan Toprak’s textbook Sanat Tarihi, published in Ankara in 1957, for example, begins with Anatolia and the Hittites, moves through the Christian middle ages to mid-century Picasso, and then veers back to the Indus Valley, and ends with 19th century Japan. It isn’t a trajectory that would be persuasive to students in western Europe or North America, because it seems incomplete—it appears as if Toprak did not want to let Judaeo-Christian art continue and envelop all of art, or as if he did not approve of modernism after mid-century. But to say such a book ends strangely, or that it “veers” from some course, is to acknowledge the pull of standard North Atlantic narratives of art history. There are many more examples in the book Stories of Art; each one reveals assumptions we tend to make about the naturalism of our own accustomed narratives. Another way of considering this narrative definition is to inquire more closely about what counts as “our” narratives. I have sketched this in a book called Master Narratives and their Discontents (2005). That book is focused on European and, later, North American versions of the principal narratives of modernism and postmodernism. One story of modernism, for example, has it beginning with the Industrial Revolution; another, more applicable to art history, ties modernism’s formative moments to the French Revolution. Several of Tim Clark’s accounts of painting, especially a chapter on Jacques-Louis David in Farewell to an Idea (1999), make a case that modernist “contingency” is to be found first, and perhaps best, in paintings like the Death of Marat. Another narrative of modernism begins with Manet, and especially his awareness of the history of painting as a history of art; this reading is mainly associated with Michael Fried and the book Manet’s Modernism (1996). Still another guiding narrative locates modernism in Cézanne’s experimentation and in Picasso and Braque’s cubism: this is the story implicit in Art Since 1900, which I will consider in chapter 4.

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Postmodernism, too, has its principal narratives, which are associated with writers such as Peter Bürger, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, and Arthur Danto. It is useful to call such stories master narratives, because they tend to guide specialized inquiries by providing large frames for local research. It makes sense to study Rayonism in detail, for example, if Russian cubo-futurism is part of a larger narrative of modernist practices considered to be canonical or essential for understanding art of the past century. It is of interest to study Argentine, Colombian, or Peruvian conceptualism because discussions about the worldwide occurrences of conceptualism are common in art history (see the discussions of Global Conceptualism in chapters 2 and 5). And global conceptualism is of central interest, in turn, because of valuations of conceptualism that are found in the master narrative associated with October and Art Since 1900. (This is not to say that master narratives have predictable effects, good or ill, on more local or alternative narratives: it’s just to point to the fact that master narratives tend to inspire and justify local or alternative narratives, making it harder for specialized studies that aren’t connected to master narratives to attract attention.) My subject in this book is not the number of cogency of these master narratives, but what I am exploring here would not make sense without the persistence of such narratives. Unlike visual studies, art history is cogent to the degree that its many individual research projects implicitly contribute to larger conversations on the important moments of modernism and postmodernism—and those moments, in turn, are given in the form of episodes in various master narratives. This narrative definition is useful mainly when the question is specifically the form of writing—the stories of art, the master narratives. In practice, when narratives of national and regional traditions are not at issue, and when it is not feasible to raise the problem of the double bind, it is probably best simply to be careful and articulate what is at stake in words like “Western.” The Polish scholar Piotr Piotrowski’s paper in the book Circulations, which I will consider in chapter 5, is a good example. Both Uruguay and Poland in the 1970s, he writes, “worked at the margins of Western culture,” and in general “both Latin American and East European art are somehow Western.” I like the “somehow,” which allows his argument to proceed without hobbling it by overly rigid definitions. Often, but not always, “Western” is best treated as a place­ holder—that is, a word used in ordinary speech to signal the speaker doesn’t feel the need to think of a more precise word in order to get on with what she intends to say.

3. The choice of North Atlantic For this book, I had the choice of a number of other terms: “Eurocentric,” “Euramerican,” “North Atlantic,” “North American,” “Anglo-American,” and “American.” My principal subject is practices of art history that are emulated by much of the world, and

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there is no single way to adequately localize those practices. It is tempting to think of this as a series of concentric circles: European and North American art history: Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, the Humboldt University, Basel; Texte zur Kunst; about 15 European university presses Anglophone art history: Leeds, the Courtauld, the Power Institute; Art History, the Oxford Art Journal; Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press, about 5 others North American art history: Princeton, Yale; The Art Bulletin, October, Grey Room; about 10 university presses Diagram 1  The central institutions, journals, and publishers in art history

The same sort of diagram could be made beginning with German-language art history, and moving out by concentric circles to its direct and indirect influence on Anglophone art history. It would also be interesting to experiment with Francophone diagrams, or diagrams starting with Italian and other languages and national traditions. But the diagram doesn’t represent a topographic truth: German Kunstwissen­ schaft is not somehow “outside” or secondary to English-language art history, and none of these three circles are unitary or otherwise well defined. It is a diagram of a perception. What matters, in the study of world art history, is what is being emulated (or rejected), and how that object of emulation is identified by the people who admire or study it. For the purposes of this book, something like the center of this chart is approximately right: what is emulated around the world is some version of what happens in places like Princeton and Yale or in journals like October or The Art Bulletin. That is not to say the center and the first ring aren’t permeable—I have tried to indicate that with the interrupted lines. The salient point here, however, is that what is being emulated in China, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Argentina, Colombia, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and many other places is English-language art history, even more than French and definitely more than German or Italian scholarship. The mixtures of models are complex, but I am risking this diagram in order to make the point that there is a center toward which emulations are aimed. (The listings on the diagram are mainly based on a comprehensive bibliography of North American and European art history translated into Chinese, which I will discuss in chapter 10. The examples of institutions, journals,

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and publishers in the diagram therefore reflect texts and scholars that have been considered worth translating.) That center is a mobile target, but often it can be provisionally described as the sum of the most active art historians working in the principal universities in the US and western Europe including Scandinavia, along with their principal journals and university presses. Any young art historian in the US could rattle off a list of the ten or so top-tier universities, the three or four acceptable journals, and the ten or so acceptable university presses. Young scholars in North America can be so fixated on such lists that they won’t apply to PhD programs in other institutions, or, at a later stage in their careers, they won’t send their manuscripts to publishers who aren’t on the list. Below is a half-serious diagram of the centers of emulation from the point of view of some scholars who work in or near those centers. If anything, this would be even more contentious than the first diagram! But that very contentiousness shows the gravitational pull of what are considered centers and margins of the field. Less prestigious universities for art history: South Florida, North Dakota, NUS (Singapore), Dundee, Lund, Bologna, Plymouth; commercial art presses such as Abrams and Prestel; commercial art magazines Second-tier universities for art history: Iowa, San Diego, Amherst, Trinity College Dublin, Copenhagen; presses more acceptable in the UK such as Ashgate and Sage; smaller presses such as Fordham, Minnesota, Penn State; national and specialist publications like Word and Image, Artibus et historiae, Perspective (INHA), Umeni, or Nonsite Top universities: Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Leeds, the Humboldt University, the Courtauld, Berkeley; The Art Bulletin, Art History, October, especially the first ten years; Yale University Press, Princeton University Press, and a half-dozen others Diagram 2  The central institutions, journals, and publishers in art history, seen from a

North American viewpoint

(Caveat emptor: I am only hoping to point to general trends here. These names and places vary somewhat depending on the scholars’ specialties, and I don’t mean to imply an equivalence or connection between the places and publishers.)

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Seen from the reverse perspective, what counts as the best practices of art history, those worth emulating, is somewhere toward the multiple centers of the first diagram. Hence among the possible choices of words, “Eurocentric,” “Euramerican,” “North Atlantic,” “North American,” and “American,” one of the better choices is “North Atlantic,” because it names the general geographic region that art historians in different parts of the world take as optimal practice. “North Atlantic” has drawbacks: it omits major centers such as the west coast of the US, and it is vague about what matters in central and eastern Europe. In addition it is reminiscent of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and Jigna Desai’s Brown Atlantic (for example in her book Beyond Bolly­ wood, 2003), although Gilroy and Desai’s projects critique previous models of diaspora, while my purpose here is to delimit a region that threatens to expand unhelpfully or contract until it has no critical purchase. “North Atlantic” is also less than optimal because it echoes North Atlantic Studies, an established specialty that has nothing to do with this subject (as in books like Jeffrey Bolster’s The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, 2012). “North Atlantic” also has the drawback of being an unusual term in art history, somewhat like John Clark’s “Euramerican”—a term I might have used, except that much of the argument in this book turns on differences and divisions within North America and Europe. (“Euramerica,” incidentally, is a geologic term, referring to a continent in the Devonian period that was comprised of present-day North America and Europe. It is also known, amusingly, as “The Old Red Continent.” And more appropriately for Clark’s usage, EurAmerica is the name of a journal published in Taiwan and dedicated to the study of Europe and North America.) “Anglo-American” was another possible way of naming this book’s subject, but it is too narrow, because the art history that is discussed in South America, southeast Asia, and Africa is often French. Another drawback is that “Anglo-American” is a term used in political theory to name the shared economic and cultural values of the United States and the UK. “Anglo-American” could be a good shorthand for the linguistic dominance of English that I discussed in the previous chapter, because it hints at distinctions between American and UK academic practices—differences that are sometimes visible in the reception of English-language art history. The historian Cao Yiqiang, for example, studied with Francis Haskell and E. H. Gombrich; his work is quite different from Chinese art historians educated in the US. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be productive to try to specify my subject any more closely than “North Atlantic.” For some people, the hegemonic model of art history should be identified with just a few institutions (as on the second diagram) and just a couple of dozen art historians (most of them also writers in English). Others might point to the crucial publishers as art history’s real center; in that case the central models of art history would be found in books by Yale University Press, or in The Art Bulletin, Art History, or October. And still others might prefer the synecdoche of New York City to

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the less precise “east coast” or “North America.” Vicenç Furió puts this very well when he paraphrases Serge Guilbaut’s famous phrase: New York didn’t just steal the idea of modern art, Furió says, but the idea of modern art history (Arte y Reputación, p. 219). “North Atlantic” is a compromise: it’s not a common usage, but I hope its slightly unfamiliar sound might also draw attention to the fact that the practices of art history that are emulated throughout the world are themselves not well defined. That is the reason I have adopted “North Atlantic” in the title of this book.

4. Central, Peripheral, Marginal Usually talk about center and periphery has to do with visual art, not the writing about it. Art historians, theorists, and critics talk about art practices, movements, styles, the market, and institutions as central or peripheral. But in this book center and periphery apply to art history: art history departments, individual historians’ texts, publishers who maintain art history lists, as well as conferences and other elements of art historical writing. “Central” is my term for whatever practices and institutions of art history are understood to be the models, norms, standards, or exemplars of art historical practice at any given time or place. “Central” might be as general as “Western” or as focused as “the first decade of October” or the Department of the History of Art at Yale. For someone in the art academy in Xi’an, central might be CAFA in Beijing or the China National Academy in Hangzhou. Contrasted with these are whatever practices and institutions see themselves, or are seen, as “marginal.” (From this point on I will omit the scare quotes around these terms, with the understanding that they do not name truths as much as perceptions, and that there is no one center or definable margins.) In this book, marginal or peripheral are intended as non-judgmental terms designating a geographic distance that is also perceived as a way of naming relatively isolated, belated, incomplete, perhaps simpler, less connected, less well financed, or smaller versions of what happens in the center. The mechanism of the relative isolation of center and periphery might be geographic, or it may also be political, historical, ethnic, economic, institutional, or linguistic. Two conclusions are often drawn from the “center / periphery” relation when it is applied, as it usually is, to visual art. Neither one, I think, is justified by the discourses that make use of the terms, and the two conclusions need to be carefully distinguished from one another, if not always separated. First, it is said that studies of local art contexts, “minor” practices (in Deleuze’s sense), subaltern discourses, and glocal developments will eventually dissolve the fundamental relation between what is perceived as center and what is perceived, or perceives itself, as margin. This hope—that attention to local contexts can resolve or avoid the hierarchy

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of center and margin—is repeatedly resurgent in art history, area studies, and postcolonial theory. I am not convinced that the many studies that articulate local contexts have eroded the hold of the concepts of center and periphery. (I can only suggest that argument here; see the Afterword to Art and Globalization for a full account and evidence.) This is the argument I would make about art, and I think the same is true of art history. In this book I will be assuming that emphasis on individual art historians’ work, on local practices of art history, or on “unusual” or “new” methodologies, interpretive concepts, publishers, institutions, or venues, may not erase the underlying distinction between center and periphery, which usually remains impervious to such attention. Second, the rhetoric of the center and periphery can be so strong that it can obscure the fact that in any given case neither one might be well defined. In art, it’s common to read about the central narrative of modernism or the exclusion of practices that do not conform to it. Yet it is far from easy to say precisely what that central narrative is, aside from many individual examples, such as the privileging of cubism in Paris, surrealism, Russian constructivism, and other movements. Rhetoric about central and marginal are also used in talk about art history, and in that case it can be even more difficult to specify what is meant because the canonical examples might not be available. When some Chinese scholars at a conference in Beijing in 2010 called for the abandonment of “Western art history,” the rhetorical context gave the claim a kind of urgency, but the center itself was not clearly defined. This kind of dependence on the rhetorical force of claims about the center and margin can make it seem as if it may not be sensible to explore ideas of center and margin more systematically. It can then be concluded that the distinction is empty or overdetermined, or that it should be avoided as an example of an restrictive binarism. I do not think that those conclusions are always warranted, because the rhetoric of center and periphery continues to do a great deal of amount of work in contemporary art. I think the same is true when center and periphery are applied to art history: an awareness that you’re in a central place, or a peripheral one, can have a tremendous effect on your work as an art historian. Regardless of how vaguely center and periphery might be understood—it’s never easy to find adequate examples or definitions—they form the interests of young art historians, the syllabi of art history classes, the themes of conferences, and ultimately, entire institutions and national traditions of art history. These two common notions of central and peripheral art practices—that the distinction between center and margin can best be vitiated by paying attention to local cases, and that the distinction should perhaps not be entertained at all—are at times conflated. The second is taken to imply the first, and the first is understood as leading to the second. Personally I find both conclusions, and their implied interdependence, Eurocentric in the worst and most old-fashioned way, and I think the same is true when center and periphery are applied to art history. The scholars who draw such conclusions

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almost always speak from universities in Europe and North America. In those settings it can indeed seem that talk about the center and margin is unproductive. Elsewhere, center and periphery are crucial to discussions about art history, theory, and criticism. (The situation is similar with the pair Western and non-Western: as I mentioned, scholars who object to those terms almost always work in major universities in North America and western Europe. Elsewhere those terms are often fundamental, even if they are always also problematic.) The philosophic critiques of center and periphery by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and many others up to Bhabha and Chakrabarty are cogent, but when they are applied to art, and also when they are applied to art history, they effectively continue the very imbalances their authors were so concerned to critique. There have been several initiatives to work through these issues, and I will consider them in chapter 5. Here I want to emphasize four aspects of the center / periphery difference that might be productive in conversations about art historical practices worldwide. My examples come from applications I read in 2013 for an international travel grant for art historians. An earlier version of this chapter described that grant, and quoted the applications anonymously, but I was informed that even anonymous quotations weren’t legal: I am bound not to say what grant I helped judge, and I am not permitted to quote any material from the applications, even if it is anonymous and untraceable. (And regardless of the fact that several applicants, whom I later met, would have been happy to see their perspectives considered here.) (A) Center and periphery in art history operate at several scales: regional, national, at the level of the department, and at the level of individuals. An applicant from Brazil noted she had studied in Paris, with Georges Didi-Huberman, Alain Badiou, Danièle Cohn, and others. She had also supervised the translation of a dozen European and North American scholars into Portuguese. Several applicants were strongly international: one was born in Africa, studied in Germany, and worked in Egypt. Another was so accomplished and had so many international connections that it seemed the opportunities afforded by the travel grant weren’t that important to him. He wrote that the present and future of art history open a path that we should transit only in an international researchers’ community and in a global scale. By comparison with these scholars, the panel of judges was more provincial. As a panel we had various obligations, but if we had accepted only scholars like these, we would have been the provincial institution inviting the global scholars to enrich its practices. That would have been an interesting inversion of the usual state of affairs, in which the better funded countries and institutions are also the more international; but it would have been in line with the grant’s interest in internationalism. Center and periphery in art history cannot always be equated with nations, cities, or university departments of art history. There are departments in developing coun-

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tries with art historians who travel internationally and look for positions outside their country. It is common, in my experience, to find small, under-funded faculties in developing nations that include one or two scholars whose breadth of reference is greater than the average for larger North American and European art history departments. (B) Some first-world departments of art history are as isolated as some in ­developing nations. An applicant from Romania wrote that art history in his country was nourished with innumerable ingredients of belatedness. One could argue, he said, that ”international” does not imply East and West anymore, that it abolishes the divide, but everyone he knows rightly believes the opposite. This kind of observation can sometimes obscure a more subtle phenomenon, which is just as prevalent. Marginality doesn’t just apply unexpectedly to certain centers of art history: some smaller, provincial and regional institutions in first-world countries can be as isolated, as belated in relation to the discipline of art history, as entire countries or regions in the developing world. There are whole art history departments in first-world countries that are peripheral in the sense that their faculty do not engage the latest scholarship, don’t travel beyond what is necessary for their specialties, and wouldn’t be viable on the job market. (Chapter 1, section 4 has some examples of marginal libraries and resources in first-world art history departments.) Several applications for the travel grant were from art historians who worked in minor institutions in first-world countries. The countries themselves could not reasonably be called culturally isolated, but some of their institutions could be. One applicant said she worked in a medieval Croatian town that was culturally insensate. An applicant from Poland wrote eloquently about the relative isolation of her institution, saying she cannot ignore the inequalities that still exist between different parts of the world. She wrote that she can’t easily get the newest books or catalogues, that she can’t easily travel, and that her salary is lower than in the West. Even so, she and her colleagues make use of the same topics and theories as in the West, and so she is part of the same “knowledge community.” It is easy for western Europeans and North Americans to underestimate the influence of apparently slight economic inequalities. And it bears saying that those economic disparities, even though they are slight in comparison to differences between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are more substantial than they might seem. In 2010 I estimated (based on on earning power reported by faculty) that effective income for art historians in Poland is one-seventh what it is in France. For most of Eastern-Central Europe, art historians need to have second and even third jobs. And the amount of disposable income that is left over for travel and books can be vanishingly small. It wasn’t a surprise to the grant panel that applicants from countries like Romania might need help traveling even within Europe. But it was harder to understand how that kind of inequality could apply to applicants from smaller countries in western

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Europe. An applicant from Italy wrote that she felt Italy is struggling with a sort of isolation, and is underrepresented at an international level. My own experience working for three years in Ireland, in 2005-7 (that is, before the banking crises, and only just after the so-called Celtic tiger), was that even the major art history departments in Ireland had very small book acquisition budgets, and the university libraries had to consider seriously before acquiring even the basic electronic databases. (This is discussed in chapter 1.) The universities’ budgets for bringing scholars in to talk were vanishingly small. At one stage the university where I worked, University College Cork, had a limit of €250 to invite speakers, which effectively limited the speakers to people from the U.K. who could pay part of their travel expenses. If there is a center of art history, in this case, it is the approximately 2,500 private and state four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., all of which can afford to buy research materials and subscribe to all pertinent databases—and many of which can afford to invite speakers from anywhere in the world, pay them fees in the thousands of dollars, and help send their own faculty abroad. This may sound inaccurate if you work in a small state university or college in the US and you’re hurting from budget crunches and meager travel and research funds, but the art history budgets for even small U.S. universities can look extravagant and even unthinkable in smaller universities in Europe. In Europe only a few smaller institutions can hope to invite speakers from outside Europe, or obtain sufficient travel and research funds for professors. In the U.S. it is uncommon to have to apply for sabbatical leave; in the E.U. it is normal, and it’s also common to be rejected. In Europe only the largest art history departments in western Europe, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and some in other places have the budgets and capacities that even mid-size US state colleges have. There is no way to quantify this, but my sense is the ratio of such departments in the U.S. to those in Europe might be on the order of ten to one. (C) Peripheral institutions almost always gravitate to the center. Part of the ­prejudice, common in major North Atlantic institutions, against words like center and periphery or Western and non-Western, comes from the idea that there are local cultures of scholarship, which are self-sufficient or inwardly directed, and are therefore not well described as “peripheral.” Those departments and scholars are imagined to be largely unconcerned with what happens in the so-called “center.” I find this nearly universally untrue. One of the candidates for the grant wrote describing conditions of art history in his institution in South Africa. He said that aside from the national organization SAVAH (South African Visual Art Historians), hardly anyone shares knowledge, so scholarship goes on in relative isolation. This paints a picture of endemic partial isolation of the kind that could, in theory, produce different research cultures. On the other hand the magnetic pull of the distant

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center is very strong. This candidate went on to describe the excitement of meeting someone from the States or in Europe who was doing similar research, and how rare it was to meet anyone working on similar subjects face to face. Another applicant from South Africa drew the consequences of this situation, saying that he thought the majority of ideas and discourses around the methodologies and cutting-edge approaches to art history remained centered in the proverbial “Western hegemony.” He said he’d initiated a few conversations with colleagues about this subject, and he’d found a general acceptance that the very idea of art history as a field of study is a Western one. What matters, he said, is the possibility of developing new ways to theorize or engage non-Western art practices. Even though the judges were interested in local practices, it was never clear, during the grant review process, which peripheral locations might be producing writing that might be different from writing done in central locations: this will be the subject of Chapter 6. (D) Sometimes scholars at the margins do not appear as part of art history. Our grant panel also got some applications from people in less well represented parts of the world, like Togo, Cameroon, and Kazakhstan, and in some of those cases it wasn’t clear whether the applicants knew what art history is. One wrote that art history helps humanity to take account of the past, and that without art history the present and the future cannot easily be foreseen. He added that art history helps humanity understand the way of life of our grandfathers, traditional know-how, and old ways of thinking. From a North Atlantic perspective, that applicant had a strange way of putting things, and it seemed he was guessing at art history rather than responding to it. Notions of art history, theory, and criticism become less well-defined in places that are culturally isolated or impoverished, and at a certain point it becomes necessary to ask: what, in any given context, should reasonably be counted as the practice of art history? Does this applicant have a working idea of what art history is, or is she motivated by a kind of hope provoked by the questions on the application? For our panel judging the travel grant, there was a practical question in applications like this one, because we wanted to be sure the applicants could make use of their exposure to art historians in North America. An applicant who knew nothing about art history as a field would presumably not know what to make of the talks given by professional art historians. From these four points I conclude that there are interesting differences between the ways words like central and peripheral are used in relation to art, and the ways they might be applied to art history. The center or centers of art history are hard to define adequately. Some depend on not being adequately defined, and most are known only from informal, unquantified descriptions like this one. In art, center and periphery or margin remain both well known and deeply problematic, especially in regard to modernism. I will end this chapter with an example in

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order to draw out another difference between center and periphery in art and in art history. (E) Envoi, on Global Conceptualism. This example concerns the book and exhibition Global Conceptualism (1999) and a response to it in a book called Circulations, edited by the Catherine Dossin and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. Circulations is the product of two conferences hosted by the Atl@s group, which is comprised of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel; I will have more to say about it in chapter 5. The essay that provides my example here is by Sophie Cras; she opens by recalling that Global Conceptualism was founded on the rejection of the center. The exhibition, she says, suggested “a multicentered map with various points of origin” in which “poorly known histories [would be] presented as equal corollaries rather than as appendages to a central axis of activity.” The very notion of centrality was altogether repudiated, as Stephen Bann made it clear in his introduction: “The present exhibition… explicitly rejects the customary practice of plotting out the topology of artistic connections in terms of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’.”

Cras also notes Peter Wollen’s claim, in the catalogue, that conceptualism had no center, and therefore did not disseminate outward, so that its manifestations are all potentially equal. Her argument is that negating “the notion of an opposition between center and periphery in favor of a supposedly de-hierarchized panorama is problematic at three levels at least”: First, artists of the time… effectively perceived the artistic scene in terms of centers and periphery, if only to contest its structural inequality. Second, leveling practices… does not allow an understanding of the process by which some established themselves historically while others had to wait for a belated rehabilitation… Third, this proscription of the notions of center and periphery… does little justice to the discipline of geography.

It’s necessary, Cras argues, to retain “center” and “periphery,” but to consider “circulations between these spaces… dynamically and dialectically” in order “to understand processes of emulation, domination and exclusion.” The book Circulations, in which Cras’s essay appears, is an attempt at writing around problems of center and periphery in art by focusing on geographical movements of artists, ideas, and artworks. The Atl@s group uses cartographic tools, large databases, and some historical and conceptual ideas provided by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and others to try to rethink ideas like center and periphery. Centers “create, or feed on, their peripheries,” Cras remarks, creating a “dialectical tension,” and the idea of multiple simultaneous equally important centers is a rhetor-

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ical move, a hope rather than a reality. Her essay includes an excellent succinct criticism of Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972 (1973), contrasting Lippard’s claims of the “decentered internationalism” of conceptual art with maps of the places she mentions, which turn out to have “defined centers and peripheries.” I agree almost entirely with Cras’s criticisms of Global Conceptualism and of Lippard’s book. Almost, but not entirely, because what most interests Cras seems to be the conceptualists’ inexhaustible experimentation with maps. The many photocopied maps in On Kawara’s 12-volume collection I Went, she writes, “suggest the endless possibility of other places, rather than the fixity of this or that art center or art capital.” Here Cras is attracted by the “visually striking… diversity of maps, scales, typographies and alphabets,” records of the artist’s endless circulation. Here it might be good to mark the difference between a critique of center and margin, and a celebration of endless circulation or the poetry of forgotten “non-sites” or deserted places like the ones shown in Art & Language’s Map of a 36-square-mile area of the Pacific Ocean, or Ger van Elk’s La Pièce (a blank map of part of the North Atlantic Ocean). On Kawara’s wandering and Art & Language’s or Van Elk’s poetics suspend talk of center and periphery, but—as in Global Conceptualism—they do not effectively remove or deconstruct either term. Like other essays in Circulations, Cras’s critique may depend too much on the expectation that an emphasis on cultural exchanges might itself remove or solve the traditional focuses of art history or “escape the hierarchization and exclusion that underlies the narrative of modern art.” Elsewhere in Circulations, Piotrowski mentions Global Conceptualism, praising the way it combines “geographical and historical” perspectives, but saying that “in terms of global comparative art studies, however, one has to go further”: Luis Camnitzer drew a geo-historical panorama of conceptual art, a kind of world atlas of such a practice. What we need to do is to compare East European and South American conceptual arts on a more detailed level.

The question here is how the “more detailed level” contributes to “breaking down the dominance of the Western paradigm in analysing conceptual art,” or to re-conceptualizing the global. Piotrowski first notes that “East European conceptual art” was not “uniform,” and neither was “South American conceptual experience.” He registers the “interesting paradox” that “anti-Soviet attitudes, although shared by almost everyone, did not produce any common transnational platform for subversive art in Eastern Europe.” He also makes distinctions among the reasons for conceptualism in different parts of the world:

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Mari Carmen Ramirez is more specific on this issue, and has polemicized against Benjamin Buchloh’s famous essay which sees the origins of conceptual art within the “administrative drive” of late capitalist society. Following Marchan Fiz, she repeats that unlike the Anglo-Saxon self-referential, analytical model, Latin American conceptualism was “ideological” and revealed social realities.

As Piotrowski’s argument develops, it seems plausible that an extended inquiry into conceptualisms in Poland and Uruguay, and in Eastern Europe and Latin America in general, will reveal differences so deeply informed by local contexts that the very project of studying global conceptualism (or even global conceptualisms, in the plural) will begin to fragment. This possibility appears, for example, when he writes, near the end of his chapter, that “neutral, purified, tautological projects such as Valoch’s… or Koz­ łowski’s… gave them universal, worldwide circulation, but their meaning came from local circumstances, making them entirely different from Latin American political projects.” Piotrowski concludes by mentioning “the limits of reception of circulating ideas.” For me, this is one of the most interesting passages in the book Circulations. On the one hand, the comparison of conceptualisms in different places is made “more detailed”; on the other hand, that very detail threatens to make local and regional differences more important, more fundamental, than whatever label is used to link them in books like Global Conceptualism. Like circulation, globalism only makes sense at a certain level of generality and scope: but if the drive of the art historical inquiry is toward greater detail, then the discordance between contexts of production overrides similarities, and circulation gives way to local meanings. (Piotrowski’s criticism of Global Conceptualism resonates with the book itself, in that Stephen Bann’s Introduction casts doubt on the coherence of the title concept. There have been a number of reflections on the exhibition, for example Jane Farver, “Global Conceptualism: Reflections” [2015] and “Reiko Tomii Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism” [2015]. In 2019 the School of the Art Institute hosted a panel with Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss, another of the exhibition’s curators. There it emerged that the curators excluded practices that showed lack of self-awareness regarding conceptualism, and practices that claimed awareness of conceptualism but did not fit the exhibition’s tacit criteria for form or medium. Camnitzer mentioned a Chinese painting of two hands holding a cup of tea, which he had wanted to include, but it hadn’t seemed sufficiently aware of its traditional medium. The art historian Delinda Collier remarked that she found the Africa section of Global Conceptualism unconvincing because there were so few artists who had awareness of New York- or Buenos Aires-based conceptual art. Weiss and Camnitzer implied that they also had doubts about the concept of global conceptualism, but they considered it was best to keep the category as a provocation. In correspondence after the 2019 event, the art historian Daniel Quiles, one of the panelists, pointed out that Camnitzer’s own

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practice was always ambiguously excluded, as if it was in some way outside of conceptualism. Quiles said some of the curators’ idea of vacillating between the umbrella term, “global conceptualism,” and an emphasis on different regional practices, struck him as “a deliberate rhetorical move” on their part. “You ask Luis what conceptualism is,” Quiles wrote, “and he treats it almost like a verb: it is the opening up of ‘conceptual’ to all possibilities, to determination by political context, to ‘whatever.’ And yet in the Foreword for the exhibition, conceptualisms are pinned down to the familiar characteristics of conceptual art, just with political action as a prominent component: dematerialization, language-information, institution critique. So I feel the flexibility of the term is actually quite skillful, and designed to avoid close scrutiny. Perhaps the reason the curators return to the myth of having suffered bad reviews in the immediate aftermath of the exhibition, regardless of how influential and revered the show has been ever since… [is to help] defer questions about whatever hegemonic position Camnitzer in particular has maintained to this day.” [Correspondence, April 3, 2019.]) This problem of the historiography of global conceptualism is emblematic, and perhaps even crucial, for any account of center and periphery in modern and postmodern art. But I want to leave it here, in order to suggest a difference between center and periphery in art and in art history. The two conferences and several years of editing that produced the book Circulations were themselves examples of central art historical practices. At the first conference, in Purdue University, the presiding historio­grapher was Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, who had occasion to mention, in passing, that he worked at the world’s richest university. His own work has been central to geographic understandings of art for several decades. (He also wrote the introduction to Circula­ tions.) The scholars at both conferences came from a range of places, but the concepts that brought them together—the idea of using circulations to think differently about center and periphery, the idea of gathering cartographic databases—were held in common. For a number of more marginal, less connected departments of art history, that kind of conversation might not have been possible, because it required some shared knowledge of the problematic of center and periphery, and a tacit agreement that a new kind of study could help resolve the issue. Personally, I am not convinced that “circulation” can replace center and periphery. As in other such projects, such as Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi’s Art is Not What You Think It Is (2012), I find that projects that seek to reframe the discourse of center and periphery (or the related discourses of the new and the belated, or the canonical and the marginal) only postpone discussion of the target concepts “center” and “periphery.” But that is not my point here: what matters in this context is that the art history performed in Circulations is itself firmly in the center, and it does not engage ways of talking about center and periphery that insist—as many of the applicants for the travel grant did—on directly emulating a center, regretting a peripheral situation, claiming a central status, or otherwise arguing status rather than reformulating it.

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5. Regional, provincial, parochial There are many more terms—but perhaps not too many—that could be counted as “leading” concepts in the articulation of global art history. For a long while, working on this project, I thought the terms regional, provincial, and parochial could be helpful in characterizing practices of art history as well as art. I am not so sure of that now, but it can be helpful to adopt provisional definitions. Speaking first of the usual applications of these words to art, rather than art history: the term regionalism can be applied to cases in which an artist knows what is happening in some other region, but decides to continue making art that is particular to her own culture. An example is suggested by Steven Mansbach in Modern Art in Eastern Europe (1998) when he points out that artists in Riga were “cognizant of progressive developments in Belgrade or Budapest” through the exchange of journals, although they continued to pursue different trajectories. Parochialism would be a better term to describe the case of an artist who knows something is happening in some other region, but is afraid to find out too much. Mansbach notes, for example, that some eastern European groups avoided outside contact “for fear of compromising their perception of their own unique contribution” to their nations’ art. This is less documented than regionalism, but perhaps even more pervasive; I will consider examples later in this book. A provincial artist, then, would be one who wants to know about art that is taking place in some other region, but is prevented for political and economic reasons. Mansbach notes the difficulty Polish artists had in forming contacts “across the lines of partition separating Russian, Austrian, and Prussian (German) provinces”: a good example of provincialism (p. 7). (These examples are in my review, The Art Bulletin 82, 2000, pp. 781–85; also The Art Bulletin 84, 2002, p. 539.) I have not pursued these distinctions in this book, for several reasons. “Regionalism,” which was a term of pride and anxiety in 20th century North American art up to the dissemination of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, has become a general term for modernisms outside western Europe and North America. The affective conflict of the older use of “regional” is somewhat lost in its use as a synonym for “multiple,” as in “multiple modernisms” (chapter 5). There is also Terry Smith’s exemplary essay “The Provincialism Problem,” which has been studied by Heather Barker and Charles Green (“The Provincialism Problem: Terry Smith and Centre-Periphery Art History,” a chapter in a forthcoming book on Australian modernism). As Barker and Green note, “Smith defined provincialism as ‘an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values,” which is different from the sense I mentioned, but just as important in its psychological inflection. It seems to me that the affective content of categories like “regional,” “provincial” (in my sense, and in Smith’s), and “parochial” may be the best reason to retain them: as categories they are more of their time—from the opening of

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the 20th century, with American anxieties about European modernism, to the end of the century, with academic experiments in writing about “other” modernisms. These terms appear differently when they are used to describe art historical writing. There are certainly parochial art historians in my sense of the word—scholars who avoid looking too closely at some potential sources, languages, and theories—and in Smith’s sense—scholars who feel subservient to ideas and methods that seem not their own. A common example of both would be the discipline’s relation to Hegel: he is an object of fascination, as the potential “father of art history”; but his texts are seldom read at length. (E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, 1969.) For younger scholars, it is not an unfamiliar feeling to be at once beholden to and anxious about theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, or Alain Badiou. Whether or not these provincialisms and parochialisms correspond to geographic areas, as provincialism did for Terry Smith in New York City in the 1970s, is another question: but in the final chapter I will argue that art history does have identifiable regionalisms.

6. A note on decolonial theory Even though the term decolonial doesn’t play a large role in this book, it matters that it has different meanings and uses, and that they vary by continent and region, just as concepts like local, regional, national, central, and peripheral vary. It is sometimes taken for granted that “decolonizing art history” or “decoloniality” (Walter Mignolo’s term) are sufficiently stable so they can be applied to contexts in different parts of the world, but I am not sure that’s a safe assumption. In June 2019 the English journal Art History issued a questionnaire on “decolonizing art history,” asking about the “historical specificity” of calls for decolonization, and wondering if they are “different from previous challenges to the discipline (such as postcolonialism, feminism, queer studies, Marxism).” (Published in Art History 2020 n. 1, 8–66.) The authors of the questionnaire, Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, noted the unrest in South Africa beginning in 2015 as the inception of a growing awareness that “unspoken colonial legacies had for too long upheld and promulgated white ­privilege,” and they also mentioned the “increasing sense of art history being an embattled discipline, an unnecessary luxury for many students faced with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.” I wondered, in my response, about the word “decolonization” and its variants, especially Mignolo’s original “decoloniality.” It seems to me there may be at least three distinct senses of “decolonization” and related terms. (A) Decolonization as epistemic disobedience. This is Walter Mignolo’s expression, denoting divestiture, deconstruction of the colonial heritage, and reconceptualisation

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of art history. This would potentially involve the traditional subjects and institutions that have supported art history. There are serious conceptual and practical issues here. Proportional representation of African voices in South African art history would involve hiring Black African faculty up to 75% of total faculty and reducing White African representation to less than 10%, to reflect the demographics of the country. A change in faculty on that scale is conceivable, but a concerted and consistent decolonization of South African universities would entail decommissioning the universities themselves, because they are indebted to UK models. I wonder if deconstructing or abandoning university structures can make sense: without the institutional models inherited mainly from the UK—including programs in art history, conferences, and journals—what would remain to be called “art history”? (This isn’t an argument to save some form of art history, but an observation about the open-ended nature of the critique.) This first sense is also the one that informs Prasenjit Duara’s accounts such as Decol­ onization: Perspectives from Now and Then (2004) which chronicles the transfer of institutional and political powers to postcolonial states. Duara’s work has been influential in contexts that are not postcolonial, such as the Australian Aboriginal rights movements. (Davina Woods and Tarquam McKenna, “An Indigenous Conversation,” Creative Approaches to Research, 2012, especially 80–81.) (B) Decolonization as incremental change. Decolonial theory in North and South America is more a matter of accelerating the work of postcolonial theory. My North and South American students at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (representing, this past year, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Uruguay) tend to speak of decolonization as a practice of individual interventions, especially installations, texts, performances, and acts of curation. In my experience, this is the principal sense of “decolonial theory” in the United States, Canada, and Europe: it is a set of strategies that permit “epistemic disobedience” to continue both against and within existing institutions, as in Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s 2018 book On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. (C) Decolonization as an interpretive strategy. In the first two decades of this ­century decolonial studies has been aimed at institutional change, but it is already operating as an interpretive strategy, in the way that postcolonial theory, feminisms, queer theory, and other theories have done for some time. The move from activist critique to interpretive strategy is a characteristic of academic poststructuralism; an early example is psychoanalysis, whose clinical dimension has long been absent from the academy. In my seminars in Chicago, I am more likely to encounter decolonial theory as a focus for exhibitions or a scholarly aid to the interpretation of art, rather than as a justification for resisting or avoiding habits ingrained in the art world or in art history. Perhaps this list of three senses of decolonial theory forms a temporal sequence, from radical change to academic writing. If so, then “decolonized art history” is actu-

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ally a name for an art history that has added decolonial theory to its battery of interpretive methodologies. If not—if something like the first meaning of “decolonization” is nearer the mark—then a “decolonized art history” won’t “look like” anything at all. If it does, then the revolution won’t have taken place. Decolonial theory and its variants have been mainly used in contemporary international art, but it is important to note that as in theories like psychoanalysis, there is no inherent geographic or temporal limit to the application of decolonial theory. A decolonized art history in this third sense would present a very different narrative of modernisms. Theories of multiple modernisms have opened doors in this regard, and so have recent exhibitions, but where is the story of modernisms that gives equal place to France and Hungary (which had a very large modernist movement), or the thirty or forty other regions and countries that produced modernist work, from Georgia to Paraguay? Where is the art history that gives equal attention to “unusual” modernist practices, such as those in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and in areas still part of Russia, such as the Republic of Bashkortostan? Decolonial theory is even more pertinent in the deeper past. The history of colonialism goes back much farther than the five centuries that concern current scholarship. From the earliest pottery sequences to the modern age, art history can seem to be nothing other than a continuous series of colonizations. The politics is different (or, often, it is unknown), but the results are analogous: certain practices are marginalized in relation to others, and it can require effort to refocus interpretive effort away from the apparently central, significant, or canonical. Entire cultures have nearly been erased from memory (little remains of the Phrygians, the cultures associated with ­Jinsha and Sanxingdui, the Valdivia culture, and hundreds of others). And yet when the historical record permits, the history of subjugation, erasure, iconoclasm, and syncretism can be compelling (recent scholarship on Angkor Wat is exemplary in this regard). Art history has dealt with the problem of “unknown” cultures and colonial complexities by teaching a “master narrative,” the one codified in E. H. Gombrich’s Story of Art, with additions for cultures that have been more widely studied since Gombrich’s generation, such as Inka, Rapa Nui, Chavin, Nok, and many others. A decolonized history of art before the modern age would be almost incomprehensibly alien. At the moment no such textbook exists. For this book the most important property of decoloniality is its geographic variation. I wrote the response to Art History’s questionnaire in Yirrkala, in the Northern Territory in Australia, in a workshop on “postnational art histories.” The participants were interested in Yolngu Aboriginal art and the voices of Aboriginal art in future ­Australian art histories. One of the organizers, Ian McLean, proposed we consider whether “postnational art practices and histories decolonize national art practices and histories.” What was at stake was the postnational, not the decolonial, which was barely discussed. The idea was that postnational and international initiatives, like the

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one that had brought a dozen non-Australian scholars to an isolated art centre in a region where most residents spoke Yolŋu Matha languages, could be agents of decolonization. Likewise there are parts of the world where decolonial theory points more to political histories like Duara’s than to accounts like Mignolo’s. It may be the case that decolonial theory is moving from activism (the first and second meanings) toward a homogeneous theory (the third meaning). It would be helpful to assemble a conference, and produce a book, on the geographic distribution of the meanings of “decolonization” and “postnationalism.” After all, most artists and scholars involved in this subject have a common purpose: to give art of all kinds the capacity to collaborate in inclusive conversations, while retaining something that could still be called a history of art.

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Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena?

The question about worldwide practices of art history can be better understood, I think, when the condition of art history can be compared to the homogenization of some other related field. By default, that “related field” has been global late capitalism, but parallels between structures in academia and those in the free market tend to be general and therefore not helpful in understanding the specific conditions of art historical writing. The parallel between global capitalism and the international art market has been well studied, for example in Charlotte Bydler’s The Global Artworld, Inc: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (2004) and Caroline Jones’s The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (2017). In this chapter I look at three fields that are closer to art history—art criticism, art theory, and art instruction (that is, the teaching of studio art)—in hopes of finding suggestive parallels with art history. I’ll consider the three fields in turn, and at the end of the chapter I will look at a possible parallel outside of visual art: the rise of the global novel.

1. Is art criticism global? I have often counted myself lucky that I work in a department called Art History, Theory, and Criticism, because that triad seems to be continuously entangled. It is uncommon to find an art-writing practice that presents itself as purely art history, criticism, or theory, although that happens. And it is rare to find a writing practice that requires a fourth or fifth term, unless those are names of disciplines like Visual Anthropology or Sociology of Art. Each of the three subjects, art history, theory, and criticism, is practiced worldwide. Of the three, only world art history has become a common subject of study. The book Is Art History Global? was published in 2006, but it was only in 2014 that the question

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of the possible impending uniformity of art criticism occurred to me. As far as I know, critics and historians have not asked whether art criticism might also be tending toward an increasing worldwide uniformity. The odd result is that even though art criticism is more widely practiced than art history, it can be difficult to find even a few pages on whether or not it is, or is becoming, a worldwide practice. Here I divide my comments into two lopsided parts: a long first section on a recent form about regional and national practices of art criticism, and then a short second section with some guesses at answers. For the purposes of this chapter, “art criticism” means mainly writing in news­ papers and magazines, online and in print, on the subject of exhibitions. I tend toward a very inclusive definition of art criticism, which would embrace brief notices in newspapers and magazines and even brochures in commercial galleries. (What Happened to Art Criticism?, 18–23.) “Art history” would then be writing in academic journals and books. “Art criticism” is also generally seen as a first-person response to individual art objects, while “art history” is normatively the study of the reception of art by specific publics, or in certain periods—in other words, it is the study of other people’s responses. These distinctions are invisible, inadequate, or untenable in various contexts, but they are enough to focus what I want to say here. (A) If there is such a thing as the study of “world art criticism” then a reasonable place to look for it would be AICA, the International Association of Art Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art), founded in 1950. In 2013, they began issuing a yearly series of books presenting “undiscovered” critics in bilingual editions, called the AICA Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism. Their first was the Paraguayan Ticio Escobar (The Invention of Distance / La invención de la distancia, 2013). Other winners have been the Swiss critic Annemarie Monteil, the Hungarian critic Thomas Strauss, and the South Korean critic Lee Yil. The 2015 award went to the English critic Sarah Wilson, and the 2016 award to the Cuban critic Adelaida de Juan Seiller. The choice depends on where the association has its annual conference, because AICA members from the host country nominate the critic whose work will be translated. I attended part of the 2013 AICA conference that was held in Košice and Bratislava, Slovakia, and in Kraków, Poland, in September 2013, and I’ll take my examples from that meeting. (Anomalously, the winner that year was Strauss, even though he is ­Hungarian.) The organizers of the 2013 conference, Richard Gregor and Juraj Čarný, described their theme “White Spaces – Black Holes” this way: “White place” is a term used in cartography describing unnamed places on the map. Black hole is a term from cosmology defined as a region of spacetime from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. White Places – Black Holes sets out

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to analyse the strategies by which lesser-known regions have been and are reflected in the global history of art. How is the local history of art perceived from the centres, and how is the global history of art perceived on the periphery?… Our aim, therefore, is to organise a central European congress which will reflect the wider associations of how local art scenes are perceived by “official” art history.

This gave the conference a decidedly art historical orientation, and the lead speaker, Piotr Piotrowski, was known for his theories about what he called “horizontal art history.” I will consider Piotrowski’s position later in this book; it involves an attempt to formulate an art history of modernism in Central-Eastern Europe that is not dependent on narratives in the West. Middle East Europe, as it is sometimes called following László Beke (the conference’s second speaker), is in process of finding itself as a region in relation to the rest of Europe, so critical activity has tended to become historiographic. In my experience most panel discussions, symposia, and other meetings on art criticism focus on the local or national critical scene, and usually on a perceived crisis or problem. Because of their local or national focus, meetings on art criticism tend not to address the worldwide dissemination and practices of criticism. Because of the nature of the 2013 AICA program, there were no papers on the local critical scene in Slovakia or in Poland. The content of the papers certainly differed from the more ordinary art criticism written, for example, for the special “Czech and Slovak Edition” of Flash Art (2013), or the “Special English Edition” of Rider, an art magazine published in Bratislava by Richard Gregor. Given its theme, and its three locations in Slovakia and Poland, the 2013 AICA conference can’t be considered typical; its participants included critics and curators from Paraguay, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Romania, Belarus, China, Taiwan, Ukraine, Georgia, France, the US, South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. The conference, therefore, was an ideal location for discussion of what regional or national practices of art criticism might look like, and by extension, whether or not they were successfully resisting pressures to become international. Yet of the events I attended, the conversations I had, and the abstracts and papers I read, not a single one was the kind of art criticism in which judgments are rendered about artworks. (This is not to say that judgment is what’s needed, or that it’s the only kind or purpose of criticism, or that it’s optimal: just that it’s a historically common form of criticism, so its absence is hard to miss. See What Happened to Art Criticism?, 2003, for an exploration of the place of judgment.) There were almost no assessments of quality throughout the conference, and only a few instances of other common kinds of critical content such as appreciations, descriptions, or evocations. Most of the talk was about the historical contexts and meanings of particular art practices, which is to say that the conference was preoccupied with art history and art theory. The papers

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were art criticism in the sense that some were presented by people who identified themselves as art critics, but the critical content of the talks was almost always directed at the art historical narratives that marginalize or exclude certain traditions, practices, artists, or artworks, or at the theories that might articulate those exclusions. There were papers, for example, calling on critics to “stop looking for what could be put into the context of Western art,” or to overcome the double history of modernism caused by the Soviet Union in order to see eastern Europe as part of “the same art history.” Andrzej Szczerski, a Polish art historian, contributed to the conference’s theme of “White Spaces – Black Holes” by proposing that the Central European region is a “white hole,” a place where stars are born, “having its own artistic identity,” with “its own critical system.” A Georgian critic, Nini Palavandishvili, noted the “lack of art criticism and theoretical analysis” in Georgia, and the “missing written history”; she was concerned about the lack of both art history and criticism. Lena Prents spoke of Belarus as a “terra incognita,” an “in-between, a territory of nowhere,” with “many blank spots” in its own art history. Belinda Grace Gardner, speaking of Romania, asked that the “white spots” of art production be restored to the map, rather than “usurped by the mechanisms of the Western art market.” Another critic asked that Central Europe stop “trying to be Western,” because then it would be “doomed to be peripheral.” Olena Chervonik, a Ukrainian curator, described two “mechanisms of exclusion” or marginalization that have kept Ukrainian art out of mainstream conversations. (She identified the two mechanisms as “Russification” and “provincialization,” and she noted that even art historical monographs like Myroslava Mudrak’s The New Generation and Artistic Modernism in the Ukraine, 1986, had not rectified the imbalance.) According to Hélène Lassalle, these conversations about center and margin are “a perennial topic of discussion” at AICA. (Her essay, “The Founding of the International Association of Art Critics,” is in AICA in the Age of Globalization, published in 2010.) These sorts of conversations are not art criticism. That isn’t to say they aren’t “perennial” accompaniments of art criticism, but technically they have to do with historical meaning. They have long been central to art historical and postcolonial discussions of modernism and postmodernism, where themes of “center” and “margin” are developed using texts by writers including Michael Baxandall, Hans Belting, Matthew Rampley, Inaga Shigemi, Iftikhar Dadi, Keith Moxey, Terry Smith, Homi Bhabha, Göran Therborn, Arif Dirlik, Andreas Huyssen, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and perhaps most pertinently for the 2013 conference, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Piotr Piotrowski. Discussions of “center,” “margin,” “canon,” “periphery,” and other such concepts belong anywhere and everywhere in the discussion of art, but to the extent that there is a recognizable thing called “art criticism,” such concerns are different, because they are about how meaning is constructed in history, not how a viewer encounters an artwork. In all of the many definitions of the nature of art criticism, a constant is the idea that art criticism is the first-person report of an experience of art. Conversations about

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“center” and “margin” are about the adjudication of different perspectives, and to that degree they are separable from art criticism. Other papers at the 2013 AICA conference were more about art theory than art history. Art theory took center stage in several presentations, most notably a joint paper by Maja and Reuben Fowkes called “Sidelined, Under-Represented, and Snubbed: The New Unofficial East European Art.” They used Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” to understand the place of politics in East European and Roma art. Their paper was an articulate summary of Deleuze and Guattari’s claims, including the necessary misunderstanding of the “minor” as rootless and depoliticized. I thought their presentation would have fitted well in a Deleuze conference, because it implicitly critiqued the concept of “minor literature” by showing how it can be used to change the perception of art practices. The majority of the paper, in the form I heard it, was art theory rather than art history or criticism, although it had consequences for both history and criticism. I am not proposing that art criticism should try to be somehow pure, in the way that Clement Greenberg’s criticism is taken to have been apolitical, optical, and devoted to judgment, or even in the way that Rosalind Krauss’s art history is taken to have been apolitical, anti-optical, and averse to judgment. The papers I have mentioned were intended as revisions of certain national and regional practices of art criticism, and in that respect they were critical, and therefore examples of art criticism. But at the same time, I think it would be hard to say exactly why they needed to be called “art criticism,” or what the field or project of art criticism contributed to them that was not already present in related texts of art history and theory, aside from specific knowledge about recent art practices that wouldn’t be available in art historical publications. As Anja Xheka commented, reading a draft of this material, it is likely some participants wanted to establish an understanding of the art history they used in their criticism; in that sense, the participants were performing art criticism as art history. In the essay “The Founding of the International Association of Art Critics,” Hélène Lassalle notes that at the time AICA was established, all sorts of things counted as art criticism. At the first international congress of art critics, in Paris in June 1948, many of the speakers raised issues that would not seem to us today to have much direct bearing on art criticism, such as museographic display, education services in museums, the development of provincial museums, archaeology, the crafts, art teaching in art schools and at secondary level, artists’ associations and learned societies, the circulation of fakes and art fraud… The art critics seem to feel an urge to become involved in any problem that had an aesthetic dimension.

She concludes that back then, “everything was still mixed up in a singularly global vision that embraced history, sociology, politics, institutions, corporatism and profes-

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sionalism, along with educational and aesthetic issues, and even the notion of public service” (p. 16). I wonder if readers fifty years from now might look back at the 2013 AICA conference and conclude something similar. It is difficult to find discussion of art criticism in the topics Lassalle enumerates (and her original list is longer than the parts I’ve quoted), and the same might be said of the content of the 2013 conference I attended. To future readers, it may seem the conference mixed art history, theory, curating, and other interests. It’s true that the act of revaluing the historical position of a national practice, such as Ukrainian modernism, is a critical enterprise, and it’s also true that revising the reception of an art practice, such as Roma art, is a critical project. But it seems to me that both postpone the question of what art criticism itself is. What in those papers is intrinsically art criticism, and not a matter of art history or theory? What is art criticism, in distinction to art history or theory? It may once have been easy to answer that question. (I can imagine someone like Ruskin, Fry, or Greenberg answering without hesitation. Criticism, in its many forms, always had to do with the encounter of the individual viewer with the artwork, and it was a record of her judgments.) It is characteristic of the period since the 1960s that the question is difficult to answer, because criticism has become entwined with history and theory. But even that verb, “entwined,” shows how the question lingers. Something has to exist in order to become entangled in other things. In the conference’s final event in Kraków, it was suggested that art criticism is a place where passion and obsession can rule, and where there is no special call for academic texts (like this one) with theses, classifications, and arguments. This position is pragmatic and true—as I saw after the project State of Art Criticism (2005), which showed that the majority of art critics don’t mind practicing something that lacks a sense of its own history, a coherent set of purposes, or consensual or common leading concepts. (This problem is developed in the “Envoi” to the book Re-Enchantment, co-edited by David Morgan, vol. 7 of The Art Seminar, 2008.) It is quite possible to work productively as an art critic and ignore these questions, and it is sometimes helpful to assert that art criticism can’t be classified or “academicized.” But when it comes to asking if a practice called “art criticism” is a worldwide phenomenon, then it is necessary to come to at least a provisional sense of what should count as art criticism. At the Kraków event it was also said that art criticism might be intrinsically scattered, mobile, multiple, and interdisciplinary. One person suggested that art criticism already exists in myriad forms, and may only look homogeneous from a European perspective. But this, I think, is a hope more than a fact. Sometimes the unusual subject matter of critics can make it seem as if their practices are different, and the existence of untranslated texts can make it seem as if there might be undiscovered continents of art criticism. To be persuasive, these claims would have to be justified with examples. In the case of art criticism it would be helpful to identify critical practices that differ in more

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than subject matter and language. What are those practices, and how are they different in form, concepts, and methods? (A note for AICA members who may read this: the brief of AICA, which is on the website aicausa, is a list of five bulleted points: AICA, it says, is intended “to promote art criticism as a discipline and contribute to its methodology,” “to protect the ethical and professional interests of its membership,” “to encourage professional relationships,” “to contribute to mutual understanding of visual aesthetics across cultural boundaries” and “to defend impartially freedom of expression and thought and oppose arbitrary censorship.” Except for the one word, “methodology,” there is no mention in this list of the idea of discussing the nature of art criticism itself. The five points imply that art criticism itself is well enough known. By assuming that, AICA defaults to what George Dickie calls the “institutional definition” of art: you know what art is by the institutions that present it. I am not so sure that works well with an activity like art criticism; my own talk in the 2013 conference was on the absence of any agreement about what art criticism is, whether it has a history, or what it is intended to do. The closing essay in the book AICA in the Age of Globalization, by Henry Meyric Hughes (his essay has the same title as the book), quotes these five points in a slightly earlier version, and then notes my own opinion that art criticism “is massively produced, and massively ignored.” (From What Happened to Art Criticism?) Meyric Hughes argues that criticism might derive strength from that weakness, and he quotes Irit Rogoff ’s ideas about criticism from the book The State of Art Criticism. He says she shows that “the critic may have a new role to play” (p. 104). To me, this kind of discussion is promising, because it goes to what art criticism is and what it should be. In one of the events recorded in The State of Art Criticism, Rogoff called for an encounter between the critic and the artist that is so intense that the critic risks losing her function and identity, becoming a collaborator or an artist in her own right. Personally speaking, I don’t think Rogoff ’s idea of “criticality” is a way forward: but it is necessary to ask, as she did, about the function and nature of art criticism. I wonder if it might be possible to add a sixth bullet point to AICA’s agenda, something like “to nourish conversations on the methodology and nature of art criticism.”) (B) What I’ve said up to this point concerns the absence of discussion of regional and national modes of art criticism in contemporary discourse, a lack that makes it hard to assess whether art criticism is a worldwide phenomenon. Given the lack of studies of the subject, it might be best just to set out some hypotheses for future conversations; here, then, are several possible answers to the question of whether art criticism is global. (1) It is, if “art criticism” means the discussions of “center,” “periphery,” and other terms. These are common qualifiers in a range of art criticism worldwide, because critics are often aware of the art’s marginal or peripheral relations to some center

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of activity. However it can be argued that center, margin, periphery, and related terms are concepts borrowed from art history, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory, and that while they are among art criticism’s concerns, they are not constitutive of art criticism. (2) Art criticism is global, if it is best understood in terms of its subject matter. Biennales, Documenta, the Manifesta, art fairs, commercial galleries, and auction houses comprise much of art criticism’s subject matter. Major contemporary artists are another traditional subject. Topics like these are common to many conversations in art criticism, and they could be a way to maintain that art criticism is a uniform practice worldwide. The difficulty with this formulation is that it reduces the activity of art criticism to its subject matter, depriving it of its methodological and interpretive interests. (3) It is, if “art criticism” means talk about curating and curatorial studies. In the last three decades, curation has emerged as a separate subject from art history, criticism, and theory, but if art criticism is understood as an integral part of curatorial studies, then the intense and increasing globalization of curatorial studies could be cited to argue that art criticism is also emerging as a relatively uniform practice worldwide. (4) It is, if “art criticism” means the shorter notices that are part of the format in Flash Art, Artforum, and many national art magazines, because brief critical reports are fairly uniform in style throughout the world. The uniformity of such notices is largely a result of their limited length: it is difficult to do more in a couple hundred words than give the pertinent facts and some limited descriptions of the work. For some scholars, such notices therefore do not count as art criticism, because they lack the space to develop critical reflection. (See Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s contributions to The State of Art Criticism, 2007.) (5) It is, if “art criticism” means brief exhibition reviews online and in newspapers around the world, because again they are fairly similar to one another. (6) It may be, if countries and regions that have little or no tradition of art criticism develop critical practices by emulating practices elsewhere. There is literature, for example, on the relative lack of art criticism in some Arab countries. The rapid growth of museums, especially in the UAE, is promoting the assimilation of models of art criticism from Europe and North America. (Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, 2007; Kirsten Scheid, “What We Do Not Know: Questions for a Study of Contemporary Arab Art,” 2008; thanks to Farah Aksoy for these references.) In China, a number of prominent scholars and curators are European or North American. In 2019, for example, there was Philip Tinari at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Karen Smith at OCAT in Xi’an, and Larys Frogier at the Rockbund Art Museum, also in Shanghai. The influence of foreign curators and critics would be hard to quantify, but they are an important part of

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the art scene. Something analogous happens in biennales: in 2020 the Beijing X Museum triennial employed a jury comprised of Diana Betancourt; Kate Fowle, director of MoMA PS1; Zhang Zikang, director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; and Hans Ulrich Obrist. (Thanks to Jacob Zhicheng Zhang and Aishan Zhang for these examples.) (7) It may not be, if essays written in different countries and regions have different vocabularies, styles, manners, interpretive methods, and narratives, as I think they do in art history. If art criticism amounts to a series of languages, then translating one into another may result in what Luis Camnitzer calls “codes” or “dialects”— that is, texts that appear similar but lack the richness and specificity of their original places of origin. (This is from Camnitzer’s essay “Esperanto,” where he uses these words to describe art practices, but the same might be said of art criticism.) The difficulty with this last point is that it hasn’t been studied. The general tendency of conversations about art criticism, in AICA and elsewhere, is toward internationalism, which can obscure or minimize such differences. A study is needed of the differences between art critical practices in selected regions of the world, with attention not to concepts such as central or marginal, or to subject matter, such as biennales or commercial galleries, but to style, interpretive strategies, and forms of narrative and argument. In the absence of such studies, it can come to seem as if art criticism is in fact a global enterprise, with little prospect of maintaining its dwindling diversity.

2. Is art theory global? Waves of art theory wash through the artworld. It can seem that art theory, unlike art history or art criticism, really is a worldwide phenomenon, something shared by people in a very wide variety of academic and commercial art contexts. Just as art history has a more-or-less familiar canon of preferred theorists (Art and Globalization; also see Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 1998, second edition 2009) and visual studies has a fairly definable list of expected or acceptable theorists (a hundred or so are listed in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, 2003, pp. 32–33), so fields like anthropology, sociology, and others have reasonably well-defined senses of what counts as pertinent or viable theory. (For anthropology, see Rex Golub, “Is There an Anthropological Canon?,” April 2014, savageminds.org.) Throughout the artworld, modern and contemporary art are theorized using Kant, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Barthes. Nicolas Bourriaud has been a central figure since the late 1990s, and so have Judith Butler, W. J. T. Mitchell, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Rancière. At the centers of theorization—mainly universities, art schools, and

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academies in the North Atlantic—scholars and artists are talking about Alain Badiou, Brian Massumi, and José Muñoz, or “unknown” philosophers like François Laruelle, Quentin Meillassoux, or Catherine Malabou. Theory, as everyone likes to say, is about fashion, and these waves spread unevenly and are often short-lived. On the other hand it may be comforting that in 2017 on academia.edu, Kant had more subscribers than all the others I’ve named put together. In general, this would be a way to argue that art theory is a more or less worldwide phenomenon: the overwhelming majority of citations are to French postwar philosophers, and in art history, visual studies, and some art criticism, those citations can be fairly predictable. As an experiment I counted all the footnotes to theoretical sources (meaning writers cited as authorities on interpretation, rather than authorities on the specific subject matter of the essay in question) in a single issue of The Art Bulletin, March 2017. They are: Bruno Latour, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Derrida, Claude Gandelman, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting (cited as a theorist, not an authority on Renaissance art, which was the subject of the essay containing the citation), Alfred Gell, Edward Said, Foucault, Barthes, Agamben, Althusser, Louis Marin, Lacan, Heidegger, Adorno, Michael Holly (again cited for a general interpretation), Rosalind Krauss, W. J. T. Mitchell, Judith Butler, Ernst Bloch, and José Muñoz. The articles citing these authors ranged from Renaissance painting to the photographer Katharina Sieverding. Similar lists, with a fair consistency, could be compiled for other journals. Another way to argue that art theory has a global uniformity would be to note that Western philosophy continues to encounter other traditions as “thought” and not philosophy. The French scholar François Jullien, for example, speaks of Chinese “thought” and its “choice” not to become a philosophy. (Jullien, “Chinesisches Werkzeug: Eine fernöstliche Denkposition zur Archäologie des Abendlands,” Lettre internationale 64, 2004, p. 91.) As Marie-Julie Frainais-Maître has pointed out, Alain Badiou has praised Jullien “for providing structures to Chinese thought, because when he read Chinese thought without preparation and conceptual work, he dismissed it as ‘small talk,’ as did Hegel many years earlier.” (Frainais-Maître, “The Coloniality of Western Philosophy: Chinese Philosophy as Viewed in France,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 19, 2014, p. 10, citing Badiou, Oser construire: Pour François Jullien, 2007, p.140.) This leads her to ask why, in France, Chinese philosophy is “isolated from philosophy”: “Is it perhaps only the Western world that has the right and the ability to think? Does China not think?” The form of Frainais-Maitre’s argument can also be found beyond France, and beyond China. Samer Frangie has written about a critique of Edward Said’s Orien­ talism by the Lebanese philosopher Mahdi ‘Amil (1936–1987); the terms (“philosophy” and “thought”) are strikingly similar. According to ‘Amil, Said constructs a polarity between the West and the Orient, and so he has to “reject reason in toto, opposing it to emotion in a quasi-Romantic gesture.” In Orientalism, ‘Amil argues, the Orient “appears to be only accessible through spiritual means or bouts of individual genius.”

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(Samer Frangie, “On the Broken Conversation Between Postcolonialism and Intellectuals in the Periphery,” 2011.) (I’ve been exact about my quotations in the preceding paragraph, because there is also sense in which “thought,” penser, in postwar Continental philosophy denotes a general condition of experience. This wider “thought,” which comes from Heidegger, can appear more capacious than “philosophy,” understood as “Western philosophy” or simply “metaphysics.” But “thought” is often also imagined as an untheorized form of cognition, one for which Western philosophy or metaphysics provides a crucial opportunity. It is also the case that the project of looking at Chinese philosophy in order to see if it is “systematic” enough to rise above the level of “thought” is itself fraught, as is shown by Feng Youlan’s History of Chinese Philosophy, 1934, English translation 1952, which is strongly influenced by European ways of studying the history of philosophy, and begins with the assertion that Chinese philosophy is more than “thought.” I thank Eager Zhang for introducing me to Feng Youlan.) In everyday pedagogy, students in various parts of the world encounter theorists including the ones I have named above, and it is rare to find a young artist, critic, philosopher, or historian who follows a theorist no one knows. There are always unexpected choices—in the past year or so, I have read essays and artists’ statements that cite Agamben, Broch, Harman, Meillassoux, Brecht, Luhmann, Guattari, Massumi, Clough, and a couple dozen others—but the list is not infinite, and genuinely independent or idiosyncratic choices are very rare. So it may seem the only reason art theory isn’t a global phenomenon is that students and artists find theorists (or resist them) at different rates. Not all young artists influenced by Rancière know much about him, or have read assessments such as Oliver Davis’s “Jacques Rancière and Contemporary Art: Swapping Stories of Love and Tyrannicide,” which is—strangely enough— the lead article in the spring 2013 volume of Critique d’art, even though the essay is not criticism as much as art theory. As the Portuguese scholar Leonor Veiga pointed out reading a draft of this chapter, there are many parts of the world where theory is effectively absent because of a lack of funding, institutional structure, or ideological support—but I’d like to leave those many issues temporarily to one side, because what concerns me here is more the general tendency or direction of art theory. (See chapter 1 for problems of funding and access.) Just as much of the discourse of world philosophies depends on fundamental concepts and forms of argument derived from European philosophy from Plato to Kant and beyond, so much of the discourse of art theory depends on concepts and arguments developed by French poststructuralists from Barthes and Deleuze to the present. Philosophy grapples with this issue in journals such as The Journal of World Philosophies and Philosophy East and West, but so far art theory has no forum for such problems. The impending uniformity of art theory worldwide seems especially clear, and yet there are difficult problems lurking here. The theorists’ names are usually unsurprising,

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but they are put to work in different ways, producing unexpected forms of diversity. Here are two reasons why art theory might be considered a national or regional practice, rather than an international one. (A) Theory may not be global, because it is used differently in different parts of the world. Theory does not look especially global when a critic like Tsai Raylin can say, at the 2013 AICA conference in Bratislava, that there is a connection between ­Leib­niz’s monad, Deleuze’s nomad, and the post-human body, without justifying his assertion. Raylin’s paper did not engage Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Deborah Christie, Serge Venturini, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, or other theorists of the biomediated, cyborg, or posthuman; and he did not elaborate, explain, or defend his slant rhyme “monad / nomad.” His paper was presented flamboyantly and enthusiastically, like a performative piece by an artist, and his use of theory was palimpsestic and impressionistic. I don’t mean this as a criticism, because I enjoyed the paper and its wild connections, but I don’t think it could be read as art theory in some other contexts. (It probably wouldn’t work, for example, in publications like Grey Room, n+1, or Nonsite, to name three theory-oriented online sites.) At the same conference the Chinese critic Ling Min proposed a new theory of contemporary Chinese “ink art” and its relation to inkbrush painting. In part her claim was that Chinese ink painting be understood in terms such “poetic” feeling and “plasticity. But she did not engage other work on the contemporary conceptualization of ink painting by Wu Hung, Mike Hearn, Zhu Qingsheng, Gucheng Feng, and others, leaving the impression that no one else has been working on the subject.” Theorization of contemporary ink painting is contentious, both politically and conceptually, but Ling Min’s paper made it seem as if there is no pertinent literature—so again it sounded like a contribution to something other than a global conversation. Broadly speaking, there are two possible approaches to idiosyncratic uses of theory. On the one hand, idiosyncratic essays might be expanded and brought to the level where they address the full range of literature on their subjects, so that they join the international conversations on their respective topics. On the other hand, it would be possible to see such essays as artist’s statements or personal texts that have purposes other than the wider discourse on their respective topics. In the last chapter of this book I will suggest a third possibility. I will return to this choice, in the case of art history, in the final chapter of this book. An eccentric, personal, or uninformed art theory can be effectively unanswerable, because it takes place outside existing conversations. In this sense art theory is not a worldwide phenomenon, because it exists in versions as different as creoles, pidgins, or entirely new languages. The challenge for forums like the Journal of World Philoso­ phies would be to accept essays that appear to misuse or misunderstand philosophic positions, on the assumption that their misprisions were the effect of regional or

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national differences in reception rather than deficits of education or understanding. The analogous challenge for art theory would be to accept essays that seem not to be participating in ongoing conversations about Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, or other art theorists, on the assumption that they were creating new forms of reception that fit their local or regional contexts. (B) Theory may not be global, because different regions read different theorists. Even though French poststructural thinkers provide the majority of theoretical sources in art history, theory, criticism, and art world conversations, there are some exceptions—places where there are distinct regional or national habits of art theory. There is an especially strong disconnect between Chinese theorists and theorists outside China. In my experience many Chinese historians, critics, and theorists read non-Chinese (mainly English, American, and French) philosophers and art theorists, but the reverse is not the case. Europeans and North Americans who are not specialists in China tend to get their information about Chinese art theory from François Jullien, in books like In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (2004). Yet Jullien’s books are problematic as representations of China, and they do not attempt to represent contemporary Chinese theory at all. (References are in my Chinese Land­ scape Painting as Western Art History, 2010.) An older generation of Western scholars got their East Asian theory from French theorists who did not even make China or Japan their specialty, such as Henri Michaux and Roland Barthes. The opposite situation is hard to imagine. A number of Western art theorists have been translated into Chinese, including not only Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, but also Roger Fry, Herbert Read, John Berger, E. H. Gombrich, Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Amelia Jones, Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp, and Thierry de Duve. Every non-Chinese art historian, critic, and theorist should be embarrassed if they cannot write down an equivalently long list of Chinese art theorists. Here are a few: 高名潞 Gao Minglu, 司汉 Si Han, 姜节泓 Jiang Jiehong, 周彦 Zhou Yan, 常宁生 Chang Ningsheng, 丁宁 Ding Ning, 冯原 Feng Yuan, 耿幼壮 Geng Youzhuang, 黄河清 Huang He Qing, 黄专 Huang Zhuan, 潘公凯 Pan Gong Kai, 彭峰 Peng Feng, 沈语冰 Shen Yubing, 王春辰 Wang Chun Chen, 王林 Wang Ling, 王南溟 Wang ­Nanming, 温普林 Wen Pulin, 尹吉男 Yin Jinan, 殷双喜 Yin Shuangxi, 杨慧林 Yang ­Huiling, 杨小彦 Yang Xiaoyan, and 朱青生 Zhu Qingsheng. This isn’t an exhaustive list; it is just the participants at a conference in Beijing in 2009. A number of Western scholars met Chinese scholars there for the first time. Most Chinese historians, critics, and theorists recognized at least some of the Western par­ticipants; no Western participants except China specialists knew any of the Chinese participants. This sort of disconnect also happens between non-Spanish speakers and Latin America, which has a number of regionally famous critics and theorists. Some are known internationally, such as Nestor Canclini or Luis Camnitzer; some are becoming known, such as the Paraguayan critic Ticio Escobar; and others remain known only to

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people who read in Spanish, such as the very subtle José Luis Brea or Cuauhtémoc Medina. There are many untranslated Spanish-language art theorists. Here are some names that were mentioned when I posted a draft of this text online: Ana Letícia Fialho, Virginia Perez-Ratton, Beatriz Cortez, Kency Cornejo, Eugenio Trias, Simon Marchan, and Xavier Rubert de Ventos. (Many thanks to Leonor Veiga, Esther Planas, Mayra Barraza, and Vicenç Furió for these.) Another such cultural divide is between China and India. There is relatively little awareness of Indian subaltern and postcolonial theory in China. In Europe, theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are known, and a few art historians read Geeta Kapur (in my experience she is more widely read by Westerners interested in postcolonial theory), but others such as Ranajit Guha, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gyanendra Pandey, Rajeev Bhargava, Göran Therborn, Gyan Prakash, and Arif Dirlik are not read except by specialists. In China, in my experience, only Homi Bhabha is read with any frequency. These large-scale bibliographies (Spanish, Chinese, Indian) are more dramatic, but rarer, than relatively isolated bibliographies specific to regions or languages. German-­ language art theory is significantly different from English-language art theory. I know only two or three North American art theorists who read Gottfried Boehm, and Fried­ rich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann are significantly less read than in German-speaking countries, despite the fact that both have been translated. Scandinavia, as a region, also has its specific literature. Joacim Sprung at Lund University suggested these theo­rists as people still mainly known only to readers of Danish or Swedish: in Danish, Carsten Juhl, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Camilla Jalving, Mikkel Bogh, and Simon Sheikh; and in Swedish, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Tom Sandqvist, Maria Lind, and Daniel Birnbaum. Where languages are confined to single nations, the literature can be even more restricted, but in smaller nations it might also be the case that the theoretical literature specific to the nation is not central to artists and historians in the country. But as far as I know this question is entirely unstudied. The Estonian scholar Heie Treier suggests Tõnis Vint, whose impact on Estonian artists was less written than personal. It would be interesting to convene a conference on smaller nations and their “un­ known” theorists. But it is perhaps in cases like these that the lists I opened with are most nearly correct: everyone reads some Kant, some Foucault, some Lacan, some Barthes, so it can seem that art theory is everywhere. Alisdair Duncan tells me that sometime shortly before 2013, the Tate Modern bookstore changed their label “Art History” to “Art Histories,” but kept “Art Theory” in the singular. If they had adopted the label “Art Theories,” it might have sounded like they meant that every theorist has her own perspective, rather than that various nations and regions have their own art theories. To me this goes to show how much work needs to be done on the subject of the worldwide dissemination of art theory. As in the case of art criticism, the impending uniformity of art theory remains largely unstudied.

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Art history follows suit, citing art theorists largely from the French poststructuralist tradition, and not asking how those choices might be limiting the questions that are being asked of the world’s art.

3. Is art instruction global? If art history, theory, and criticism may be tending toward a global uniformity then visual art instruction might also be. A more or less uniform set of practices around art instruction would not be problematic for many people, because training in art should be responsive to the globalization of visual art and the art market. Yet there are presumably sources of diversity in art instruction that might be threatened by the increasing attention to the global art market. The homogeneity of studio art instruction is especially evident at the MFA level in larger institutions. As Dave Hickey, McKenzie Wark, Jerry Saltz, and others have said, the programs can seem like mills, turning out a uniform MFA product. That uniformity decreases sharply in smaller institutions, smaller countries, and outside the first world: more on that below. Art instruction is also surprisingly uniform at the first-year (foundation year) level, despite the now conventional disagreement about how the first year should be taught. (There is more on this in the book What do Artists Know?, co-edited with Frances Whitehead, 2012.) Elements of Bauhaus instruction, for example, are common around the world, and so are leftovers of French Academy training. Bauhaus exercises in abstraction, colors, or textures, and French-Academy style exercises in drawing from the model can be found in academies from Paraguay to Kyrgyzstan. Yet it’s clear that the flavor of art instruction varies from place to place. Assessment, for example, seems to vary widely: some institutions have strongly critical learning environments, and others have almost no critique culture. Some institutions have no budget to buy even basic darkroom equipment, while others can afford the latest 3D printers, computer looms, and laser routers. At larger institutions from Germany to Japan, some instruction is in English; but there are many smaller art institutions with few or no instructors who can read the principal European languages. This sort of list could be continued, but I don’t think these contingent features capture the really important differences. Here are three ways—aside from assessment, economics, and language—that art instruction is not a homogeneous enterprise around the world. (A) Local, regional, and national techniques. It might be said that techniques and skills in studio art aren’t essentially parts of a global conversation. The Bucharest National University of Arts (Universitatea Naţională de Arte), for instance, teaches stu-

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dents how to restore Romanian frescoes; the Academy in Tehran has instructors who know how to make miniature paintings; in Tokyo Geidai students can learn Japanese lacquer; in Renmin University in Beijing you can study Chinese lacquer; the Terrace campus of Coast Mountain College in the northwest coast of Canada offers First Nations arts programs for students of aboriginal descent; and there are several academies and workshops in Italy for mosaic work. (Thanks to Madalen Benson for the information about Coast Mountain College; for the Italian workshops see the Mosaic Matters website.) The same is true in different ways in western European and North American art schools and departments. The art department in Durham, New Hampshire, has a strength in “perceptual art”—realistic oil painting. There are several state schools in the Midwest (Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa) where a student can learn midwest-style landscape painting. When I was an MFA student in the 1980s, the Boston Museum School offered fresco using heated lime and mosaic with a large selection of tesserae from Italy. I wonder if it might be true that most nameable techniques are older ones, and that newer media—at least those that are less dependent on expensive equipment—are more uniformly distributed around the world. (B) Local, regional, and national styles and schools. There are examples of regional and national strengths and tendencies that aren’t related to techniques and skills. Eastern Europe has an identifiable kind of surrealism that has continued into the twenty-first century; to learn it, a student would be best off studying in the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, or Belarus. China is an especially intricate example, with its smaller art academies still divided between ink painting and Western oil techniques. Academies that are influenced by the Russian academic model tend to have instructors who teach a certain kind of realistic painting; the effects of that particular school can be seen as far apart as Kazakhstan, the IRWIN group in Slovenia, and the Academy in Lhasa. Some of these regional and national schools and styles have diminishing importance in the contemporary art world. Except for offerings in purely technical subjects (how to restore a Romanian fresco) and occasional instruction in national and regional styles (such as the influence of Soviet realist painting), larger academies and universities do not differ enormously from one part of the world to another. In smaller art schools, smaller cities, and smaller countries, local or national interests are often a stronger influence than the international. This is true even in larger first-world countries. In the US there are some unusually focused places like the one in Durham, but it is relatively common to find regional artists on the faculty in smaller state campuses. I find this is true worldwide: go a little off the art world map, and the world is filled with local practices. This is a fascinating and important subject, because it leads art historians, theorists, and critics to misconstrue the art production of different countries. Off the beaten track of major academies in China, most art production is still a mixture of ink paint-

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ing and School of Paris styles, with unpredictable admixtures of contemporary practices. It’s also the case that the styles and stars of the international art world loom large even in the smallest art academies in the most isolated places, which they don’t necessarily do in smaller institutions that offer instruction in art history. The tendency, in studio art instruction, has been to omit local interests from publicity materials and curricula, emphasizing instead whatever seems global and contemporary. In order to preserve differences in art instruction worldwide, it will be necessary to find ways to revalue local, regional, and national media, techniques, and styles, and to see them as something other than leftovers of a period before internationalization. As in the case of art theory, where the names of local theorists are well known, it isn’t difficult to name what is local: a wall-painting tradition, a style of conversation on art instruction. As in the cases of art criticism and art theory, the lesson for art history is that local practices may not appear to be pertinent: just as the website of the Bucharest National University of Arts emphasizes “European values” over their expertise in Romanian fresco painting, so Romanian art historians may value art practices that have pan-European significance such as Tristan Tzara or Marcel Janco over modernists such as Nicolae Tonitza or Ştefan Luchian. (There is another point of contact between studio art instruction and my main interest in this book. I have heard art students in a number of countries talk about artworld stars, but in more culturally, economically, or linguistically isolated places artists’ names mean very different things from what they might mean in western Europe or North America. On one of my first trips to China, in 1999, I heard Damien Hirst’s shark piece discussed, in Chinese, by art students in Hangzhou: they had found a reproduction of it in a Western art magazine in their library, and were enthusiastic about it, but they had no idea about the Western context of medical museums, curiosity cabinets, or innovations in museum display. They couldn’t read that the piece was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. At that point the shark sculpture was already eight years old, but it was the first those students had seen it. For them it meant the possibility of making something ambitious and very large. Things have changed now, but that kind of visual influence, without critical or historical context, is analogous to the differences in art historical meaning that I am exploring in this book.) (C) PhD-level instruction around the world. I think there is another sense in which studio art instruction is not a worldwide phenomenon, and it pertains to what is called in the EU “third level” art instruction—teaching and learning at the PhD level. At graduate level, art instruction does seem to have regional variations. It is global, or worldwide, in the sense that the degree, the PhD, is transferrable; but it may not be global at the level of curriculum, assessment, content, or purpose.

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What follows is adapted from a chapter in a book called Artists with PhDs, which assesses the studio-art or “practice-led” PhD around the world. There are currently about 200 institutions that grant the PhD to artists, and this passage is about the possibility that those institutions might be going in at least six different directions rather than working together on a single kind of degree: (1) The Continental model is found in Continental Europe, especially Scandinavia, along with some institutions in the UK, in Central and South America, and in southeast Asia. Northwestern Europe is where most of the publishing about the PhD is taking place. It is also the center of a certain sense of research. In literature like Henk Slager’s The Pleasure of Research, the concept of art research is aligned with a poststructural critique of institutions; research is partly a matter of mobile, oppositional spaces, and of intellectual freedom. Art research is less the institutionalized, science-based practice of hypothesis, deduction, experiment, and falsification, and more the name for a set of strategies for reconceptualizing art in relation to existing academic structures. (2) The Nordic model emphasizes what Henk Borgdorff calls a “sui generis perspective”: it stresses “artistic values when it comes to assessing research in the arts.” Programs in Norway and Sweden follow this model, which is based on the idea that what counts as “research” in the arts should proceed according to properties of visual art; in that sense it engages Christopher Frayling’s original “research for art,” which he described as not about “communicable knowledge in the sense of verbal communication, but in the sense of visual or iconic or imagistic communication.” (3) The UK model is practiced in the UK, Australia, South Africa (Michaelis, in Cape Town), Uganda, Canada, and other Anglophone centers including Malaysia and Singa­pore. The UK was one of two places in the world that developed the studio-art PhD in the 1970s, and the influence of UK administrative structures on assessment and outcomes is still visible in many institutions. Among other characteristics, the UK model involves sizable bureaucratic and administrative oversight, including sometimes elaborate structures for assessment, specification and quantification of learning outcomes. It remains closer to the scientific sense of research than what I am calling the Continental model. (4) The Japanese model. One of the main surprises of this research, for me, was “discovering,” in 2010, that Japan has twenty-six universities that grant the PhD. Japan, along with the UK, were the first countries to develop the PhD in the 1970s. In terms of the length of their tradition and their independence (if not in terms of international influence or number of students), Japan and the UK are the co-founders of the studio-art PhD. The Japanese model has been developed in isolation, and its dissertations are still largely studies of natural, technological, scientific, and artistic precedents that are then applied to the students’ practices.

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(5) The Chinese model. China has a much smaller, more recent tradition of PhDs. As of January 2014 there are only three PhD-granting programs in China, in CAFA (Central Academy of Art); Beijing CAA (China Academy of Arts), Hangzhou; and THU (Tsinghua University), Beijing. Part of the reason that the PhD is not expanding is administrative: the degree is given under an administrative research heading, which does not exist in other academies such as Chongqing and Nanjing. It will require a change at the level of the Department of Education to make it possible for other art academies to offer the degree. (6) The lack of a North American model. There is no consensus in North America about how the PhD should look. Of the North American programs, several have distinct flavors. Santa Cruz, for example, has a strong program in North American-style visual studies, which also involves gender theory, postcolonial studies, and anthropology. Rensselaer Polytechnic is one of the United States’s leading technical universities (alongside Georgia Tech) and students there have a unique combination of political theory, activism, and science. In my experience, because of the unique cultural configuration in Canada, there is little communication between the Francophone and Anglophone institutions, to the point where several times my Canadian correspondents have been surprised to discover the existence of other institutions that grant, or are contemplating, the PhD. This is all speculative, and it could change in several directions. Africa is an interesting example of the difficulty of deciding about the global or local nature of PhD-level art instruction. As of January 2014, there are six institutions in Africa that grant the PhD. I have visited three of them: Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, South Africa; the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana; and the Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda. Each differs from the others, and all diverge from EU and North American practices. Michaelis School of Art is the closest to European institutions, and has the most contacts. But Michaelis has not yet engaged the debates that are current in the first three models. KNUST in Ghana is quite isolated and impoverished by comparison, although several of its faculty exhibit in Europe and elsewhere. In my visit there was little talk of the international conversation on the PhD, and more on the dissemination of art theory—a concern that is common in many institutions other than the PhD. Makerere University in Uganda has a larger, robust program; when I visited I met with most of the current PhD students, who showed a very wide range of concerns. One was studying forms of clay that could be used in water filtration projects; several others were looking at forms of central and eastern African avant-gardes. But there was a surprisingly wide range of awareness of art theory, from what would be in North America a beginning BFA-level awareness to work on a par with many PhD programs. No one I talked to was conversant with the literature I listed at the beginning of the Introduction to this book.

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I do not mean these programs are deficient, or that they might “catch up” by engaging the literature. What I hope for in regard to the studio-art PhD is similar to what I want in relation to art history, theory, and criticism: not a worldwide conversation with a shared vocabulary and bibliography, but an appreciation of local and regional cultures of art instruction. There’s a challenge here both for those who teach and study in regional institutions, and for those who travel and observe such programs. For people who study or teach in regional, local, or smaller institutions, the difficulty will be in nourishing and articulating their own interests without becoming disconnected from worldwide interests; and for those who travel and study such programs the challenge will be avoiding perceiving local, national, or regional practices as belated or partial. These three sources of local, national, and regional differences are not, in general, the direction in which art instruction is going. Art instruction is strongly globalized as well as international; in another generation, as local expertise in media is further eroded, art instruction may become effectively homogeneous except in smaller academies and schools.

4. A possible parallel: is the novel global? Art criticism, art theory, and art instruction share a lack of critical reflection on their global diversity or uniformity. The study of the contemporary novel is an instructive contrast and parallel, because it has been the subject of an extensive literature. The novel is often considered as an optimal example of a worldwide practice that nevertheless remains attentive to the texture of local life. In that respect, it presents a close parallel to the self-descriptions of global art history. Mario Ortiz-Robles puts this well: “the novel’s loose, though fairly stable, formal traits,” he writes, “make it particularly well-suited to the task of representing… widely varying local contexts without significant loss of structural integrity.” (“Local Speech, Global Acts: Performative Violence and the Novelization of the World,” Comparative Literature 59 no. 1, 2007, p. 1.) If we read “narrative and interpretive methods” for “formal traits,” we have a good approximation of descriptions of the successes of global art history: it is taken to have a recognizable form, a “structural integrity,” that can work in very different cultural contexts. The study of the history of the novel and the study of the history of art share a phase, extending roughly from the mid 19th through the mid 20th century, during which scholars were interested in what Bruce Mazlish calls “world art history.” In his usage the expression “world art history” denotes the study of common themes and ideas in art of different periods and cultures. In art history that ambition marks a num-

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ber of late 19th century “universal histories,” and includes 20th century scholars such as Riegl. As in the study of the history of the novel, such “world art histories” tended to disappear with the dissemination of poststructuralism. A late summary of the state of such work in literary history is in the classic text of New Criticism, René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942, third edition 1956). The authors trace the idea of world literature to Goethe’s Weltliteratur, which was not the study of literature “on all five continents,” but “the ideal of the unification of all literatures into one great synthesis.” They are in favor of reviving a study like Goethe’s; today’s scholars, Wellek and Warren say, have been influenced by nationalism to “increasingly narrow provincial cultivation of the study of national literatures.” It is not that Wellek and Warren are against the idea of considering what makes a national literature: they are afraid of reducing literature to what would today be called ideology. Theory of Literature is a reminder of a time in which it was still possible to say—using the grammatical form aptly called the “present unreal conditional”—“we would argue that we cannot even seriously wish that the diversities of national literatures should be obliterated” (p. 49). Needless to say the authors do not mention any “literatures” outside of Europe. The histories they admire are Ernst Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948) and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946), which are as enormous, as erudite, and as Eurocentric as their own book. Theory of Literature represents an interesting moment, just before and during World War II, in which German and Italian sources were as much a part of the conversation as French ones, and in which ambitious surveys of world literature, or world art history, could be imagined without too much awareness of art made outside Europe. I mention this as background: the parallels I have in mind have to do with the contemporary situation. There are several possible topics in the theory and history of the novel that bear on its globalization, including the field of translation studies, and the emergence of the discipline of comparative literature as a mediator for global studies of writing. For Jacques Lezra, for example, comparative literature can play a central role in articulating national literary cultures because of its “‘consciousness of languages’” and their effects on the “production of differences.” (Lezra, “The Futures of Comparative Literature,” 2012, p. 88.) From many possibilities I choose five topics. (A) The idea that the global novel is made expressly for translation. The novelist, critic, and translator Tim Parks has taken strong positions on world literature. Replying to an essay by David Shields, which was later incorporated into Shields’s book How Literature Saved My Life (2013), Parks notes that the local and the contextual is lost when writers insist, as Shields does, on a continuum of global practices, where “every man contains within himself the entire human condition.” Parks advocates local, regional, and national traditions over packaged novels “that will lead to prominence on the world stage.” The problem, he thinks, is “a slow weakening of our sense of being inside

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a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions.” That kind of writing, aware of its context and tradition, is “being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture.” (New York Review of Books blog, January 19, 2012; see also Where I’m Reading From, 31–9, 60–71, 85–92, 183–201.) In an earlier blog, titled “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks presents a contentious version of this concern. He notes how authors increasingly want to be published in English, and have their books sold internationally. Agents and publicists orchestrate “simultaneous launches” of books, using corporate-style promotional strategies. As a result, “a reader picking up a copy of… a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world.” Parks’s target is the uniformity of the literature that is produced: What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. Writing in the 1960’s, intensely engaged with his own culture and its complex politics, Hugo Claus apparently did not care that his novels would require a special effort on the reader’s and above all the translator’s part if they were to be understood outside his native Belgium. In sharp contrast, contemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerbrand Bakker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring. More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding wordplay and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader. [New York Review of Books blog, February 9, 2010] The risk is that the market for world literature will “neglect… the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.” It is easy to be sympathetic to Parks’s appeal, at the end of that essay, to “avoid writing over and over the dull, amazing novel, or the amazingly dull novel that new market conditions are inviting us to write, ‘the Esperanto of international literary fiction’ as Adam Shatz has called it, reviewing Orhan Pamuk.” Parks has elaborated his critique by including translators in the mix: what appears as a universal novel, worthy of the Nobel Prize, may actually be “put together” or “consigned to the page” by a translator, who is implicated in the projection of internation-

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alism and the appeal to an “international public.” He argues that the process of internationalization of the novel does not liberate, but reinforces stereotypes: However much you prize your individuality, your autonomy from your national culture, nevertheless you’d better have an interesting national product to sell on the international market: Scandinavian melancholy, Irish burlesque, the South American folk tradition. Or best of all, some downright political oppression of one variety or another. [Parks, “The Nobel Individual,” Times Literary Supplement, April 20, 2011]

(Parks’s essay got a number of responses. Andrew Seal raised cogent objections to Parks’s choice of examples and his claim that the phenomenon is relatively new. Yet for my purposes here it is the outline of his argument, rather than his examples, that matters. David Damrosch, whom I will discuss below, also notes that “a defining ­feature of world literature… is that it consists of works that thrive in translation,” but he points out that translatability and universality are not necessarily related. “There can be no more global work than Finnegans Wake,” he writes, but it is “only a curiosity in translation,” while the more local Dubliners works well in translation. Sharae Deckard has connected Parks’s critique to a Jamesonian analysis of world literature in “Mapping the World-Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature,” 2014; in Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, 2017, Rebecca Walkowitz suggests there are virtues in the kind of reading that a novel “born translated” implies.) The politics of identity and ethnicity in visual art is usually critical of “national culture,” but artwork in international contexts is expected to represent its places of origin. Parks’s suggestion that novelists write in a way that is easily translated is a useful way of naming the uniformity in the forms of reference that visual artists employ when they want to be visible in international venues. Complicated, apparently difficult, idiosyncratic, overly demanding references to the local are generally avoided in favor of signs of identity that can be easily assimilated. Perhaps that is the art world’s version of translatability. In art historical writing there is no such length limitation, but there is a similar tendency toward ease of “translation.” Local contexts and practices are presented in ways that make them comprehensible and engaging for “generalist” readers, or ­readers outside the author’s specialty. The result can be writing that is curiously easy to digest, even though its subject matter may be very distant from most readers’ experiences. Most major art history journals publish such articles regularly: they “represent” global practices without asking readers to make the effort that would be required to read texts written for other specialists. There may be a parallel here between the carefully curated local detail in such essays and the grit and difficulty of language and words that Tim Parks misses in the “new global novel.”

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(B) Denials and remnants of nationalism and regionalism. Parks gives several examples of writing that resists the leveling he associates with the desire for inter­ national success, including The Great Gatsby, Barbara Pym, Hugo Claus, and Henry Green. (These examples are scattered through Where I’m Reading From.) Such writing embraces “culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity,” but it also tends to speak to “the immediate experience of people” in their “own cultures.” The first criterion is linguistic and the second has to do with subject matter. The first asks authors to avoid simplifying their language, the other asks them to avoid the homogenization of reported experience. This is a doubled argument that also appears in discussions of global art. The issue in both fields, I think, is the concordance or adjudication between these ideals. In a review of Yvonne Owuor’s novel Dust, the novelist Taiye Selasi praises the author’s lack of “African archetypes” and her independence of “the conventions of interracial romance,” and says the novel is not just for “Afrophiles” (New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2014). She also praises Owuor’s writing in unusual and specific terms: Owuor’s prose is a physical expression of the landscape it evokes: raw, fragmented, dense, opaque. Beautiful, but brutally so. There’s a sort of lawless power at work in her text, a refreshing break from the clinical reserve so beloved by American M.F.A. programs. The language sweats. It bleeds. Critics may object to the novel’s unapologetic density, or find the characters’ ruminations unfashionably ‘emotional.’

This description will be familiar to readers of eastern and western African novels, and Selasi makes her regional preference clear by the comparison with North ­American writing programs. It’s difficult not to imagine that the critics she is thinking of are mainly in North America and Europe. In this way Selasi conjures a quality of Dust that may appeal mainly to “Afrophiles” or is at least not the general “bibliophiles” who prefer work that appeals outside its places of origin. (Given these distinctions it is not irrelevant that the two authors here are black women and the three critics are white men, although the internationalism of the group is not immediately apparent from those identifications—Owuor is Kenyan; Selasi is Nigerian and Ghanaian, born in England and raised in the US; Parks is English, but lives in Italy; Damrosch is American; and Siskind is Argentine.) What is helpful here, for the parallel to visual art, is the difference between Selasi’s fully articulated position about how novels might avoid regionalism (for example, by omitting “the conventions of interracial romance”) and her implicit regionalism when it comes to style and voice. The contrast between conceptualized or simplified positions, on the one hand, and embodied, complex positions, on the other, also marks writing on visual art and art history worldwide: some of what makes the art regional or local is identified and analyzed in the texts, and some is generalized or unrepre-

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sented. In my reading of Parks’s essays, there is a similar tension between an idea of local or regional tradition, which can’t be defined and relies on examples like Jane Austen; and the idea of nuances, clutter, and local usages, which can be defined but not easily translated. (C) Quantitative and systematic studies of world literature. There are initiatives in art history to study world art using macroeconomic and financial indicators, to study dissemination and circulation of art using empirical data, and to study art as an effect of Darwinian or neurobiological principles. Those projects are small in comparison to the application of quantitative and systematic analysis to the study of world literature. Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005), for example, leans in part on Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (1974; part 3, 1989), which proposes a combined post-disciplinary social science endeavor, aimed at understanding the redistribution of value from the “core” to the “periphery”; it would include national or local identities but its real interest would be the “world system” of modernity, which is global. Moretti’s project combines Wallerstein’s ideas with Darwinian evolutionary theory and visual communications. As Damrosch summarizes it: In Moretti’s view, the European novel can be mapped as an invasive species, spreading around the world in the wake of colonial and neocolonial political and economic developments, putting down roots in cultures that previously had little history of extended prose fiction, and variously suppressing traditional genres and inspiring new creativity, usually after an initial period of uncertain, derivative composition. [p. 506]

Moretti’s method isn’t quantitative as much as a matter of “deliberate reduction and abstraction” (Moretti, p. 1). One difficulty with such an approach is that it may not make contact with existing ways of understanding the novels he studies. The culminating example in Graphs, Maps, Trees is “free indirect discourse,” a complex term that is central to definitions of literary modernism. (It means, nominally, the practice of reporting and commenting on a character’s speech and thoughts instead of just quoting them.) Moretti traces a history of free indirect discourse using a tree graph inspired by Darwin and Ernst Mayr, but for the subject itself he cites only Ann Banfield’s “classic study” (1982) and older sources such as Bakhtin. His tree graph is divided into “second person / orality / collective” and “first person / thought / individual”—six contentious terms, grouped into two problematic sets. Moretti’s purpose is to reveal “some fundamental principles of cultural history” by “replacing the old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature…) with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions” (p. 91).

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A possible point of contact with histories of visual arts is Moretti’s interest in avoiding types and genres. As he says, once you replace a “type” such as detective fiction with a tree, “the genre becomes an abstract ‘diversity spectrum.’ (p. 76). The problem in adapting such an approach to the global study of art history is that it omits aesthetic criteria. Significant or “interesting” novels, practices, and types—which crop up throughout Moretti’s work—are discussed in terms of their survival (in a Darwinian or evolutionary sense), their success at defining niche markets, or their place in branching evolutionary trees. The result is counterintuitive for many readers. Ultimately, why study the romantic novel, the detective story, or the history of free indirect discourse, if the point isn’t the individual novel or story? Moretti’s answer has long been that the evolution and differentiation of the romantic novel is inherently more representative of novels than, say, another close reading of Wuthering Heights. The exclusion of close readings (or, in art historical terms, close descriptions, formal analysis, attention to facture, materiality, and other ways of paying attention to the particularities of the artwork) is ultimately an exclusion of the aesthetic moment. On the other hand, systematic studies in art history, including studies of macroeconomic, financial, and “neuroaesthetic” approaches, have contributed many needed corrections to received ideas about genres and practices. Moretti’s is only one of several projects to apply social science methods to literary history. Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (1999) also presents a Darwinian model, and is closer at least in that respect to existing studies in global art history such as Julian Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (2005), although Casanova’s work has mainly had resonance in literary criticism. (For example Christopher Prendergast, Debating World Literature; and work by Christophe Charle, which is represented in the edited volume Circulations, discussed in chapter 5.) There are many possibilities for links between systematic, sociological, economic, evolutionary approaches to world literature and to world art. Within literary criticism, Moretti remains controversial for another reason, which can also be helpful to the study of world art: his mantra of “distant reading”—machine-­ assisted reading that takes in hundreds or even thousands of novels to find formal similarities—has been resisted by scholars who feel it vitiates “close reading,” the sine qua non of aesthetic appreciation since the New Criticism of the mid-20th c. A forum in the professional journal PMLA in 2017 brought this out very clearly (PMLA 132 no. 3, 2017, 613-89). As Bethany Wiggin wrote, Moretti offered a “pact with the devil”: give up the pleasures of close aesthetic reading for the undiscovered territories of the world novel (682). A “distant reading” brackets out the aesthetic enjoyment of the text in the same way as a sociological, anthropological, or statistical study of world art might do. The benefit is that it becomes possible to see large-scale patterns of development. I will return to this approach, and its limitations, in chapter 10.

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(D) The remnants of the canon. David Damrosch’s essay “Frames for World Literature” shows how the early history of writing on world literature focused on Western examples (Damrosch, in Grenzen der Literatur Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, 2009). He says the change from histories that exhibit what he calls “great-power emphasis” to histories with more genuine globalism happened after 2000; his own Longman Anthology of World Literature appeared in 2004. It is interesting to speculate how such a history of histories of world literature might correspond to histories of visual art. In art history I imagine one thing that scholars might want to say is that the idea of a world art history is itself European. This is so, I think, even though histories of world art produced outside western Europe are often illegible or even unrecognizable as plausible histories. I have documented a number in the book Stories of Art (2002). That aside, art history texts can be said to have been effectively global at an earlier stage: the first edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1956) had only Western authors (all but one male), while Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages had non-Western material, of an abbreviated and formalist sort, in its first edition in 1926. Art history has also in large measure avoided the “canon wars” that spread through the other humanities in the 1980s simply by increasing the size of its surveys and textbooks. It takes less time in the classroom to include a painting than a novel, so art historians were able to add to the roster of artists, practices, and cultures, without making hard decisions about whom to exclude. (This is discussed in Stories of Art.) Damrosch distinguishes between three “basic paradigms” of world literature: ­novels “as classics, as masterpieces, and as windows on the world.” He sees the last of those as ascendant since the mid-1990s (p. 503). He points out that in the growing interest in world literature, the “classics” and “masterpieces” have not been ignored in favor of “windows on the world”: no one fails to read Virgil or Shakespeare because they are also reading Toni Morrison. The old system, Damrosch says, was comprised of the canon and a satellite system of “minor authors.” (His examples are Petronius and Suetonius, who served to highlight Virgil and Ovid; and William Hazlitt and Robert Southey, who were “minor authors” in comparison to Wordsworth and Byron.) Damrosch proposes that the current system has three “levels”: a hyper-canon, a counter-canon, and a shadow canon. The hyper-canon is populated by the older “major” authors who have held their own or even gained ground over the past twenty years. The counter-canon is composed of the subaltern and contestatory voices of writers in less-commonly-taught languages and in minor literatures within great-power languages. [p. 511]

In this system, the real losers are the “minor authors… who fade increasingly into the background, becoming a sort of shadow canon that the older scholarly generation

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still knows (or, increasingly, remembers fondly from long-ago reading), but whom the younger generations of students and scholars encounter less and less.” The hyper-canon continues to be discussed—there are more books on Kafka and Joyce each year—and smaller countries can find themselves reduced to one author as their hyper-canonical representative. The shadow canon is “figures everyone ‘knows’ (most often just through one or two brief anthology pieces) but who are rarely discussed in print: they served their purposes in postcolonial literary criticism, and are now in danger of being forgotten.” Damrosch names Fadwa Tuqan, Ghalib, and Premchand, and he notes how the hyper-canon pushes authors into the shadow canon: “Alan Paton gives way to Nadine Gordimer, R. K. Narayan is upstaged by Salman Rushdie.” This candid if somewhat Darwinian discussion of the economy of authors in world literature might be of interest to global art history studies. Few books have addressed the concept of the canon in art history (an exception is Anna Brzyski’s Partisan Canons, 2007), but it may be time to revisit that apparently vitiated theme. There is certainly a shadow canon in art history, even if the selection and inclusion processes are quite different. (E) The globalization of the novel. Mariano Siskind makes a distinction between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global. The latter is “the production of images of the globalized world,” and it produced “dissimilar imaginaries” of the global depending on the authors’ geopolitical situations. (“The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature,” 2010, in World Literature: A Reader, p. 331; and in Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World ­Literature in Latin America.) This might be useful for studies of world art: the parallel would be the globalization of the artwork and the visualization of the global—both familiar phenomena. In Siskind’s account, a “cultural mediation” accounts for the “gap” between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global, between “capitalism’s creation of ‘a world after its own image’… through the global expansion of its aesthetic and cultural institutions,” and “local literary reappropriations and reinscriptions” of that process. I wonder, in the art world, how much the globalization of art and visualizations of the global could be seen to differ, except in their iconography (except, that is, for the particular subjects they portray). Siskind asks questions directly related to the themes I have been exploring. Is there a difference, he wonders, “between the European novel and the Latin American novel, the Asian novel, the African novel, and so on?” Yes, because it is possible to point to “formal and thematic aspects of individual works” that express the novelization of the global. But no, because it is hard to find “institutional and political” dif­ ferences in the function of the novel in different places. “In other words,” he concludes, “the world system of novelistic production, consumption, and translation

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reinforces the dream of a global totality of bourgeois freedom with Hegelian overtones.” (p. 331) He says he was initially heartened by Damrosch’s project of world literature in his Longman Anthology of World Literature (second edition, 2008) until he saw the sort of “syllabi, anthologies, and research agendas” that would actually result: they would be the same “romantic ideology,” and the same idea of the “indivisible unity of the nation.” So what would a better kind of pedagogy of world literature look like? Siskind agrees with Moretti that the study of world literature must become the study of world literatures, ideally excluding nothing and therefore incapable of examples that are “isolated because of their supposed capacity to represent… national or regional cultures.” (p. 344) This is “convincing,” but “impractical,” Siskind writes, and he ends by proposing his distinction between the globalization of the novel and the novelization of the global as a way of understanding how the universality of world literature is being made, while also “resisting the temptation to fall back” on “national and regional cultural identities.” (p. 346) Another critique of the globalization of the novel appeared in 2013 in the online journal n+1, under the title “World Lite: What is Global Literature?” It argues, informally and in an unsystematic manner, against various kinds of novels currently viable internationally, such as the postwar European novel, exemplified by Houellebecq and including “Perec, Bernhard, Nádas, Nooteboom, Jelinek, Marías, and now Knausgård,” a literature “written by, about, and for literary people who attain a critical mass only at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Such authors’ “melancholy wanderings among the dead seem a way of shielding the novel’s protagonist, and perhaps the novelist himself, from a contemporary world he can’t face… present day confusions and controversies are neglected or sentimentalized.” The anonymous editors’ principal target is novelists who have lost their political edge after receiving university appointments. They make this argument about Salman Rushdie, Junot Díaz, Dinaw Mengestu, Michael Ondaatje, and others, indicting a kind of “global formula” that produces books appetizing to the small publics that still consume literature. Díaz, for example, gave up chronicling “down-and-out Dominicans” and wrote a novel about an American academic who is obsessed “with the semiological analysis of comic books and science fiction.” They propose the only good academic novel is DeLillo’s White Noise, which was written by a writer who never taught in a university. Political retrenchment is common: even Naipaul, they say, eventually retired to England after writing The Enigma of Arrival. “World Lite” provoked responses by authors eager to point to literatures the editors had overlooked, to show the essay’s Anglophone bias, to argue that not all university novels are bad, or to point out that some professors write about themes other than university life. (See MLYNXQUALEY, “World Literature Certainly Sounds Like a Nice Idea”; and Jennifer Solheim, “n+1’s World Lite: A Hopeful Response.”) The editors then

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responded, defending their position against claims of Anglophone regionalism, but they did not address deeper issues. (“‘The Rest is Indeed Horseshit,’ Pt. 6, On World Lit #BEEF,” on the n+1 website.) The essay wasn’t meant to stand up to concerted ­criticism: the editors even posted some of their emails to one another, showing how rapidly they had formulated some of their judgments, such as their opinion that Goethe wasn’t a good novelist. (“Editorial Debates On the ‘World Literature’ Intellectual Situation, Issue 17,” also on the n+1 website.) For the parallel I am pursuing here, it matters that “World Lite” is consistently political in its interests and values. For the editors, political opposition is the sine qua non of viable world literature. They praise work that remains outside the circuit of academic, elite, “international middlebrow” taste. The terms of their approbation closely match the values of postcolonial theory in the visual arts; they support work that finds places and projects of resistance, “opposition,” and “most embarrassingly, truth.” They give several examples: Eduard Limonov, Roberto Bolaño—and especially the astonishing 150-page novel-within-a-novel in 2666 about women murdered in a town that is modeled on Juarez—Marie N’Diaye, Elena Ferrante—especially Days of Abandonment— Juan Villoro, Álvaro Enrigue, Yan Lianke, and Pola Oloixarac. These are roughly the equivalents of politically active visual art from Haacke to Ra’ad and the Yes Men, and to the art historians and visual studies writers who privilege such work, from the group around The Anti-Aesthetic to contemporary writers like Nicholas Mirzoeff. This political reading of world literature faces the same difficulties as the socio-economic readings of art history and theory influenced by postcolonial theory: that is, it begs the question of why literature is what’s at issue. Form, style, voice, quality, rhetoric, and writing in general may only be mentioned only in passing. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, for example, is praised for using “metafictional techniques of postmodernism to address the theme of migration,” but that doesn’t clarify why it was politically efficacious to mix postmodern writing with themes of hybridity. Is it just that the divided and multiple forms and voices of postmodern metafiction resemble the forms of contemporary diasporas, hybridities, and migrations? If so, that would be an observation, not a justification, and it would still leave unsaid why the optimal vehicle is fiction and not postmodern theory. At the end of their response, the n+1 editors mention Michael Ondaatje as an example of a bad writer: it’s the only discussion of style in the response, and it’s just an assertion of Ondaatje’s bad writing, reminiscent of the way that connoisseurs used to assert quality without argument. Such brief, unsupported mentions of writing quality make it difficult to see why the globalization of the novel, in particular, should be any greater concern than the globalization of any cultural product that carries political meaning.

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These are glimpses of the larger literature on the globalization of the novel. In different ways each raises the question of how best to write about a practice—the “global novel”—that is becoming increasingly uniform even while it continues to claim to be an authentic vehicle of the local and particular. When Lezra ponders the sense of teaching Comparative Literature at NYU–Abu Dhabi, he is interested in what it would mean to teach what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said in the world”—provided, Lezra says, such a thing even exists anymore, and if it exists, if it is accessible, and if it is accessible, if it is teachable, and if it is teachable, if “its teaching is desirable.” In this exceptionally thoughtful account the voice, critical terms, and issues remain faithfully American. There is no mention, for example, of the possibility that engaging Arabic-language ­literary-critical traditions might be pertinent or compatible. The Abu Dhabi campus has students from roughly 100 countries, and only 15% or so are Emirati students, so it poses an especially complex case for questions like Lezra’s. (Lezra, “The Futures of Comparative Literature,” 2012, p. 83.)

Concluding remarks From these four case studies I draw two pessimistic conclusions. First: the fields most closely related to art history—art criticism, art theory, and art instruction— remain largely silent on the question of their increasing uniformity worldwide. Of the three examples I’ve discussed here, the most pressing is art theory, which urgently needs to find a way to address its ongoing working assumption that European, and specifically French, theory is optimal to interpret all the world’s art. Second: studies of the global novel suggest that it is possible to make headway on the question of art history’s uniformity, but possibly only by omitting aesthetic criteria and relying on statistical, quantitative, or sociological data. Studies of the novel also show how it can be possible for an artistic practice to continue to claim its fidelity to the local even while it tends toward an easy translatability. The study of the global novel is one of several parallels that might be brought to bear on the problem of global art history. Anthropology has long pondered its global uniformity, and so has musicology, and there are also studies of worldwide practices in sociology. (For example Sujata Patel’s “Afterword: Doing Global Sociology: Issues, Problems and Challenges,” Current Sociology, online, March 19, 2014.) There is also at least one study on the global spread of art journalism, Ruth Skilbeck’s “Art journalism and the Impact of ‘Globalisation’: New Fugal Modalities of Storytelling in Austral-Asian Writing.” (Pacific Journalism Review 18, 2008, pp. 141–61.) If these comparative studies were to be multiplied, I imagine it would be difficult to avoid becoming depressed about the increasing worldwide uniformity of the arts

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and humanities. This is so despite the current focus on local art, customs, beliefs, concepts, languages, and other traits of culture, because at the same time scholars think about those things, they write in an increasingly uniform manner within each discipline. In the absence of evidence to the contrary it appears that the arts and humanities are headed toward a remarkable global uniformity, supported by an intensifying rhetoric about the local.

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The Example of Art Since 1900

In order to do serious work on the problem of writing art history with full awareness of global issues, it is necessary to be as precise as possible about what counts as the sort of art history that does not address such issues. There would be many candidates for art historical literature that avoids questions of relevance beyond its purview: by their nature, focused studies will do that. The concept of master narratives, which I introduced in chapter 2, is useful here because it is a reminder that the apparently trackless expanse of specialized studies in art history is actually ordered. Even narrow studies are oriented as critiques or additions to master narratives, because those narratives give specialized studies their motive and coherence. This is true, I think, of even the most specialized monographic essays in journals like The Art Bulletin: the choices of topics and methods is underwritten by larger structures of value and historical significance. The many apparently scattered inquiries of art history take their sense, their pertinence, and their orientation from master narratives. They are like iron filings scattered on a tabletop: they are subtly turned, pointed toward magnetic sources of attraction. It is tempting to call these master narratives “chaotic attractors,” in a nod to chaos theory, because there are several such narratives, and they move and shift and overlap. Luckily my subject in this book is not the number or development of master narratives, but the effects of their existence. In order to frame the kinds of problems I will be exploring beginning in the next chapter, I only need to specify one especially important master narrative: the one associated, inevitably but inaccurately, with the journal October, and with the textbook Art Since 1900. In contrast to other textbooks that include the entire 20th century, Art Since 1900 argues the value and interest of the art, rather than adopting the neutral or informational tone that is common in textbooks in all fields. There are remarkably few exceptions in any subject: one of the best parallels is Richard Taruskin’s contemporaneous Oxford History of Western Music, especially the final volume, Music in the Late Twentieth

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Century (2005–9), which includes sustained personal arguments with the common reception of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and others. Even though Taruskin’s textbook is unusually polemical and personal, his book suggests a clear relation between history and criticism. A parallel reading of Art Since 1900 and Music in the Late Twentieth Century reveals the density and complexity of the art historians’ engagement with criticism, in comparison with the clearer differences between criticism and historical modes in Taruskin’s work. Because Art Since 1900 both introduces and critiques both art and its criticism, even a cursory reading can be difficult. In my experience the book as a whole is rarely assigned in classes, and in undergraduate classes the chapters are treated more as introductions to artists than as arguments. In graduate seminars students read the methodological introductions, which raise their own problems. (None of the introductions is a straightforward account of the methodology it presents. There is no general orientation, and no accounting of methodologies that are omitted.) It is difficult, at first, not to read Art Since 1900 as a drama of some personalities in and around October. I have been involved in a number of seminars, in different countries, which have devolved into speculations and anecdotes about the book’s authors. One way around that would be to compare the four authors of Art Since 1900 to another group of four, the “quadrumvirate” of “theory” professors at Yale in the 1970s and 1980s. There are intriguing parallels. Both contexts involved a reaction against a preceding practice identified with modernism. Both involved four people, more or less; as Marc Redfield argues in Theory at Yale (2015), the “quadrumvirate-plus-one” at Yale was “Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man, with Derrida playing his central role from the margins.” Both contexts involved “fractures” that were formative from the outset; at Yale those differences were apparent from the hiring of Paul de Man in 1970. In literary theory, the number four was both agreed upon and argued from the outset; this is described in Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich and Wallace Martin’s collection The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983). An institutional and structural comparison of October and “theory” at Yale might go some way to separating readings that depend on biography and institutional configurations from readings that focus on the texts’ claims. The problematic place of criticism in art history, and the distracting if crucial role played by individual historians are two obstacles to a more reflective reading of Art Since 1900. In this chapter I will propose a kind of reader’s guide to the book, in two parts: first a survey of issues that have been brought out by the discipline’s reaction to the book, and then a set of reading strategies that concentrate on the book’s critical values. My account deviates somewhat from previous readings in that I am more interested in the ways the authors argue, and the judgments those arguments reveal, than in the substance of their claims or the shapes of history they propose. The idea is to see how this particular master narrative, the one most closely associated with

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North Atlantic art history, is structured. It is possible to study the phenomenon of North Atlantic art history by looking at institutions, bibliographies, and particular accounts of artists. What I have in mind here is more like a rhetorical or logical analysis of the form of the arguments I associate with North Atlantic art history. The shapes of the arguments in Art Since 1900, taken apart from the subject matter, are very helpful guides to identifying the influence of North Atlantic practices. So what follows is not a review of the book, but a schema for understanding the kinds of arguments that are most typical of North Atlantic art history. Art Since 1900 is the example because it exhibits the most succinct and influential forms of these arguments. I begin with three themes that emerge in the reviews of Art Since 1900.

1. Salient features of the reviews The first edition of the book Art Since 1900 was reviewed at least forty times. The Art Bulletin gave it eight responses rather than a single review (June, 2006). Both Robert Storr and Norman Bryson reviewed it for Frieze (November and June–August); Christian Weikop reviewed it for Art History (2006); Pepe Karmel for Art in America (November); and Claire Bishop for Artforum (April). It was exceptionally widely reviewed in newspapers and trade periodicals, including The Guardian (May 14, 2005), the Telegraph (April 24), the New York Times (December 11), The Nation (December 8), and the Los Ange­ les Times (April 5). I am aware of four Spanish-language reviews, including one by José Luis Brea (Revista Performance, 2006). (A) The hinge of the 1960s. In What is Contemporary Art? (2009) Terry Smith ­ roposed a brief but trenchant critique, saying that Art Since 1900 “tracks above all p the contemporaneity of modern art, rather than its history,” leaving it “ambiguous” whether “anything has changed” since modernism (p. 252). Several reviewers experienced Art Since 1900 in a similar way, as a book hinged around the 1960s. That decade was formative for the four authors of the book, and it has become crucial for art history’s sense of itself. Pamela Lee puts this well. For her, 1969 in particular “serves as a shorthand for a turning point in the field, latently expressed in the book’s nearly 700 pages and its guarded, bordering on fatal, prognoses for recent art.” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 379) Lee cites Krauss’s summaries of postmodernism and Buchloh’s despair over the hegemony of the spectacle, but what matters most in this context is her observation that “for better or worse, the 1960s may have replaced the postwar era of Abstract Expressionism as the immediate point of art historical reference for a new generation of students.” The year 1969 “marks a virtual divide,” she writes, “generational, institutional, and art-critical.” It acts, in effect, “like 1945 once did in the literature on twentieth-century art.”

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I think this can be put even more strongly. In a recent job search for East Asian and Middle Eastern art historians, I found that two-thirds of the candidates chose the 1960s as their focus, even though the events in the countries they studied—Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Korea, China, and Japan—were not easily comparable in content or historical significance to events in Europe and North America in the 1960s. In 2018 my own department in the School of the Art Institute in Chicago commemorated the events of 1968 by assembling a year-long course taught by a dozen faculty; it involved some faculty who specialized in the art of countries where 1968 was not pivotal. The values attached to the art of North America and Europe around the year 1968 had to be discovered, sometimes in different years, in the art of countries outside Europe and North America. In some countries, such as Japan, the late 1960s have become contested ground: the Western reception of Gutai, for example, has been modulated and challenged. In other countries, such as Estonia, Slovakia, Turkey, and Korea, the choice of the 1960s as a turning point in the country’s art is arguably problematic. My colleagues were aware of those disparities, and they addressed the issue in two ways: some looked at years other than 1968 to find art analogous to the North American and European art of that year, and others understood the notion of 1968 to denote political, oppositional, or activist art in general. Art Since 1900 makes choices and arguments in accord with its authors’ investment in the late 1960s, but its influence, together with the more general North Atlantic model, is institutional: it has become a disciplinary reflex to look to the late 1960s as a formative moment. There are, I think, two ways to think about this emphasis on the late 1960s. On the one hand, it marks a turn away from modernism, and toward what was later called the anti-aesthetic: art that was understood as primarily political, whose purpose was the reconfiguration of institutions. The value accorded to 1968 or 1969 in particular then makes sense as a recognition of the inauguration of a decisively new way of thinking about art’s purpose, which continues to the present moment and is therefore not only a “hinge” but also the moment when the “contemporaneity” of art became clear. On the other hand, the dissemination of North Atlantic art historical practices, which I am exemplifying here with the textbook Art Since 1900, leads art historians naturally and sometimes without reflection to the late 1960s, because the values they see in the art historical literature are most forcibly exemplified in art of those years. This is an elusive but fundamental phenomenon: some of my colleagues who taught on the 1968 course, and some of the candidates in the search for the East Asian and Middle Eastern position, were drawn to study art around 1968 because the discourse they had learned as students, and the texts they considered exemplary, valued art of those years in particular: the species of art historical discourse determined what was considered significant. In this sense what matters in Art Since 1900 is not so much what it includes and excludes—which was the focus of most of the reviews—as the concepts and arguments it uses to privilege values associated with the late 1960s.

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(B) The question of visual properties. Matthew Collings’s review in The Guardian (May 14, 2005) poses the book as an exercise in moving from “credulity to disillusion,” meaning, for him, that the authors question “the power-interests of everything,” including visual pleasure. Collings implies that pleasure in the visual is not fully critiqued by the authors, but rather simply excluded. The book’s main weakness, he thinks, is its “blindness to anything purely visual”: “from this blindness, of which the authors seem proud but which I see simply as philistinism, arise all sorts of problems… Art that delights, or is supposed to delight, in apolitical hedonism is shunned.” There are two issues entangled here: the implication that the authors do not experience visual pleasure, and the implication that they understand but omit reporting on visual qualities. In my experience it’s common to hear Krauss, Foster, and Buchloh accused of being insensitive to the visual properties of artworks, as opposed to the art’s politics or its position in critical discourse, but it is seldom easy to know what to do with such criticism, either because it tends to assume the existence of an ideal, non-political, purely aesthetic engagement, or else because it is informed by the critic’s own sense of what an adequate visual response might be. Collings’s review might have been more reflective if he had proposed that the authors experience visual pleasure as an effect dependent on historical context and discourse; he could then have asked why the authors chose not to present historicized versions of visual pleasure, theirs and other people’s, as parts of their account. As historically specific reactions, conditioned by contemporaneous discourse, assertions of visual pleasure would be entirely legitimate in the logic of Art Since 1900. It would also have been interesting if Collings had considered that just as visual pleasure isn’t the same for everyone, so the ostensibly non-visual intellectual interests the authors of Art Since 1900 display are also a matter of pleasure, and that there is, as Robert Storr notes, “taste in ideas” that might be just as much in need of historicizing. (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 383) Aesthetic, formal, subjective, personal, non-historical, or visual characterizations of artworks can seldom make analytic contact with historical projects such as the one in Art Since 1900. Collings has the usual difficulty in characterizing Chris Ofili’s visual content: it has a “richness,” and it combines “formal value… identity politics, pop culture and shock, and he puts them all together… in a lighthearted way,” which isn’t a strong characterization or a good reason to care about Ofili. This is a typical problem. It’s another issue entirely whether Krauss, Foster, or Buchloh fail to take in or interpret the visual material they confront. (C) Measuring the narrowness of the book. Robert Storr’s brief review in Frieze, titled “All in the Family,” begins “I grew up in a one-party state. It was called Chicago.” (Frieze 95, November 17, 2005) His longer review in The Art Bulletin opens with an unforgettable image: “for thirty years,” he writes, “new art history and art criticism have

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been under construction… with the publication of Art Since 1900 the keystone to its Alexandrian main gate has fallen into place.” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 382) On the face of it, Storr’s assertion that “the new art history that many of us who are members of the oppositional generation of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have tried to foster is now turning into a one-party state,” and his observation that the October model seeps unnoticed into bibliographies, teaching jobs, panels, and articles, are compatible with what I am arguing in this book, except that I wouldn’t contrast what he sees as the insidious October “empire” only with “new art history,” which is largely centered in the North Atlantic. I would rather broaden the contrast, and pose the pervasive but often elusive influence of October against not only “new art history” but a number of national and regional practices around the world. Like Storr, I am concerned with the narrowness of a book that “is destined to become the standard, reconstituted ‘grand narrative’ of modern art for the foreseeable future–in universities, at any rate.” And it is also right to point out that Art Since 1900 is “nothing more or less than the construction of a new canon, a new master narrative, and, indeed, a new orthodoxy.” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 383) The question is how best to pose the book’s narrowness. In the Frieze review Storr makes his case by looking at the book’s recommended readings. He notes that the “overwhelming preponderance” of entries, both at the end of the book and at the close of each chapter, “are either the principal authors themselves, former contributors to October magazine, the group’s party organ, intellectual mentors who have been ‘rebranded’ by the October group, or former students of one or another of the principal authors.” A statistical study could be made of these citations, just as a cartographic study could be made of the book’s geographic exclusions. Neither strategy would effectively critique the book’s contents, but it would be helpful to have such data because that would make it possible to specify more clearly the people, places, and institutions that comprise the Chicago-style “empire.” Storr’s Art Bulletin review also raises one of the central issues I am exploring in this book: the unnoticed reliance of the current generations of art historians, worldwide, on the model exemplified by Art Since 1900. That unacknowledged dependence comes out in Storr’s last paragraph, where he concludes: “suffice it to say that this reader would rather explore the expanded field of art making and art history the authors of this new orthodoxy helped open up, but from which they have long since retreated, rather than join them in their claustrophobic redoubt.” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 385) Storr is one of the most prominent skeptical voices who read and respond to the “new orthodoxy,” yet the very formulation of his position shows his dependence: he is engaged with, and grateful to, the early experimental phase of the “new art history” in the 1960s and 1970s, and so he is not—as I assume he would acknowledge—free of the “orthodoxy.” No one I know who writes on contemporary art is: most accounts of late twentieth-­century art are entangled in the interpretations and choices crystallized

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in Art Since 1900, and Storr is not an exception. His interests are more contemporary than the first four authors of Art Since 1900, and he is interested in (and mentions) Latin American art, antimodernists like Balthus, Russian nonconformist art, African-­ American art, expressionists like Beckmann, African art, and Asian art: but his critical terms and points of historical reference are indebted to the valuations and choices that enabled the “expanded field” of “new art history.” He does not contest the importance of the periods and practices in the first half of Art Since 1900: he wishes only to expand on them, to show modern art’s “actual diversity”—and in that sense, he is part of the “orthodoxy,” especially in comparison to other national art historical practices I will consider in later chapters. Yet affiliations and indebtedness are tricky subjects, and there are other places in Storr’s Art Bulletin review that indicate clear breaks from the October model. He wonders, for example, how the authors of Art Since 1900 manage to “neatly fuse” Robert Morris’s “Antiform” with Georges Bataille’s informe, “to create a tidy new formalist classification leading inexorably… from Surrealism to Pollock” and on to Mike Kelley, despite the fact that “the thrust of both concepts was to break down boundaries and pollute purities.” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 385) That sort of critique, if it were continued, would threaten the foundational moves of the authors of Art Since 1900, moves that shore up their genealogies and privileged practices. It isn’t easy to tease out the indebtedness or the ongoing affiliations of individual scholars to the models exemplified by Art Since 1900. At the same time the challenge is to understand and articulate such debts, and not to assume they have been repaid, or that this issue is something for a past generation.

2. Reading strategies for Art Since 1900 Here are three strategies I have found useful in reading and teaching Art Since 1900. Each one can be applied to North Atlantic art history in general: the values and forms of argument that are condensed in Art Since 1900 may be found throughout art historical writing roughly since the codification of the anti-aesthetic in 1980. (A note on the chapter titles in Art Since 1900: each chapter has a year in large print, sometimes with a small letter after it, like this: “1900a.” There follows a brief prose description of the chapter, which is referred to in the section “How to use this book” as the title. But the most useful chapter titles actually occur on the bottom of each page, in small print, a fact noted by only a few reviewers. The section “How to use this book” refers to the text in the footer as the chapter’s “name.” This confusion is central to the book’s conflicted pedagogic purpose. It wants to argue, like a graduate-level text, but it also wants to be expository, for undergraduates. The prose descriptions following the year numbers seem to propose each chapter’s argument, but they are abbreviated

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and their critical content is dampened in comparison to the titles of subsections within each chapter, which are sometimes fiercely polemical. The small-print “names” at the bottom of the pages are actually the best guide to the book’s coverage. In this chapter, I will follow the usual practice and take the large-print dates as chapter titles.) (A) Thinking about methodologies. Art Since 1900 has structural innovations that distinguish it from its competition. In the place of an overview of 20th century art, the book begins with four dense, difficult, and arguably idiosyncratic introductions to methodology. In my experience those introductions are hard going even for graduate students, and a case could be made that a full reading of the introductions requires knowledge of the four authors’ previous writings, as well as texts by a number of the philosophers they mention. The four essays are effectively not introductions to the methodologies they discuss, but contributions to ongoing conversations on the critical reception of those methodologies. The methodological introductions, and references to them in the roundtable conversations, constitute a problematic: a reading of their principal arguments would require a separate chapter, or more. However, it is inadequate to assign those introductions alone, as I think often happens in graduate seminars, without also reading at least parts of the book, because Art Since 1900 is not only a history of art, but a history of interpretive methodologies. Several chapters, such as Hal Foster’s excellent essay on Warhol, are more reviews of the later reception of work than of its initial contexts and intentions. The chapter “1907,” on Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is a crucial example. Its opening, untitled section poses the painting as having been “resisted” and only “recog­ nized” later in the century. The section includes a brief history of the painting’s late reception, beginning with its “canonization” by Alfred Barr in 1939. Nothing “fundamentally challenged” Barr’s account, we read, until Leo Steinberg’s essay “The Philosophical Brothel” in 1972. The next section of the chapter, “A ‘Transitional Picture’?,” reviews both Barr and Steinberg. “1907” is initialed by Bois, and its review of Steinberg may well have been written by him, but it is closer to Krauss’s interests: she had adopted Steinberg as October’s Renaissance art historian, and she had several arguments with William Rubin, whose name scarcely appears in the text even though he wrote “the longest study ever devoted to the work” (p. 82; two of the four “Further Reading” suggestions at the end of the chapter are to Rubin). The penultimate section, “The Trauma of the Gaze,” proposes a psychoanalytic reading, implicitly as a step beyond Steinberg, noting that “several psychoanalytic scenarios dealing with the ‘primal scene’ and the ‘castration complex’ apply amazingly well to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” (p. 83) The concerns here are, broadly speaking, Foster’s, although they could be shared by Bois and Krauss, although not by Buchloh. There is then an abrupt transition and the section turns to a comparison of Matisse and Picasso in the years leading up to 1907, a theme that had been recently developed in Bois’s Matisse and Picasso (2001). The chapter’s final section, “The Crisis of

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Representation,” does not fit at all with the rest of the chapter. It is as much a précis of Krauss’s interests as the preceding paragraph is a summary of Bois’s interests. This is one of the places in Art Since 1900 where it must feel to a reader as if the editor didn’t dare intervene. The section opens “We can now return to the standard, pre-Steinberg assumption that Les Demoiselles was the ‘first’ Cubist painting”—although nothing in the logic of the preceding section warrants such a return. According to this final section, “questioning the rules of representation… would be the work of Cubism as a whole,” an enterprise that involves a “semiological pimpulse” that reaches its high point in 1912—all ideas that Krauss had argued in earlier publications. It seems unlikely to me that a reader who does not know Krauss’, Bois’s, and Foster’s methodological interests, as well as something of Barr’s, Rubin’s, and especially Steinberg’s, could make much of this chapter. (And a reader who does not know Buchloh’s interests would miss the pointed absence of Marxist and political interpretations here.) The chapter isn’t a semi-private conversation, as some reviewers have said about Art Since 1900 as a whole: but it is not comprehensible merely as a review of the historical reception of the painting, precisely because the historiographic overview ends with Steinberg: after the summary of his account, the three authors’ interests appear without chronological, logical, or narrative order. Overall, Art Since 1900 implies that different interpretive methods are deployed to illuminate different historical problems, but such a reading would disembody and de-historicize the methods, which are embodied in the book’s four introductions (that is, they are identified with individual authors), and historicized in chapters like “1907.” Readers of Art Since 1900 move back and forth between two modes in which the concept of methodology exists in the book: methodologies presented as moments in the history of the reception of artworks (as in “1907”), and methodologies as understood by the individual authors (as in the Introductions). A full reading of the book has to engage the fact that in almost all the chapters, methodologies are simply put to work, implying they are optimal for the subjects at hand, and obscuring both of the other ways methodologies are present in the book. This unresolved relation between methodologies and case studies is characteristic of North Atlantic practices more generally. Departments of art history adjust and re-adjust their “methodology” course offerings: some require seminars and lectures on individual methods such as style analysis and iconography, and others offer specialized topics such as feminisms, psychoanalysis, and semiotics (or more current theories such as object oriented ontology, affect theory, and decolonial theory). As a result some art history departments imply the discipline is defined by a few fundamental methods, while others imply that art history is comprised of an open-ended set of methods. This indecision in the discipline is reflected and exemplified in Art Since 1900, in the very idea of separate introductions to methodologies, in the choice of four, in their idiosyncratic content, and in their indeterminate application throughout the text.

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(B) Strategies of exclusion. The majority of reviews of Art Since 1900 noted artists and practices that the book omits or marginalizes: Mexican muralism is assigned to the ghostly fifth author, Amy Dempsey (unnoticed by most reviewers, and named only in small print in the credits behind the title page); Francis Bacon is hardly mentioned; modern architecture is nearly absent. Critics have noted many other absences and near-absences: Edward Kienholz, who “tries too hard”; American art before the First World War (except for Precisionism—more on that below); Giorgio de Chirico; the School of Paris; Balthus, whom Storr calls “among the most notorious… and enduring antimodernists,” is not mentioned; Beckmann is barely in the book and is accused of being unable to analyze his own political situation; there is a “general blackout” (in Storr’s expression) of the School of London including Freud, Hockney, and Kitaj; the “queering of American art history” and figures such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Andy Warhol; Matisse’s work between 1917 and 1930, which Pepe Karmel notes is described as “a reactionary trend”; Picasso’s work from the neoclassical work of the early 1920s through the Girl Before a Mirror of 1932, an absence Karmel attributes to the authors’ “interdiction” against “the biographical,” subjectivity, and “individual genius” (Art in America, November 2005, p. 65); and the internet, which (as Karmel also notes) is not in the book’s index. Other reviewers have noted the book’s inadequate representation of their specialties: Christian Weikop complains about the treatment of German art, expressionism in particular (Art History vol. 29, 2006, pp. 509–16); Lia Yoka complains about the authors’ politics, including their poor reading of Tim Clark (Histo­ rein vol. 5, 2005, pp. 171–76); Richard Meyer remarks on the absence of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement (Artforum, September 2005). Barry Schwabsky mentions the absence of Matisse’s chapel at Vence, outsider artists such as Adolph Wölffli, Martin Ramirez and Bill Traylor, and popular art such as George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (The Nation, December 26, 2005). Norman Bryson’s review notes that Bois fails to write about art since 1967, even though some of the terms he favors, such as the informe, would fit artists like Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley (Frieze, June-August 2005). Other art historians have noted dozens of other omissions, such as the fact that Frida Kahlo is only present in a single sentence of the book (this was first brought to my attention by a student, Miriam Ruiz), or the interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s constructions as secular experiments in medium (thanks to Gwendolen Webster for material on this). Reviewers focused on the reasons for these omissions, which are usually easy to see. Art Since 1900 necessarily omits or excludes a great deal, as any history textbook has to do. And yet the “stunning demotion of the often overrated Francis Bacon,” Storr writes, “to a reproduction and ten lines of invidious comparison to Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti seems spiteful rather than corrective” (Art Bulletin, June 2006, p. 384). In this case the exclusion can be understood superficially, as canon building, or more reflectively in terms of the authors’ position in relation to expressionism and its revivals and to figuration in general, which would make it anomalous to treat Bacon at

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any length. (At the London launch of Art Since 1900, Krauss said he wasn’t in the book because he isn’t an important artist.) These sorts of reasons for omissions are not especially illuminating, because they tend to follow from the authors’ previous writing. In the first of the book’s two roundtables, Hal Foster makes a distinction between things the book omits or excludes, on the one hand, and things it “occludes.” An occlusion, I take it, would be an untheorized or unnoticed misrepresentation of one thing by another. (It might also be possible to distinguish exclusions, which would involve assertions of absence, from omissions, which would be lacunae.) Occlusion is an interesting possibility. Several examples occur in “1934a,” one of the few chapters devoted to antimodernism, which is one of the three terms in the book’s subtitle Modernism Antimodernism Postmodernism. This particular antimodernist movement is arguably the 20th century’s most significant: the official launch of Soviet Socialist Realism at the All Union Congress of Writers in 1934. Most of the chapter is a rote rehearsal of Andrei Zhdanov’s essays, but there are several works of visual art, two of which are characterized in ways that could be described as “occluded.” Aleksandr Deineka is praised for a “peculiar and masterly synthesis of Soviet modernism and a more traditional definition of public and monumental mural painting” sanctioned by the Zhdanov doctrines (p. 287). His painting Building New Factories, Buchloh writes, “embodies” the same “contradictions” that are found in Neue Sachlichkeit’s “fusion” of new technologies and apparently obsolete pictorial strategies. Here the description of the work occludes the fact that Deineka would not have expected or valued praise dependent on the achievement of “contradictions” between doctrine and disused and devalued practices. Buchloh also quotes an essay by Leah Dickerman, which appeared in October, praising the Soviet realist painter Isaak Brodsky for achieving “a structure of ambi­ valence” between Soviet Socialist Realism’s use of photography and “erasure of the image’s mechanical origins” (p. 288). I will return to terms like “ambivalence” and “contradiction”: they are characteristically negative terms, not compatible with Zhdanov’s rhetoric, but embedded in the writing of the authors of Art Since 1900. Their use in the chapter obscures the fact that Brodsky—not to mention Zhdanov—would presumably not have valued such terms. Deineka and Brodsky are both “occluded” because they are praised in ways incompatible with the framing discussion of Zhdanov, and that incompatibility is itself not acknowledged. Occlusion is an interesting issue, but as far as I am aware it is not mentioned in the reviews of Art Since 1900. Most reviewers focused on exclusions and omissions, and they tended to favor direct explanations of such absences in terms of the authors’ values. In reading Art Since 1900 it is more helpful, I think, to concentrate on strategies of exclusion, which include occlusions as well as exclusions and omissions. (C) Strategies of inclusion. Some art practices the authors do not especially favor may have been included because they would be expected in a textbook, and the

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authors’ handling of such cases reveals some of their strategies for including work they do not value. Viennese expressionism is an example; it is mentioned in the book’s opening chapter “1900a,” initialed by Foster, which begins, unexpectedly, not with a work of visual art but with a text, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. (I wonder if Art Since 1900 is unique among art history textbooks in opening with a book and not a work of visual art. It is a brilliant move, signaling the book’s conceptual interests and critical intentions.) Foster then has to negotiate the fact that Freud himself was “a conservative collector of ancient, Egyptian, and Asian artifacts” (this is the first mention of visual art in the book), and that his milieu in Vienna was principally marked by the Secession and Art Nouveau, which are also not the ordinary starting places for histories of 20th century art. But because the book opens with Freud and Vienna, it also needs to include Viennese expressionism, a style that is marginal in the work of all four authors of Art Since 1900. At the end of the chapter Foster develops an account of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka that is broadly psychoanalytic—their work shows signs “of a tortuous surfacing of subjective conflict,” although “without direct influence from Freud.” Because their work is only evidence that “psychoanalysis and modern art share several interests” (p. 15), it is necessary to find a better motivation for opening the century, and Art Since 1900 as a whole, with artists who are in fact secondary to the stories the book means to tell. Schiele is accordingly introduced by qualifying his importance, tying it to a later moment in art. Gustav Klimt’s and Schiele’s “transformation of the figure,” Foster writes, “is the primary legacy of Viennese art at this time. It might seem conservative in relation to other modernist art, but it provoked the Nazis to condemn it as ‘degenerate’ thirty years later” (pp. 55–6). Schiele’s presence in Art Since 1900 is partly contingent on the need to discuss the artistic milieu of Vienna around The Interpretation of Dreams, but his appearance is justified more directly by noting that he was later significant as a focus of National Socialist antimodernism. Let me call this inclusion by association. Another strategy for including artists who the authors would not normally study is bracketing lesser achievements. Yve-Alain Bois does this in the following chapter, “1900b,” when he mentions “a kind of hybrid sculpture that one could call pseudo-­ Cubist,” including Jacques Lipchitz and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, whose works misconstrue the crucial innovations of cubism, reaffirming the whole and “magnifying the solidity of the masses.” A total of five artists are mentioned in passing, and so just barely included in the book, because they illuminate a misunderstanding of the possibilities of cubism at that moment. Art movements and styles that are considered less significant are also sometimes included by using art to talk about social practices—even when the movements in question did not effectively address or critique those practices. An example is the photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit (1929), which is recuperated by association with a

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critique of consumerism: photograph’s “serial subject” and its capacity for fetishization, according to Buchloh, could “record the impact of commodity fetishism” (p. 253). Hal Foster’s chapter on Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Precisionism, “1927c,” is another example. The Precisionists, Foster writes, lacked “irony” and worked in a “benighted and belated” relation to European modernists. (p. 232) Their paintings “represented modern icons, but were these artists modernist?” They weren’t, because their work is a return to “clarity and stability,” a “reconciliation of representation and abstraction,” an “antimodernist ‘return to order.’” In those senses, Precisionism is like Neue Sachlichkeit, “yet without its critique of the military-industrial complex that produced World War I.” Indeed, both Precisionism and Neue Sachlichkeit were “poles apart” from Russian Constructivism, because they “worked to recoup industry as an image for art.” (p. 235) This series of negative judgments, not balanced by other terms or implicated in more complex “suspensions” or “exacerbations” of opposites, con­ tinues throughout the chapter. Toward the end Sheeler is said to have “identified artistic perspective with technocratic surveillance” and “reconciled” landscape painting with “Taylorist and Fordist principles of work-management.” His work “magically smoothed over” the effects of assembly-line production described by György Lukács in 1923. (p. 237) A half-hearted paragraph on Georgia O’Keeffe concludes “1927c.” What could a student make of this? As in several other chapters in Art Since 1900, the characterizations are nearly all negative, and they are made even more fierce by the lack of opposing terms, “suspensions,” and other complexities. Sheeler and the Precisionists are damned, in effect, for their simplicity even more than for their naiveté, belatedness, or lack of irony. Simplicity is an opposite of avant-garde values, and it may be that the only way a student could recoup such a practice, using the evidence and arguments proposed in Art Since 1900—and aside from the trivial exercise of mining the chapter for useful historical material—would be to excavate a new complexity: one which, according to the logic of “1927c,” would be incompatible with the cultural context and intentions of the artists themselves. “1927c” is one of the more remarkable short essays on a modernist practice ever written. It records a period that was, in the logic of the chapter, absolutely unredeemed. The social practices and beliefs implied by the art are again the strategy of inclusion, even if they are presented entirely negatively. (D) The equation of negativity and critique. These strategies of inclusion and exclusion often turn on the positive value accorded to negative critical positions. The authors make many equations between moments of negativity (resistance, refusal, suspension, ambivalence, contradiction, ambiguity, complexity, difficulty, to name some that occur in Art Since 1900) and positive value (political, formal, philosophic). In some measure Art Since 1900 is structured as a series of negatives: artworks are described partly or wholly in terms of the properties and strategies that they resist.

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Adorno’s formulations of modernism are partly behind this negative critical structure, and so is the distance all four authors have taken from high modernism, for which positive terms of praise (spontaneity, opticality, beauty, the sublime) had been crucial. In reading Art Since 1900 it helps to keep a running list of specific strategies used to support equations between negativity and positive artistic value. In “1900b,” for example, Yve-Alain Bois introduces Matisse as the book’s second instance of fine art after Foster’s look at the Viennese Secession and expressionism. The chapter, which is longer than most in the book, includes a close reading of Matisse’s The Serf (1900–3). Bois’s first characterization uses four negatives: “It suggests no extension of any kind, into neither mental nor physical space: one of the first resolutely modernist antimonuments, the sculpture asserts its autonomy as an object.” (p. 58) Here the “antimonument” is understood as something “autonomous” (that is the sentence’s only positive term) because of what it rejects. The next sentence is a double negative: “This is not to say that The Serf owes nothing to Rodin’s craft.” This is not the kind of double negative that a grammatically-minded editor could correct into its corresponding positive form: Bois needs the negatives to underscore just how little The Serf takes from Rodin; and in fact what Matisse borrows is Rodin’s “private” art (in quotation marks), which is a kind of “process” art (again in quotation marks). In final section titled “The Inaccessible ‘Thing-in-Itself,’” Bois concludes that The Serf is fundamentally different from Michel­ angelo’s or Giambologna’s work, to which it has been compared, because the different views of it do not add to “a discernible endpoint,” “a moment when you realize what is going on.” Looking at Matisse’s sculpture there is “no climax to our circumnavigation… nor any privileged view.” The chapter ends with a sentence that names these negatives: “It is as if he were playing a game with cognition, teasing our desire for its fullness, and declaring its necessary incompleteness—the very condition of modernity.” (p. 63) In my reading, the entire body of the argument has only two positive terms, “autonomy” and “modernity,” and its dozens of negatives and refusals condense onto the concept of “necessary incompleteness.” This is a positive valuation achieved by addition of negatives. A different use of ­negativity as a term of critical praise occurs in the chapter “1911,” on analytic cubism. There readers are led through at least six readings of cubism, each one of which is insufficient: Carl Einstein’s, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s, Guillaume Apollinaire’s, Albert Gleizes’s, André Salmon’s, and Clement Greenberg’s. According to Krauss, who is credited with this chapter, Einstein made two fundamental errors that were repeated in various ways by later critics. First, he assumed that cubism achieved a “synthesis” that “delivered to the viewer… more not less knowledge of the depicted object.” (p. 107) In fact, in Krauss’s account, cubism delivered less information than realism had, and that subtraction is crucial to its fundamental achievement. (Subtracting information without producing shorthands for naturalism, as in E. H. Gombrich’s account in Art and Illusion, is presented as a significant achievement.) Second, Picasso avoided synthesiz-

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ing either the depicted flatness and the flatness of the picture, or “visual and tactile experience,” insisting instead on a “rupture” between them, “like a sore that will not heal.” (p. 110) The “effect of divisiveness” between the visual and the tactile, which the Picasso of Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909) took from late Cézanne, appears in Art Since 1900 as the intentional and controlled display of a philosophic proposition, “the problem of visual skepticism,” and also as a willed refusal to solve or resolve the “problem.” It’s a wonderful piece of critical writing, because it proposes the painting Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909) is both a philosophic problem (Bishop Berkeley is invoked) and also a “sore”: and that unusual and unpleasant image—an open sore, that won’t heal—is proposed as a good thing, in fact just as good as a philosophic problem. Unresolved tensions are valued in this account, even though they wouldn’t be, and haven’t been, in philosophic and critical descriptions of the same phenomena in earlier paintings and scholarship. In “1911,” a negative critique is achieved by subtracting information and at the same time valuing lack of coherence between meanings. The chapter ends by praising Picasso’s awareness and control of this open-ended experiment in paintings such as Still Life with Chair Caning, in which the “disjunction” between the visual and the tactile is “absolute” and “economically stated.” So far that is three strategies for associating significant properties of artworks with refusals, failures, and other negative operations: adding negative judgments, praising the subtraction of information, and “exacerbating” failures at synthesis. A fourth strategy is accumulating opposed properties or concepts (such as “visual” and “tactile”) and then proposing they are at their most interesting when they are “suspended” instead of “exacerbated” or displayed as a “rupture.” This happens in the chapter “1934a,” where Buchloh quotes Dickerman’s positive assessment of photography in Soviet socialist realism as offering a “structure of ambivalence,” recording both a “fear” and a “desire for the photographic.” It also occurs in the chapter “1913,” which deals with the first generation of international abstraction. The authors of Art Since 1900, including Hal Foster, who is credited with this chapter, have little interest in or patience for the artists’ evocation of “transcendental concepts… such as ‘feeling,’ ‘spirit,’ or ‘purity.’” (p. 119) In order to foreclose that interpretation, the chapter proposes a rhetorical “opposition” of Delaunay and Malevich: “the first proclaims the transparency of the window to color and light; the second, the victory over the sun in the triumph of the black square.” (p. 123) In the end, what matters is that abstraction “suspends” this and many other such oppositions “between spiritual effect and decorative design, between material surface and ideal window, between singular work and serial repetition.” Of these, “the materialist / idealist contradiction might be the most profound of all: painting as a plane covered with paint… versus painting as a map of a transcendental order.” (p. 124) In this way what makes abstraction by artists like Malevich, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Kupka, Léger, and Taeuber significant is its “suspension” of the opposition between

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“materiality” and “transcendence.” This works effectively against a received interpretation of this generation of abstraction—proposed in several cases by the artists themselves—and it avoids claiming that these artists “exacerbated” or otherwise controlled the opposition. Accumulating suspended oppositions might be a name for this interpretive strategy. These four ways of associating positive, significant, interesting, or otherwise crucial properties of artworks with negative operations are common in art historical literature in the wake of Adorno and postmodern criticism and history, and so they may seem unproblematic or analytically empty. But they are very specific to their time and place—what I am calling North Atlantic art history, especially when it is applied to modern and postmodern art. Consider the argument of “1911” or “1913” in an abstract form: an artist has been interpreted as doing x. That interpretation is insufficient, and there is another reading y that is opposed to it. That reading is also insufficient, but the optimal reading isn’t a synthesis, it is a more “profound” awareness that x and y work in undecidable opposition, “exacerbated” by the artists or “suspended” in their practices, and that—in logic it might be called not-x and not-y—is the best way of conceptualizing the artist’s work. This abstract version helps show how precise and complex these negative strategies can be. On an initial reading of Art Since 1900 what tends to matter most is what’s included and omitted. The reasons for those choices may appear to be mainly biographical or institutional: they seem to reflect the authors’ personal values or those of the authors’ professional affiliations. The reading I have outlined here is more abstract, because it focuses on the strategies by which the authors assembled, privileged, marginalized, excluded, or occluded their historical material. The virtue of this more abstract reading is that it uncovers values that underlie particular historical judgments. When abstract painting is praised for “suspending” “contradictions” such as “material surface and ideal window” or “singular work and serial repetition,” what matters is the complexity of the relation of opposed terms. By the logic of “1913,” no abstract painting of the years around 1913 would be valued highly unless it could be shown to “suspend” such oppositions. Such a reading avoids reducing the authors’ choices to their affinity with conceptual art or their aversion to some figuration. It can seem counterintuitive to speak of Delaunay, Malevich, or Kandinsky as being important on account of their ability to accumulate suspended oppositions: but that is exactly, logically, what the chapter claims. I don’t want to say that the art doesn’t matter, that it is a vehicle for the authors to practice such oppositions. But I also don’t want to say that an understanding art is the only legible purpose of the chapter “1913.” The chapter can be said to have three subjects: a selection of paintings, a complex conceptual relation, and the undecidable relation between those two.

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What counts as criticism, analysis, or interpretation in Art Since 1900 is in close and difficult relation to the objects it ostensibly exists to describe: neither is simply a vehicle for the other. For me, the most powerful contribution of Art Since 1900 is the forms of the valuations it articulates and defends even as it apparently goes about the business of describing art. The forms of the authors’ judgments (adding negative judgments, privileging suspended meanings, praising the subtraction of information, and so forth) can come very close to being the real subject of the book: certainly it is possible to imagine the book as an argument with argument, or a philosophy of value in modernism with visual objects as helpful examples; it is harder, I think, to imagine it the other way around—a book about visual objects and practices, with some thought-provoking articulations of what gives them value. Specific forms of resistance, refusal, suspension, ambivalence, contradiction, ambiguity, complexity, difficulty are as much the point of Art Since 1900 as the content of the authors’ judgments or the art that is taken to express those judgments, and those forms are in continuous unresolved tension with the presentation of the works themselves. I’ve tried to suggest that the common themes in the critical reception of Art Since 1900—the stress on the late 1960s, the apparent absence of purely visual analysis, and the restricted canon—are actually the results of the authors’ preferred forms of argument. The same forms can be found throughout the central texts of North Atlantic art history. They are its field marks, its distinguishing characteristics, and they are learned, often by emulation and without explicit acknowledgment, by students of art history. North Atlantic art history can be defined as a series of institutions and scholars, as a series of texts, or as an implicit canon of artworks, but for me the most useful diagnostic is the forms of its arguments. Arguments that subtract information, value unresolved oppositions, equate negativity with critique, and suspend ambiguities recur in very different contexts, where they are naturalized and scarcely noticed. A last note before I return to the question of how to write about art practices in different parts of the world: if you are a young art historian, exploring possible disciplinary affiliations and practices, you might consider applying these reading strategies to the texts that you take as exemplary, to see what forms of argument they use; and you might also keep an eye on the forms of arguments you use in your own writing. In theory it would be possible to write very different kinds of art history and still employ some of these forms of argument, but in practice they are closely related to the preferred narratives, institutions, and implicit canons of North Atlantic practice.

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State of the Field: Six Current Strategies

With this chapter I begin a survey of the current thinking on how to write the art history of different cultures, regions, nations, localities, and practices, outside the master narratives of modernism and postmodernism that I have exemplified with Art Since 1900. This chapter is intended as a kind of abbreviated guide, and several of the topics I discuss here are treated in more detail in the following chapters. The six strategies are not associated with schools of thought or individual scholars: they overlap, and scholars typically adopt eclectic approaches, taking cues from several of these. The custom of assembling strategies using various theories has both good and bad effects: it promotes experimentation, which is essential in such a mobile and unpredictable field; but it also implicitly sanctions combinations of positions that are actually contradictory when they are considered in detail. I hope this way of organizing the chaotic state of scholarship can help distinguish incompatible approaches, and clarify the overall number of strategies.

1. Avoid the relation between center and periphery by considering circulations of artworks, artists, and markets Only a few art historians—David Summers comes to mind, along with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Kitty Zijlmans, Terry Smith, Whitney Davis, David Freedberg, Martin Powers, and John Onians—research concepts and practices that are shared across widely dispersed cultures and locations. Those ambitious projects are a good place to begin because they pay the most attention to what counts as the discipline of art history conceived as a whole, with potential relevance for all art practices. Summers’s book Real Spaces (2003) is in many ways the touchstone of such efforts in the last thirty years; it has been discussed at length by Whitney Davis and in my review in The Art Bulletin (86 no. 2, 2004, pp. 373–80). Other projects, such as John

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Onians’s or David Freedberg’s, are limited by their allegiance to scientific discoveries. That in itself does not make them less important, but because neurobiology is still only a marginal interest in art history, their work cannot represent the discipline’s central interests when it comes to writing about the world’s art. Here I will focus on Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s work, because it is contemporary, and because it is potentially an account of all of art history under globalization. Kaufmann’s position has been articulated in Circulations (2015), the first book published by Artl@s, an international association of art historians based in Paris. Circula­ tions is an attempt to gather essays that contribute to a new sense of global art history by privileging the circulation of artists and markets rather than the relation of a center to its peripheries. The three editors, Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice JoyeuxPrunel, emphasize “the ceaseless transformation of the circulations and adaptations of ideas, objects, and images originating elsewhere,” rather than the dissemination of art and ideas from a center to various peripheries. By studying circulations the editors propose to avoid the “hypostasis of cultural entities such as ‘Western and Non-western,’ which derive from a priori essentialist definitions.” The book is therefore explicitly posed to answer the question of center and periphery, which I opened in chapter 2, and to pave a way to write about the world’s art that circumvents current preoccupations with center and periphery by returning to what Kaufmann has called a “geography of art,” an older tradition in art history that paid attention to geographic inter­ actions of many kinds (Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 2004). (Circulations is the most elaborated investigation of the idea of cultural circulations. A number of scholars have adumbrated similar concepts: for example Saloni Mathur has proposed a “comparative” study of “global incursions of artists and ideas in and out of the dominant centers”; and Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago have proposed a theory of agency in the international production and dissemination of art. For those see Preziosi and Farago, Art is Not What You Think It Is, 2012; Mathur, “Response: Belonging to Modernism,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 90, 2008, p. 560.) In Circulations the title concept is elaborated in Joyeux-Prunel and Dossin’s chapter. They discuss “distant” and “close” kinds of circulation, drawing on Braudel and Foucault, respectively. One possible limit of the concept of circulation emerges early in their chapter, when they write that “Such a comprehensive approach provides the foundations for a global history of modern art that is circulatory and inclusive, instead of hierarchical and exclusive.” The proposal is that attention to circulations and inclusivity will vitiate art history’s traditional interest in centers, without the need for a directed critique of values accorded to center and periphery—but I wonder if the hierarchical may be too deeply grown into the enterprise of art history, and into specific artistic contexts, to be uprooted by studies of circulation. A note of caution might also be sounded by some philosophic relatives to circulation: I think, for example, of Merleau-Ponty’s mutual touches, Nicolas Bourriaud’s “radicant,” and Deleuze’s “rhizomes”:

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even though those are anti-hierarchical concepts, none is without its hierarchies. In botany, rhizomes are rarely just tangles of hyphae without direction or order. ­Radicants (plants like vines that put down roots as they grow) always have roots— they are never free of the obligation to draw nourishment from the ground. (Bourriaud, The Radicant; the Tate Triennial Altermodern, 2009.) Rhizomes have centers and directions: literally speaking, they are attached to roots, and therefore to trees. In aero­ dynamics and atmospheric science, too, vortices and other circulations have measurable axes, directions, and velocities. Circulations, therefore, may not themselves be without “centers” and “peripheries.” And even where they are effectively non-hier­ archical, it is not necessarily the case that discovering them will allow historians to “escape the hierarchization and exclusion that underlies the narrative of modern art.” Perhaps the most direct application of the concept of circulations in Circulations is Michele Greet’s chapter, and especially her observation that “demographics and mapped evidence of physical presence can start to challenge the canonical stories of art history.” This certainly happens in her project, although the results she reports also work to question her own project, as in the example of the critic Raymond Cogniat, who “decided to claim Picabia as a Latin American artist” despite Picabia’s own description of his transnationalism (his father was Cuban), and despite his long-term residence in Paris. As Greet asks, “in the project of mapping whose voice to do we listen to, that of the artist or the critic?” Projects that involve mapping produce results that not only question the status quo in art history, but question the mapmaker herself, her intentions and concepts. For several contributors, “circulations” refers primarily to the decentering of hierarchies, and to the possibilities of studying reciprocal relations between centers, yet it may be that the most promising sort of circulation in the book is the one in which the map maker sees that her map suggests different starting places for the next inquiry. There is an external circulation among artistic centers, and there is an internal one between the scholar’s assumptions and her unexpected results. Joyeux-Prunel and Dossin’s chapter present a number of detailed findings. Centers of artistic activity in Europe are re-evaluated: Brussels, for example, “became a major center of exhibitions in the 1880s, hence a major actor in the circulation of modern painting.” There is a great deal of material here for future work, and I think both scholars deserve congratulations for having gathered so much new information. My reservation here is contingent, because I have no objection to the data: I am interested, as I think they are, in what happens next. At one point they write: A network analysis of the commonly reproduced artists and of the contributors writing in… modernist magazines shows that in 1925–26 Paris was not the main center of interest and polemics. Whereas the official story of Modernism claims that Parisian Surrealism imposed itself as the new avant-garde of the time, it was in fact isolated and quite at odds with a mostly constructivist Europe des avant-gardes.

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Notice this leaves the master narrative untouched: I can imagine Hal Foster or Benjamin Buchloh reading this and thinking: well, it may be statistically true that Parisian Surrealism wasn’t central until “the rise of European fascisms and the consequent emigration of German and Central European artists to Paris,” but conceptually and artistically—and therefore historically—what mattered was happening in Paris. There is information in this chapter about the European role in disseminating American postwar art: The first museum exhibitions which introduced American Pop art in Europe were organized in 1964 by European curators who had discovered the new American art at the ­Parisian gallery of Ileana Sonnabend. In the case of American Postminimal and Conceptual art the involvement of Europeans was even greater since the movement was, for the most part, introduced in Europe by Europeans, mostly Germans, who like Kasper Koenig, Paul Maenz and Piero Gilardi, had been to the United States and discovered artists whom they brought to the attention of European dealers, curators, and collectors.

The challenge, I think, is in knowing what kinds of conclusions are appropriate. The provisional conclusion the authors offer here—that these results highlight “the importance of the so-called peripheries” and especially German dealers, collectors, and writers—is true, but it is only part of what this kind of information might do in, or to, art history. Results like these are potentially more subversive than a geographical and political rearrangement. First, they raise the issue of the art’s intrinsic value. American art of these decades spread in Continental Europe because “writers, dealers, and collectors” took an interest in it. But why did they take an interest? I can imagine a number of research papers devoted to that question; they could answer it in the ways Piotrowski and other contributors in Circulations do, by specifying the constructions of national and regional identity that drove the dealers’ and writers’ interests. But would that be the end of the story? Modernists like Michael Fried might say such a conclusion short-circuits the art’s own properties and qualities, in favor of a study of ideas people have had about the art. Art with interesting or compelling properties eventually traveled, and that is what matters. A Marxist critic such as Karl Werckmeister might say this opens new opportunities to think about moments of reception, but it is only half the story. If the reception of Pop art and other postwar American movements at a given moment depended on “a European take,” then what was that take? How exactly did the German dealers rethink postwar American art? This is by way of saying that demonstrating unnoticed circulations, new patterns, new maps, unexpected centers, and altered dates, may not in itself “decenter” art historical explanations. There are moments, for example, when Joyeux-Prunel and Dossin could pursue the kinds of doubt that Greet mentions in the case of Picabia. “Prosopo­

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graphy,” they write, “moves art historical discussion beyond rehashed questions of influence, like between Fauvism and Die Brücke for instance.” As in any mapping or statistical study, the scholar has first to know what her categories and subjects are: the groups, practices, and categories have to be generated in advance in order to gather data. The results might then suggest a revision in those same groups, practices, and categories. I can imagine, for example, that a second generation of scholars, whose starting point is the maps generated in these projects, might have a good chance at undermining the “hierarchies” of traditional accounts. Aside from the concept of circulation, the book Circulations is also an attempt to find a new way to write about the world’s art. It is broadly informed by Kaufmann’s position on the geography of art, which he has articulated in books like Art and Glo­ balization (2010) and Towards a Geography of Art (2004). All such attempts, including Carrier’s, Smith’s, and others, have partly to address themselves to the wider community of art historians who do not try to “put the world into a book,” in Onians’s phrase (Compression and Expansion, 2006.) The way that Circulations poses its project raises this issue in an exemplary fashion. In the final chapter of Circulations, Joyeux-Prunel and Dossin note that attempts to include the world outside North America and Europe usually involve grafting ostensibly unfamiliar material onto the usual Western narratives. “Far from resulting in a global, or all-encompassing, history of the period,” they write, “such an approach ends up merely Westernizing world art history”: But how to avoid this pitfall? How to think the history of art in a truly transnational perspective? Could the study of circulations and exchanges provide a point of departure for such a global art history?

This is Circulations’ most basic question, and its proposed answer. In the book’s introduction, Kaufmann, Joyeux-Prunel, and Dossin, writing together, propose a similar formulation: their aim, they say, is “to write a global history of art for a globalized world” by “following the transnational circulations of artists, artworks, and styles.” Let me try to step back a little from the editors’ answer. The expression “transnational perspective” may itself be a problem, because for many readers “global art history,” “universal art history,” or “transnational perspectives” are themselves suspect. There are, I think, at least nine other ways of thinking about what a “transnational perspective” might be, and whether it is a good idea. (A) A global or transnational perspective might not be possible without a fundamental critique of the forms of modernist and postmodernist narrative, which entail tacit rejections of mobile, non-meliorist concepts like “circulations.” This is my own position. The book Circulations does not address the anti-relativist strains of modernism; instead it seeks to substitute narratives about circulation.

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(B) It could also be said that a transnational perspective would require abandoning or suspending the aesthetic interests of art history in favor of socio-economic criteria. This is what is proposed, in effect, by some postcolonial, subaltern, and area studies: I will consider this position later in this chapter. (C) A global or transnational perspective would require acknowledging that the vehicle of any universal art history will itself still be Western; this is also a position I have taken. I am thinking here of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), with its argument that universalizing itself comes from the European Enlightenment. (D) Alternatively, a transnational perspective could require a turn to scientific or evolutionary criteria: this is John Onians’s position, and in some respects it is shared by David Freedberg, Ellen Dissanayake, Ladislav Kesner, and others who work with neurobiology, neurology, and neuroesthetics. (E) It could necessitate a move in the direction of visual culture in general, outside of fine art: this is exemplified by visual culture studies. (F) It could mean rethinking the basic phenomenological terms of human experience in the world: this is a way of describing what David Summers has done in Real Spaces. (G) It could entail re-grounding some fundamental concepts of anthropology: this is Hans Belting’s project in Bild-Anthropologie (2001, in English as An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, 2014). (H) More radically, a transnational perspective or a global art history could be resisted out of a conviction that cultures are incommensurate: this is the position Kaufmann associates with Michael Holly. (I) And perhaps most radically, a “transnational perspective” could be resisted, because it would require cultures to share senses of time and space: this is the position Kaufmann identifies with Keith Moxey. The editors’ position in Circulations is strong and clear, but it risks alienating a fair percentage of people currently at work in the field. Kaufmann’s own introduction mentions three of the ten positions I have listed here, but he does so to exclude them. Circulations presupposes that the project of a global art history is a good one. The editors’ question is how to do it well, not whether it should be done at all. Like Jim Cahill in the field of Chinese art, Kaufmann hears the call of the larger themes, the deeper history, and what Panofsky called the “megaperiods” of art history. But for other scholars interested in world or global art history, such an ambition is problem-

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atic from the beginning, and what needs to be done is something more on the order of a critique of the ambition itself, coupled with a search for new strategies of historical writing. Whitney Davis’s work on David Summers, for example, strikes a balance between admiration for Summers’s book and awareness of what Davis thinks of as the Kantian foundations of art history’s universalizing interests. Even writers sympathetic with the project of “putting the world in a book” tend to be wary of proposing a communal effort in which “we” (to use the inclusive pronoun Kaufmann favors) “start to think about how to write such a huge history.” It is possible to agree that “some of the arguments for cultural relativism, among them the thesis that points of view may depend on the cultures of the authors from which they come, should in any event also not negate the possibility of searching for common threads in what used to be called reality (and humanity)” but at the same time be sympathetic to what scholars like Moxey and Holly are doing. I am not sure that readers who agree with what Moxey has attempted in the book Visual Time (2013)—and I am one of them—will see his project as a misreading of Kubler, or think his position on time is effectively answered by Jörn Rüsen, as Kaufmann suggests. Holly’s work, which Kaufmann takes as an example of the doctrine of cultural incommensurability, is similar in that the interest in incommensurability (setting aside for a moment the claims she makes, or implies) is, I think, more widely held than the interest in universality. I imagine a number of readers of this book will acknowledge that “while many critics in the Humanities may take such ideas as multiculturalism, ­incommensurability, or heterochronicity as pointing to a necessarily fragmented picture of knowledge or reality that seems impossible to make whole, and regard such issues as presenting irresolvable conundrums, scholars in other intellectual fields of inquiry are actively searching for solutions in a common ground and in common theoretical bases,” but such readers might at the same time wonder if Kaufmann’s critique of Moxey, Holly, and others, on the specific points of incommensurability and heterochronicity (and with the support of Rüsen, Gombrich, Popper, and Kubler) are helpful or persuasive. (In passing, Kaufmann mentions a session at a College Art Association conference; I was a co-organizer at that session, and Michael Holly was also there. Kaufmann recalls shouts from the audience that “principles used to study art history [are] valid anywhere,” and for him that is evidence against Michael Holly’s position. But claims in favor of art history’s universality are in my experience a common response when historians who feel disenfranchised speak to those who are considered central. Assertions that time is effectively universal, and that cultural discontinuities can be overlooked, are sometimes based more on political and economic self-interest than on consideration of the philosophic issues. Some people at that conference session spoke from positions they considered marginal or disenfranchised, and from those perspectives common ground was potentially institutionally empowering.)

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My concern in writing the afterword to Circulations was that their project may be perceived as outside of some conversations on cultural difference in art history, which are aimed at local questions and reject the idea of “putting the world in a book.” Any talk about world art history, “transnational perspectives,” global art history, or universal art history, needs to also find ways to accommodate those for whom those ambitions are, from the beginning, dubious.

2. Rethink belatedness (and along with it the avant-garde, influence, derivativeness, originality, and precedence) It is not easy to find a word for the complex of issues that circle around the notion that some art practices are not exemplary, crucial, or necessary for historical understanding because they came after other similar practices. Somewhat unfortunately, belatedness has emerged as a synecdoche of this complex of ideas. Belatedness is a prickly concept: it forecloses sympathy and prohibits dialogue by offering a value judgment as a description. It trails a string of problematic concepts with normative implications, including the avant-garde, influence, originality, and precedence. Each of these concepts have been the subject of concerted critiques. Here is a sampling of strategies that have been deployed to counter the normative effects of the concept of belatedness: (A) The most direct approach, taken by Charles Green, Chris Berry, and others in the book Art and Globalization, is not to critique the concept, but to enumerate examples where the West was belated. This strategy, which is also used in Steven Mansbach’s book Modern Art in Eastern Europe, is limited by the necessity of demonstrating clear priority; but even when the search for such avant-­gardes is successful, most art outside the master narratives is still excluded. (I don’t use the expression “avant-garde” much in this book. It has two principal uses: a sin­gular form—“the avant-garde”—which tends to be unhelpfully general, and a plural form—“such avant-gardes”—which can be ambiguously multiple. Singular expressions like “the avant-garde” or “avant-garde values” imply a uniform definition, which seldom makes sense outside of philosophy. Plural expressions such as “such avant-gardes” acknowledge that the term avant-garde has had very different uses, and has been imported, untranslated, into various languages, beginning with English. These differences are often crucial, but the simple plural form, as in “such avant-gardes” tends to gloss over the sometimes deep differences between individual uses.) (B) Belatedness can be erased from the vocabulary of historiography if the canon that creates it is itself unseated. In Art and Globalization and in an article in The Art

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Bulletin, Partha Mitter proposes “a radical decentering of the avant-garde canon,” and in that he speaks for a large number of scholars. (“Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin, 2008.) But I don’t share even Mitter’s very guarded optimism that such a decentering can be accomplished mainly by the accumulation of studies of the “margins,” unless the new scholarship also does its work of decentering by addressing the coherence of the old positions. Mark Jarzom­ bek, for example, makes the point that non-European modernist architecture can be not only “a fundamental challenge to the European nation-state model” but one that is legible within art history. But it is not easy to move a conceptual apparatus as heavy as art history. (C) Belatedness might lose its sense if art historians conceive large parts of the world as interconnected and interdependent. This is a different, and less common, idea than the study of geographical movements and circulations. It entails a con­ viction that the world has long been effectively a mixture of omnidirectional influences. Martin Powers, for example, emphasizes the weakness of distinctions between Europe and other parts of the world, especially the many centuries of trade between China and Europe. He tends to discount theories of the “nature” or “culture” of China, because of his acute sense of the exchange of ideas and materials between Europe and China extending from the Shang Dynasty to Roger Fry (Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China, 2006). Most historians do not have Powers’s reach, and in the much shorter span of modernism such a perspective might be hard to achieve. (D) Belatedness loses its cogency if the cultures that are involved are sufficiently different as to effectively preclude the kind of comparisons that might emphasize or favor one cultural context over another. An example of this possibility is C. J. Wan-Ling Wee’s contribution to Art and Globalization, which focuses on Ahmad Mashadi’s contribution to the Singapore Biennale in 2006. The biennale proposed that new Asian figuration and conceptual art should not be seen as belated because they arose for different reasons than they did in the West. “Thus,” Wee concludes, “by implication, the region has no need to be ‘in sync’ with Western narratives of such art forms.” In this fashion belatedness is divided from itself, because it is potentially different in each context. Yet the reasonable observation that forms and practices can be reinvented in new contexts, and the equally reasonable implication that practices can be interesting partly precisely because they are legible as incommensurate reinventions, may not resolve the initial problematic of belatedness. The claim of incommensurability, which I noted in Kaufmann’s critique of Holly and Moxey, is also arguably internally inconsistent if the word “belated” or its cognates are used to help make sense of differing practices and contexts even as those practices or contexts are said to be incomparable.

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(True incommensurability, as philosophers such as Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine, and Nelson Goodman have argued, entails incomprehensibility or illegibility: what is at issue here is subtler and possibly confused, because it is implied that readers and viewers can understand Singaporean practices as belated, while also understanding that their modes of belatedness are incommensurable. A good philosophic text on this is Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47, 1973–1974, pp. 5–20. The best art historical treatment of incommensurate worlds is John Clark, Asian Modernities, pp. 27–29.) Claims like Wee’s involve incommensurate discourses in addition to possibly incommensurate art practices. Singaporean figuration can be described so it appears in some way dependent on Western modernism and postmodernism, or it can be pictured as the result of a reconfiguration or redefinition of the avant-garde, influence, or belatedness. Either of these options can be accomplished by itself, but there is not yet a way of joining the two discourses to make a new, more complex whole. That further problem is only obscured by saying, as Wee and Mashadi do, that Singaporean figuration is something different, because that is true, differently, from both perspectives. Because there is truth in both ways of describing contemporary figuration in Singapore, it may seem that this is only a pseudo-problem, and a careful text or exhibition might embrace both as a dialectic condition of current practices. But that would lead, I think, to a genuine dilemma, because the the two positions are not in a dialectic relation: there are political investments in both, and one partly excludes the other. If I call a figurative painting done in Singapore in 2005 “belated,” I foreclose some talk about how the work is part of a different socioeconomic and temporal condition. If I say that the painting is the product of an incommensurate sense of “belated­ ness” or the avant-garde, I foreclose some conversations that depend on parallels and further comparisons. I am as helpless on this point as I think anyone is. (E) Belatedness would not matter if no sense of the avant-garde existed in the countries and periods in question. As Iftikhar Dadi has said, “in the absence of powerful but outdated institutional and academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply cannot exist.” As a consequence an identification of such art as belated would be misguided or projected (Art and Globalization, p. 183). The difficulty here is that Dadi’s entirely plausible exemption of Pakistani “modernism” works from the perspective of the historical situation in question, but not from the perspective of the centers of modernism, and not, in some instances, from the perspective of the artists themselves, who sometimes identified themselves as avant-garde despite the lack of the kind of history of art instruction that would underwrite an avant-garde. Observations like Dadi’s make the entire subject more complicated by distinguishing varying perspectives, and in that sense they are exemplary; but they do not vitiate the category of belatedness.

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(F) An historian might also abandon influence as a concept, in favor of ideas like affinity or resonance. This would also avoid cause and effect, and so it would also remove belatedness, the hierarchy of original and copy, initial instance and reaction, or creative act and response. Speaking of Global Conceptualism, the exhibition she helped curate, Reiko Tomii remarks that viewers found “resonances” between conceptual art in different regions of the world even though connections were not actively pursued in the exhibition. She defines resonance as “similarity with little or no e­ vidence of actual connection, influence, or knowledge.” There can be many kinds of resonance, resulting in layered “maps” of analogous phenomena, “extended chain[s] of similarities and dissimilarities,” and “hidden degrees of similarity.” With work, the concept of resonance might gain in interpretive power, but Tomii makes her case by stressing individual concepts such as shinkō geijutsu (“new art”) and especially avant-garde (zen’ei), which in its original Anglicized French version “is effective only as a way of aligning Japanese practices to similar practices outside Japan.” I prefer the analysis of terms to the construction of a theory of resonances, because “resonance” is necessarily inexact. Affinities and resonances would be distinct from circulations, which are still examples of cause and effect, but what they gain in freedom they may lose in ­historical cogency, because it may be unclear what historical relationships are being proposed. (G) Art historians may learn to see belatedness as a positive possibility by noting that newness is always dependent on repressed or unnoticed displacement and repetition. The canonical example of a work that is canonical in modernism on account of its originality, but which is actually composed of non-canonical, belated references, is Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, which shows evidence of Picasso’s study of African masks. It is pertinent that William Rubin’s response to Thomas McEvilley’s critique of his Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art exhibition (1984) was to insist that Picasso and African or Oceanic masks show parallel concerns with the possibilities of the human face: Rubin made the canny move of avoiding influence altogether, in favor of something like a combination of Kaufmann’s “transcultural” values, a formalist sense of the ostensibly universal possibilities of the face, and the “affinities” or “resonances” articulated by Reiko Tomii. (This same move resurfaced in the permanent exhibition of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which opened in 2017; its penultimate room juxtaposed tribal sculptures and Monet, Manet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh, tacitly proposing the same noncausal formal affinities that were critiqued 33 years earlier.) (H) Art historians might undertake inquiries into the generative concepts of belatedness, influence, priority, and so forth, in order to show how they proceed from European assumptions about progress that come, ultimately, from the Enlightenment. This is what is at stake in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of “provincializing” European

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culture. He is interested in rethinking the historical processes that have made ideas of chronology, reason, universals—and therefore art—appear “natural” (Provincializ­ ing Europe, 2000). This would be a fundamental critique, at several removes from its potential application to belatedness. If belatedness can be revealed as an “unnatural” product of “European” philosophic and political concerns, then it would necessarily collapse—although its deconstruction might well leave ghostly modernist values in place. (I) Belatedness can be reimagined as a virtue by stressing the self-reflexivity and sophistication of apparent instances of belatedness outside the West. This is partly John Clark’s strategy in regard to the Tokyo Academy in Modern Asian Art (1998), discussed in chapter 9. In Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980–1999 (2010), Clark proposes “four basic modes of modern discourse” as a way to open his argument about how Thai and Chinese modernisms—and by extension, any other modernisms—might be compared. The first is “conservative modernity reappraising the past,” “heroic modernist innovation,” “modernism as self-referential discourse,” and “postmodernism.” Nominally only the third depends on self-reflexivity, but the opening examples of each one are also instances of sophisticated intentional appropriation and quotation. As an example of the first mode Clark illustrates a modern Chinese inkbrush landscape painting by Liu Guosong 刘国松, stressing the way that the artist’s importation of Northern Song Dynasty landscape forms makes contemporary Chinese inkbrush painting one of a “mutually defining pair” along with the forms of contemporary Chinese art more familiar to European and North American markets. His examples of the second, third, and fourth are all “postmodern” appropriations, for example Chen Danqing’s Les Misérablas (sic, 1989), an appropriation of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. In this way much of Clark’s argument turns on species of self-reflexivity and appropriation in various stages and contexts of modernism and postmodernism. This is an effective strategy, but it also opens the question of the extent to which “self-referential discourse” is the master metaphor of his account. (More on Clark’s approach at the end of this list.) (J) Historians can frankly note the ideological interests that drive talk about belatedness, in order to defuse or reinscribe the entire discussion as one that is artificially driven by unanswerable problems generated by the politics of institutions. As Dadi says, “canon formation is linked to global power imbalances, capitalist accumulation, and institutions in complex ways that require analysis rather than tacit acceptance of its a priori status.” Yet it can be difficult to shift the interests of art history by changing the terms of explanation: I wonder if stressing that belatedness are culturally produced, or that it depends on politics, ideologies, colonialism, nationalism, or identity, vitiates the force of the concept in existing discourse.

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(K) It is also a common rhetorical move to claim an interpretation reveals a new level of complexity or detail, and let that stand as a contribution to the issues around belatedness. I find this custom bewildering: papers that begin with analyses of belatedness might end with assertions of “more complex relationships” between practices, “the need to accommodate differential yet interrelated temporalities,” or “unexpectedly complex constellations of local practice and regional influences.” But surely any paper that contributes more historical matter to the record will also increase the subject’s complexity, even though that may not affect underlying structures of belatedness and influence. (L) Belatedness and its allied terms have also been cited as problems from the past of art history, no longer pertinent to current interests. This position becomes increasingly true as each decade passes: inevitably, scholarship and culture will drift away from the issue. The deepest problem here is not that drifting, which may well sweep the phenomenon belatedness off the table in favor of entirely new ways of addressing history. The problem is that modernist master narratives entail the concept of belatedness because it is integral to the sense of the avant-garde and innovation, so belatedness is still very much with us and may need to be addressed by any scholarly project that is invested in a modernist or postmodernist avant-garde. (M) Scholars can invoke theories of non-hierarchical conceptual structures in order to rethink the problems involved in influence and belatedness. Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome is used in this way, and so are his concepts of deterritorialization and the “line of flight.” Other sources for anti-hierarchical theory are Jacques Rancière, Homi Bhabha (for theories of hybridity), Judith Butler (for performative models of gender and identity), New Historicism in literary and cultural studies, and anthropologists including James Clifford and Clifford Geertz. Clark’s account in Asian Modernities is the most carefully articulated attempt to make use of non-hierarchical structures from disciplines outside art history. He draws on Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which offers a model of biological evolution that adjusts Darwin’s. In the Darwinian model, a single origin branches intermittently but continually, producing a tree whose trunk splits into multiple branches. In Gould’s model, the single origin undergoes an early moment of intense differentiation, as if the tree is T-shaped, and a number of branches grow upward from the horizontal bar, representing taxons that are relatively stable through time. For Clark the salient feature of Gould’s model is that the current forms of life derive from a single origin but do not diverge from a single origin. “In art history,” Clark writes, “thinking along these lines would allow us to identify similar species within the putatively termed genus of modernity without presuming at the outset that one species was original or primary” (p. 26; cf. p. 30). No one currently existing “species” of modernism needs to be thought of as “original or pri-

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mary.” It’s a promising model, although it could be asked whether his agnosticism about European modernism’s relation to Asian modernisms defers the question of what is to be assumed about European modernism. Saying that the proper subject of a study of national or regional modernisms is an “overall range of structural arrangements” postpones the question of what underwrites the perception of those structural arrangements. Philosophically, the model is conundrum: how can an historian know that the objects of her study are modernisms at all, without knowing the salient properties and historical position of that “one origin”? This is potentially a much longer list, and in chapter 8 I try again, from a different perspective, to name the principal alternatives. It is necessary to “move away from blunt instruments such as originality, influence and derivation that remain embroiled in discourses of domination,” as Ming Tiampo writes, but it is also necessary to include them, to let them speak, because they are also everywhere present in the existing literature. None of us are independent of the master narratives: they drive and inform the majority of current scholarship on art outside the North Atlantic, from accounts of conceptualism in Peru to the the meanings of photography in 1970s Japan. No matter how the new accounts modify or critique the master narratives, they depend on them for their sense of place and purpose in relation to art history: and therefore the new accounts are also in dialogue with belatedness. There is an opportunity here, because none of our current solutions are enough. Without a synthesis, an account calling itself art historical will only tell part of the story, and be compelled to omit the rest. Like Tomii, Tiampo, Dadi, and many others, I think fundamental conceptual analysis is indispensable, but I wonder if it will ever be enough. These concepts have deep roots, and the culture in which they grew is impacted around them like clay. We can work hard at understanding how the concepts have operated, and we can acknowledge their continuing grip, but it is as if they are fused to the soil, the matrix of our understanding of history in modernism. It is not hard to imagine that if concepts like the avant-garde are radically reduced by critique, we will left with little of what matters in modernism: but it is harder to picture the consequence, namely that if concepts like belatedness are effectively removed from historical discourse, much of what matters in modernism will also be eliminated. It is possible, I think, that the problems I have exemplified with belatedness are part of the currently available structures of historical understanding itself. There is an awful formula, “The Iliad of X,” which is used for innumerable national poems: the Shahnameh is the Iliad of Persia; the Manas is the Iliad of Kyrgyzstan; the Lusiads is the Iliad of Portugal; the Three Kingdoms is the Iliad of China, and so on. These formulas are persistent because they capture the irreducibly comparative character of historical understanding. Several people who wrote assessments in the book Art and Globaliza­ tion were concerned with ways to avoid such comparisons; Carolyn Loeb, for example,

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suggested transcultural studies, the same expression used in Circulations. The difficulty with all such projects, as important as they are, is that the structure of historical understanding on the North Atlantic side of things depends on versions of such comparative formulas. I will try to make that case in the next chapter.

3. Replace modernist interest in a work’s visual qualities with the study of institutional contexts, market forces, economic frameworks This change of focus creates an interpretive dilemma. As Charles Green puts it in Art and Globalization, “if art history’s terms of value and the reasons for valuing painting have been formulated across the North Atlantic,” he writes, “then attempts to think of other centers as equal—as Asianist John Clark does, for example—might seem to risk cutting off the reasons for valuing painting as painting. Do such attempts risk tending to change the conversation from the value and quality of the painting to the socio-economic contexts that make different art unique in different places?” As Green notes, the interest in not framing modernist art in terms of its value or quality springs from the awareness of the historical and political conditions under which the art was given attributes such as value and quality. This awareness can be traced to cultural studies in the UK in the 1960s; to writers like Rasheed Araeen, Jean Fisher, and Third Text; and anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai. It has presented both an opening for art history, but it has also presented interpretive problems. The analysis of “socio-economic contexts” shifts attention away from “value and quality” not because it isn’t interested in modernist concepts, but because such an analysis reinterprets aesthetic properties as products of economic contexts, so they are not longer accessible as judgments. In addition, the two ways of considering modern and postmodern art have an unequal interpretive power: a socioeconomic analysis can account, in its own way, for aesthetic judgments made about artworks, but an art historical account that involves aesthetics needs to present socioeconomic contexts as framing material or historical enrichment. In other words, only one approach can account for the other. This issue is succinctly put in Ming Tiampo’s contribution to Art and Globalization. She notes the assumption “that modernism was a closed system, located in the West and relentlessly disseminated to its territories with no reciprocal exchange; and that once ‘transplanted,’ modernism was replicated around the world, resulting in no contributions that were necessary to modernism.” Her suggestion is to shift the question into politics: “As Edward Said suggested in Culture and Imperialism, modernism needs to be re-evaluated as a transnational movement that is inextricably linked to its history of colonialism, imperialism, war and the outcomes of travel, commerce, media, immigration and imagination.” In this way the new interests are presented as ways to understand the old interests: the two perspectives are unequal in their interpretive power.

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The shift from esthetic concepts such as value and quality, to socioeconomic ones is a sea change in art historical scholarship in the last thirty years, and it is still far from being resolved. The difference is often a disciplinary one: an interest in quality, visual and formal properties, aesthetic content, value, and judgment is pursued within art history; and the interest in politics, nationality, and economic context is identified with postcolonial theory, area studies, visual studies, and cultural studies. There are many overlaps and mixed positions. T. J. Demos, for example, takes Susan Buck-Morss to task in Art and Globalization for a “totalizing tendency” that “reduces all culture to economic reason.” But in the gray of ordinary compromise it is possible to discern the blurred outlines of a deep and fundamental disagreement about the nature of art. Dadi cites the compendium Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (2007), and especially an essay by Andreas Huyssen called “Modernism at Large.” The argument, as Dadi presents it, is that modernism needs to be understood by “careful and patient work, including an awareness of social and political history, languages and literatures, and other cultural conceptions.” As Dadi notes, much of that work has been done in the pages of Third Text. Before Third Text, it had seemed possible to quickly assess whether a particular Kazakh, Indian, or Japanese painter was worthy of consideration in the context of canonical modernism, and whether the work lacked value or quality. Now that no longer seems possible. Without extensive research into the particular conditions of each place, Dadi points out, writing about South Asian modernists will just be a new form of trophy-hunting, with the Eurocentric historian bringing back astonishing and exotic new examples of avant-garde art. I agree with these reservations. When I travel, I do not hope to augment the modernist canon, and in fact I systematically avoid “discovering” “new” artists. This may seem self-evident, and yet it is common for scholars to “discover” “new” artists, and describe them using terms familiar from North Atlantic modernism. Much of contemporary scholarship and curatorial work on art of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, Africa, and southeast Asia could be described in these terms. It is difficult not to “discover” “new” artists, and the reason is not simply that it is natural to understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar: it is because the narratives and disciplinary structures of art history privilege modernist values such as the avant-garde. Even scholars trained in postcolonial studies can find themselves “discovering” “new” artists. Green’s question looms in these contexts. Several contributions to Art and Globali­ zation propose political and economic analyses of artists, including criticism of previous work that had made simple identifications of the art and aesthetic values, but without saying why those artists are worth considering aside from their political and socioeconomic conditions. The absence of that justification is a sign that aesthetic and socioeconomic understandings are immiscible: in a politically-oriented critique, an artist can still be understood as having intrinsic value, but that value is presupposed

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and not directly addressed. The unarticulated assumption that an artwork has intrinsic value, and it is therefore worth writing about, is a limit to the postcolonial-studies project of problematizing the modernist scholars’ identification of visual qualities, because the initial choice of the artwork is beyond the text’s horizon of conceptualization. A corollary is that the project of problematizing the identification of aesthetic qualities in art appears as a project because modernist logic remains so pervasive. It is the internal conceptual structure of modernism that leads scholars to see their task as the dismantling of modernist concepts. This is a complex argument, but it is a complex problem: postcolonial theory and visual and cultural studies that interpret art as a socio­economic and political phenomenon conceive themselves as engaged in a critique of judgments of value and quality that emanate from particular cultural institutions in Europe and North America, and that critique takes the form of the assertion of the conceptual dependence of valuation on politics, rather than an examination of the possibility and history of valuation, and that is because valuation is involved in the initial location of objects of study, outside and before the text: and that, in turn, is a result of the ongoing dependence of writing about modern art on the conceptual machinery of high modernism, no matter how distant that machinery may appear to be. This is the central conundrum of the apparent freedom and interpretive power of socioeconomic analysis. As far as I can see it has not been resolved. I do not find that Third Text has come to terms with the power of the aesthetically-driven narratives of modernism in the way that is necessary if they are to be fundamentally changed and not just rewritten as episodes in the history of nationalism, or slowly forgotten as fading remnants of European hegemony. The new subjects (economics, politics, postcolonial histories, languages and social contexts, material culture, identity construction) will not remove the old subjects (including not just value, quality, and other aesthetic judgments, but also master narratives, concepts of the avant-garde, originality, immediacy, formalist criticism, notions of the significance of cubism or surrealism—the entire narrative and scholarly tradition of Western modernist and postmodernist art history). The reason is an old chestnut: value matters in modernism, and judgment of quality is not separable from modernist self-descriptions. Postcolonial theory and area studies have rewritten judgments of quality and originality as ideologically and historically specific notions, whose persuasive force depends on specific political and institutional interests: but aesthetic quality cannot be made into a socioeconomically determined property of modern art without loss of historians’ grip on the self-understanding of the modernist artists. As Dadi says, “in the absence of powerful but outdated institutional and academic codes to rebel against, the avant-garde simply cannot exist.” This is a good observation, but it may miss something that can be crucial to the ways artists outside Europe understood what they were doing: the fact that in the absence of the institutions that

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propelled European modernism, it was and still is possible to desire to have an avantgarde. Artists could still mimic what they took to be avant-garde styles and ideas, and they could still measure the quality of their art against those projected goals. Modernist artists in Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and many other nations understood their projects as emulations of European modernism, and that made it not only permissible but necessary to think of aesthetic questions including quality and value. Dadi is sensitive to this, and he writes that it is important to engage in “a writing of artistic practice that respects the formalist properties of the art.” But what can count as formalist properties in a discourse that sees formalism and its attendant aesthetics as products of specifically European and North American practices? Dadi’s Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) engages this question by pondering what might count as a viable, sufficiently historically neutral kind of formal analysis that will permit the work he studies to be described without overwhelming or undermining the description by importing European or North American ideologies. But formal analysis simply is a North Atlantic art historical interpretive tool, enmeshed in modernism. An account of modernism in Muslim South Asia that wanted, or needed, to be fully independent of the North Atlantic modes of art historical understanding would have to avoid all of the expected tools of visual description, including formal analyses, style analyses, and ekphrases. It would be possible to begin with an historical and critical analysis of formal analy­ sis—replacing its aesthetic values with an account of the socioeconomic contexts that gave them meaning—but then it would be hard to know how to go about describing the “formalist properties” of the artworks that are to be studied. Reconfiguring concepts such as value or the avant-garde as effects of specific Euramerican socioeconomic configurations may only delay and deflect the possibility of better understanding their effect on our own choices and interests—on the reasons why we choose to write about certain art practices. As Ian Hacking has argued, naming something as a social construction is not the same as critiquing that thing. (Hacking, The Social Con­ struction of What?, 1999.) I agree with Partha Mitter that despite the new scholarship in postcolonial and area studies “the problem remains,” because of the “sedimentation that has accumulated over the centuries with regard to what art is and must be.” The privilege of the center will continue, he says, unless there is “some drastic rethinking of the underlying assumptions of art history.” There is a further puzzle for socioeconomic analyses. When scholars attend more or less exclusively to the conditions of production of art and meaning, and when they look to social, market, and historical contexts to give their analyses meaning, it can come to seem as if the socioeconomic contexts that produce art are the subject of the inquiry. The art, after all, is a product of value systems and conditions of production and reception, so it can make sense to say that what is of interest for scholarship is economics, production, and reception.

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I wonder about this, not because some practices may cease to appear as interesting art, but because socioeconomic interest can be high where the art practices appear to be uninteresting, and vice versa. This is clearest to me in John Clark’s work on the Tokyo Academy of Art at the beginning of the twentieth century, in Modern Asian Art (1998). Some of the paintings produced at that time can appear weak or derivative, even though they were made in very interesting conditions, and were impelled by fascinating and complex ideas of the avant-garde. In Modern Asian Art, Clark avoids the derivative nature of the paintings in order to write about the socioeconomic conditions in the Tokyo Academy at the time. Clark’s interest is almost exclusively on the intricate discourse that produced such work. But given that interest, and given the lack of acknowledgment of the formal or visual properties of the work (both as they might plausibly appear to current readers, and as they may have appeared to artists and critics at the time), it is not clear why Modern Asian Art does not also choose to consider any number of other sites of production, even those far afield from fine art, that may have been equally socioeconomically complex. The change of topic from Green’s “value and quality” to the languages of discourse and economics begs the question of the reason for studying fine art to begin with.

4. Avoid global themes or concentrate on local contexts and practices The emphasis on the particular, the unique, and the unreproducible is an exemplary purpose of historical writing, and compelling historical accounts couldn’t be written without such an emphasis. I list this fourth option separately because a thorough rethinking of the local has become one of the principal strategies for freeing art history from the universal claims of modernism. Piotrowski’s essay “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” for example, proposes a “horizontal” art history to counter­ balance the dominant “vertical” one. The “key problem of horizontal art history,” he writes, is “the problem of localization,” which entails, among other things, making sure that “regional capitals” like Prague, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires are no longer “underrated or ignored” in comparison to “international centers” like Paris and London” (Umění, 2008, p. 381). There are many such attempts to rethink modernisms in terms of the local. Another is Jessica Winegar’s concept of “reckoning,” which she applies to the study of Egyptian modernism. Reckoning, she writes, “enables us to recognize agency without uncritically adopting a notion of individual or cultural autonomy, and without utopian claims of ‘local’ people’s “self-creation in the face of ‘Western’ domination.” For her, artistic “knowledge” is “constantly being made,” by continuous dialogue with the past and the context’s immediate potential. (Winegar, Creative Reckon­ ings: The ­Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt, 2006, pp. 6–7; thanks to Farah Aksoy.)

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Art and Globalization includes several calls for a return to the specificity of the local. Hyungmin Pai asks: “Is this a search for a global theory in a globalized world? One must emphasize that there are centers and peripheries; divergent communities defined through language, ideology, nationhood, financial interests, wealth, and connectedness to a global world… The point is how writing changes when one is immanent to the concepts that one uses.” Other contributors to the book exemplify Pai’s point. Caroline Jones gives an account of Hélio Oiticica’s sense of the local and global; Suman Gupta offers a glimpse of his work on Zlatyu Boyadzhiev; Esther Gabara considers the example of Cildo Meireles; Rasheed Araeen mentions Third Text work on non-White artists in postwar England and the US; and Iftikhar Dadi reports on Pakistani artists. As anyone who has researched a new cultural context knows, it can seem as if the “matter” of history—its texture, its difficulty, its surprises—is stronger than the abstract conceptualizations of disciplines. I think it is helpful to distinguish a pragmatic from a critical form of the v ­ alorization of the local and particular. As a pragmatic approach, attending to the local is a way of suspending conversation about large issues such as influence or experiences of the avant-garde. It is a tonic to the repressive effect of those concepts, and also a tacit rejoinder to what is understood as their lack of consequences of large issues for dayto-day research. As a critical strategy, looking at local contexts is a way of revealing the disunity of the European center. Alistair Wright, for example, suggests that thinking about Rabindranath Tagore might help reveal the “hybrid and contingent nature of Picasso’s own work.” The issue here is that critical effects are commonly thought to inhere in practical inquiries: when an historian pays attention to the local, it is taken as a tacit critique of the global. It can then seem plausible that with enough accounts of local practices, the center will no longer hold. Attention to the local and particular is a large subject; I find it is helpful to divide it into three topics. (A) The local as partly outside history. Among the meanings assigned to the “local,” one of the most intriguing is that it is outside conceptualization or philosophy. In Art and Globalization Hyungmin Pai writes about Fredric Jameson that “it is mostly dis­ appointing when brilliant writers who deal with the global never assume themselves to be local.” For Pai, the local is a practice, not a conceptualization. It is therefore not available to universalizing theories. He makes an analogous point about the affiliated concept of the everyday when he asks: “isn’t the everyday, even in its varied uses, defined as something that is practiced rather than thought?” For Pai, the everyday and the local are immersive: they may own us rather than the other way around. “The everyday impinges on the concept,” he writes. These two kinds of experience, the local and the everyday, are understood in various ways, but their uses share a stress on nonconceptual, phenomenological, lived experience. A common thread in these other-

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wise divergent meanings is an interest in inhabiting a represented experience that is phenomenological rather than conceptual. An interesting example of a book that presents the local as partly or largely unavailable to a global art history, or to art history in general, is Rangihiroa Panoho’s Māori Art: History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (2015). I first heard of this book in a seminar in Melbourne, when a graduate student, Anna Parlane, suggested it as an example of a book that is available as art history, and yet is definitively different from what I am calling North Atlantic practice. The book turns out to be a massive effort to present the world’s first example of what Panoho calls the “discipline” toi tāhuhu, or “Māori Art History” (7). It is not an easy book to read, because it has an enormous quantity of indigenous terms, especially words for the landscape, which is presented as necessary for the understanding of the art. At the outset Panoho lists some of his “key ideas”: “the palimpsest” (which is defined, eccentrically, via an essay by Orwell, and without references to Umberto Eco or other poststructuralists), “te hana, ‘radiance,’ te hekenga, ‘the journey’... the cyclical concept of to hokinga mai… matapuna the freshwater ‘parent spring’” and literally hundreds more (8). For a person who does not live in the parts of New Zealand Panoho writes about, the book will remain partly, and at times largely, opaque. Panoho’s book is intentionally poetic and visual (he also uses photographs to show the landscape), and in some ways aimed inward, for an undefined regional public, rather than outward toward an international readership. It’s an interesting example of the opposite of a strategy like Ming Tiampo’s Gutai (discussed in chapter 8), which employs central concepts of modernism and postmodern and attempts to work on them until they convey meaning differently. Panoho’s gambit is to present the irreducible, partly incommunicable local in all its density, and defer the question of readership. The obstacle for art history is that a purely nonconceptual experience is not available for history, so these versions of the local need to be treated as partly within philosophy and history. As Pai says, paraphrasing Mark Wigley, the local “is a form of knowledge” that reconciles “knowledge” with “place-bound conditions.” A purely phenomenological local would be inimical to accounts of historical structure, but the evocation of an unthought, practiced and lived experience is an integral part of the presentation of the local in this sense. This opens a question for future writing: what threads lead from the practiced, unthought, experienced, unconceptualized sense of the local to the wider concerns of scholarship, up to and including the global? Or to put it more formally: how can phenomenological experience be represented in accounts that are engaged with concepts that devolve from the universal? (For a discussion of the non-ideological experience in history, see Landscape Theory, 2008.) (B) The local as the individual. For some scholars not interested in the phenom­ enology of the local experience, a productive way of conceptualizing the local is

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by equating it with the individual artist or practice. Tani Barlow makes a case for studying individuals, as contrasted with “modernism-at-large”: “so let me make my first point as unmistakable and clear as possible,” she writes, “Tanizaki, Oiticica, Doxiados, Lu Xun, Na Haesuk, and so on are not integers on a larger platform or project about globalism or global art. They are critical and inventive actors in the historical events of modernism-at-large.” Here “modernism-at-large” is the critical counterbalance to the individual, but it could be argued that “modernism-at-large” is not as clearly disjunct from individual “actors” as it would need to be to serve the distinction Barlow makes. (More on modernism-at-large below.) In modernist art history, large-scale narratives and concepts organize and inform accounts of the trajectories of individual artists. The relationship between what counts as individual and what is presented as general or universal is dialectic. Current work that depends on the individual practice for its sense of the local or particular faces the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for the other half of the dialectic. Holding too tightly to the particularity of local contexts or individual artists and artworks can mean releasing the companion term of the dialectic into an open-ended or ill-defined conceptual field. In Barlow’s text that problem is avoided by adducing “modernism-­atlarge” (a sort of relativized, mobile modernism no longer interpreted only from a few places), which she also links to Dadi’s use of the expression, to neoliberalism, and to the collapse of the central position of the US in the world economy. There are many possibilities for this kind of move, and they can be articulated by exploring the roles played by three groups of concepts: the large terms that are suspended (in Barlow’s text, “globalism or global art”), the small-scale terms that are valorized (the individual, the “actor,” the “integer”), and alternates to the large-scale terms (“modernism-at-large,” “multiple modernities”). (C) The local as a different logic. A third way to think about what the local and particular—or, to put it negatively, to think about what counterposes itself against the master narratives—is to consider the local as a discourse that is partly incommensurate with the discourse of North Atlantic art history. One of the most reflective current scholars on this front is Monica Juneja. In 2010 Juneja was concerned with using “non-Western” terms to interpret local practices, a possibility that I take up in the next chapter. In recent work, she has turned to art history’s capacity to historicize itself differently in new contexts. In a special issue of Kritische Berichte, she argues it is important not to take nations and other large categories as given terms, but to deal with the logic of agents (“der Logik der Akteure”) and relationships. A boundary or frontier (“Grenzgebiet”) should be considered as a “transitional zone” (“Verbindungsraum”) calling for a new sense of connection and translation. Terms like avant-garde and innovation need to be reimagined in each new context; a word like “imitation,” for example, might mean very different

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things in different cultures (Juneja, “Kunstgeschichte und kulturelle Differenz: Eine Einleitung,” Kritische Berichte 40, 2012, pp. 6–12). These considerations are elaborated in an essay in Circulations on “modern Eurasia.” There Juneja places the book’s concept of circulation in the wider context of a move away from “linguistic and territorial boundaries.” “The notion of circulation which forms the organizing principle of this collection,” she writes, “can be viewed as one more avatar of the move to critique the notion of localized, bounded cultures.” The concept of circulation, she notes, had been in use in southeast Asian studies for a decade, at least since the book Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750– 1950 (2003). She mentions Appadurai’s interest in “a world with dis­solving boundaries, marked by global flows,” Serge Gruzinski’s development of métissage, and “similarly connoted terms such as hybridity and creolisation,” and then she notes that even “hybridity,” perhaps the most-used of these, summons “‘pure’ cultures which then somehow blend or merge into a ‘hybrid’ that is treated as a state beyond enunciation or articulation.” Circulation, she says, is “an important entry point,” but more is needed. She recommends “precise language to theorize the morphology of the many possible relationalities that are engendered by mobility and encounter,” and a descent “into the thicket of localities.” Her preferred term is “transculturation,” first used by Fernando Ortiz in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940) and more recently by cultural theorists including Finbarr Barry Flood. For Juneja transculturation means giving up even implicit starting points of the kind implied by hybridity. “Historical units and boundaries cannot be taken as given,” she writes. Concepts like nation and place should not “mechanically” follow “the territorial-cum-political logic of modern nation states.” Rather they “have to be constituted as a subject of investigation, as products of spatial and cultural displacements,” so that they “are continually defined as participants in and as contingent upon the historical relationships in which they are implicated.” Space and time become “non-linear and non-homogenous.” In an interview conducted in 2013 Juneja advocates “transregional studies,” which allow historians to “discard models of centers and peripheries” and explore “deeper, more complex, and perhaps more multidirectional histories of globality.” For her the primary philosophic problem is rethinking the region (or, in the terms I am using here, the local). She notes that art historians still need to address “how we constitute a region as a unit of investigation in the first place,” in order to “think in more nuanced ways about scale, beyond the standard oppositions of ‘global’ and ‘local’ or ‘macro’ and ‘micro.’” These are, in slightly different terms, the same issues I’m exploring here, and I entirely agree that “the challenge is to make the concept of the region a subject of reflection.” (“All Things Transregional? Interview with Monica Juneja,” 2013, published online in 2015.) In that interview the two principal strategies she mentions are “approaching time and space as non-linear and non-homogeneous” and thinking of the subjects of histor-

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ical inquiry as “defined through the logic of circulatory practices.” Her essay in Circu­ lations qualifies the second of these. The first idea, reconceptualizing temporalities, will come up in Section 5 below, and in the following two chapters; it has emerged as a common strategy in global art studies. The essay in Circulations considers several paintings, including one by the artist Madhu Khanazad, made in Lahore in 1595 in the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. It is a kind of art that a previous generation of art historians would have seen as an incomplete assimilation of Western influences. She is interested in avoiding such formulations, which see linear perspective and pictorial realism as logical aims for art, so that non-European artists are imagined as struggling to achieve naturalistic effects. At the same time she doesn’t want to propose Madhu Khanazad’s art is optimally described as incomparable to European precedents. “The challenge of historicizing vision by eschewing the poles of human universals and radical cultural relativism,” she concludes, “involves examining interactive moments when mobile images and objects enter into complex relationalities engendered along the routes they travel”—in other words, in being alert to transcultural changes in the meanings of practices. Paintings like Madhu Khanazad’s “could be regarded as a condensation of temporal moments, which then act as a space to make difference encountered through circulation visible, a site on which to negotiate and theorize about it.” This is an admirable goal: she doesn’t want to give up on larger patterns and shared meanings in the name of incommensurability—to do so would be to collapse the possibility of writing a history of art legible outside its immediate context—nor does she want to lose sight of historical inquiry by counting each local or regional practice as incomparable with others. I am in sympathy with Juneja’s reservations regarding the concept of circulation (and its related ideas), and her misgivings about the unpromising polarity between “human universals” and “radical cultural relativism,” and I agree very much with her identification of the “regional” as a fundamental concept in need of rethinking. (Although I wish she hadn’t associated me with the idea that when it comes to local concepts, “fixity is assumed.”) But I wonder about her escape plan. The “thicket of localities,” the “complex relationalities,” the “deeper, more complex, and perhaps more multidirectional histories of globality,” the “precise language,” and the “condensation of temporal moments” are moves from the universal, general, and abstract toward the local, contingent, and contextual. But how might that solve the gravitational pull of the centers? I can imagine a long book on Madhu Khanazad’s painting: it would go into great detail on every passage of the pictures, it would suspend certainty about meaning, avoid the common European art historical interests in naturalism, be attentive to the precise language of the image... but it might still be about influence, it might still need to call on pre-existing notions of nation, art, boundary, and region, and it might ultimately still be a European art historical inquiry. Detail and local or regional logic, in other words, may not dismantle large-scale conceptualizations.

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As we explore ideas of the local, individual, or particular, we need to keep an eye on the ecology of terms in which they thrive. It is also possible to ask, for example, how we come to recognize interesting local or particular practices. How does an art historian know when a practice is interestingly, or significantly, local? I wonder if what counts as persuasive immanence in local practices isn’t limited to work that makes contact with the artworld’s and academia’s interest in resisting global capital, as Caro­ line Jones puts it in her contribution to Art and Globalization. Critical practices are the main examples of the local throughout the literature on global contemporary art. In Art and Globalization there is a brief contribution by Karl Eric Leitzel, Director of Landscape Artists International, a conservative artists’ group in the US. He has things to say about his practice that scarcely touch on anything the fifty other contributors discuss. He only mentions the local and the global, the intuitive and the theoretical, because he is generously trying to make contact with the book’s themes. From the perspective of the other contributors, Leitzel’s work may not appear local: it may appear swamped by partly acknowledged influences. In general, I suspect the artworld recognizes a practice as local when it recognizes itself as oppositional or excluded. Our sense of the local may also be limited by our assumptions or hopes of what might remain provisionally independent of the spread of capital and the transformation of art into business and spectacle. Artists like Leitzel, who speak about non-political, arrière-guard, realist art, may help us to see the limitations of what we think of as the local: after all, Leitzel’s realist paintings are identifiably of his time and place—central Pennsylvania, at the turn of the 21st century—and are therefore as local as works that attract the attention of art historians. Chapter 10 develops this issue using the example of a sub-species of realist landscape painting, marine painting. Roland Robertson’s concept of the glocal, the reciprocally emerging local within the global (and vice versa), is especially interesting when it comes to recognizing the local: it requires both the apparently natural identification of the local and the global, and also the apparently natural capacity to recognize mixtures of the two. In the standard economic examples—such as the adoption of “local” and “national” varieties of hamburgers in some McDonald’s restaurants—the “local” may be spurious but it is easily identified. In the artworld, it can be less clear what counts as local and how it might be different from what signifies the global. In Robertson’s theories as in the others I have sampled, the local is an unstable category, formed partly of projections, partly of opposites of what appears as global, and partly from concepts imported from other disciplines. At its core, the assumption that attention to the local deconstructs global conceptualizations revives an old debate about the importance of individual events and objects as opposed to universal ones. The question was whether scholarship that attends only to particular people and objects can be historical writing, and conversely what happens when scholarship becomes so interested in large-scale ideas that it

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ceases to see structure in history. Erwin Panofsky recounts an exchange he had with the anthropologist Franz Boas on this subject. (Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 1972.) Panofsky’s concern was “megaperiods,” his term for the largest possible categories into which art history may be divided short of a unity. Boas, on the other hand, was interested in dividing his material into an uncountable number of individual events. The analogue in art history to Boas’s anthropological examples would be an art history comprised of a myriad of “periods” or “styles” each ­exemplified by just one artwork. A single undivided sense of art would not be a history, Panofsky says, and by the same logic, a history divided into an uncountable number of individual events would cease to imply a sequence through time. What is necessary for art history, Panofsky thought, is periods and megaperiods: history has to have a structure in order to appear as history. We need not adopt Panofsky’s sense of art history or its principal periods to find this useful: in the analogy, scholars who advocate attention to new forms of the local can risk the particularism that Panofsky attributes to Boas, paying such special attention to local contexts that larger comparisons become unworkable. That alternative might end up being no more sensible than the universalizing approach of modernism that all current scholars reject.

5. Recognize that there were multiple modernities, at different speeds in different contexts “Imagine,” Charles Green writes, “that many places have seen analogous modernities, and many of the artists are of equivalent value. The canon depends on where you live, and depends on the ability to imagine that you are not at the center of the world and that there are many potential places of greatness” (p. 242). Of all the strategies I discuss in this chapter, multiple modernisms or modernities are probably the most popular ways of addressing global art history. As Sujata Patel points out, there are multiple modernities (Shmuel Eisenstadt, Charles Taylor, Amir Arjomand and Edward Tiryakian, Masoud Kamali), alternative modernities (Dilip Gaonkar, Rajeev Bhargava), hybrid modernities (Homi Bhabha), entangled modernities (Göran Therborn), global modernities (Arif Dirlik), and modernities-at-large. Andreas Huyssen, who coined the expression “modernity at large,” defines it as “the cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiation of the modern with the indigenous, the colonial, and the postcolonial in the ‘non-Western’ world.” (In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 2007.) This formulation divides ­modernisms, but also defers the problem of modernism’s claim to uniqueness. (Notice how the sentence I quoted enlists a pre-existing “modern.”) “Modernism at large” and “modernity at large,” along with other concepts that point to modernism’s various entanglements in nationalism, global media, capital, migration, and colonial experi-

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ence (to paraphrase a list of Gaonkar’s), are parts of a general conversation on the impure, multiple, self-dissimilar, and continuously political sense of modernisms. Keith Moxey’s lucid essay “Is Modernity Multiple?” (tinyurl.com/jcoljyt) is a good example; he takes a South African painting by Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993) as an illus­ tration. Moxey notes that Sekoto’s painting was made in 1941, but it seems to owe more to Van Gogh or Gauguin than to its contemporaries in the modernist narrative, the surrealists or abstract expressionists. (It appears Sekoto was also influenced by English or North American social realism, which makes his practice somewhat less belated.) Moxey notes that Olu Oguibe, who chose the painting for an exhibition, values it as a kind of nationalism—an excellent example of what I have been calling socioeconomic evaluation, which overlooks styles and other aesthetic criteria in favor of political contexts. Moxey is not satisfied with that reading; he is more interested in the fact that Sekoto’s painting seems to “belong to another temporality,” that it is out of the time of modernism. Modernisms were multiple, he says, and the challenge, following Chakrabarty’s account in Provincializing Europe, is to understand why what I have been calling the master narratives came to seem natural, inevitable, and central to the understanding of modern art. Moxey quotes Chakrabarty saying that “the point is not that Enlightenment rationalism is always unreasonable in itself but rather a matter of documenting how—through what historical process—its ‘reason,’ which was not always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look ‘obvious’ far beyond the ground where it originated.” For Moxey, if “the belief persists” that European artworks are the only ones that seem to matter, it is “because of the continuing grip of a progressivist notion of historical development.” In order to nourish “respect for the particularity of different cultures,” it will be necessary to adopt “a heterochonous sense of time”—permitting work like Sekoto’s to be valued in context of multiple modernities moving at different speeds in different contexts. These are all good formulations, and they can be elaborated by inquiring exactly what will be involved in moving from current understandings of modernism toward a history of multiple temporalities. The political reading suggested by Olu Oguibe will not work in this context because it allows the art to work as a placeholder for politics. Moxey suggests the obstacle is the “progressivist notion of historical development,” but that may be especially attractive because it is simple to state. If we say the obstacles also include the master narratives, in all their detail and complexity, and the terms by which modernist art is valued, and the institutions invested in valuing it, then the road to multiple temporalities seems less accessible. In the last sentence Moxey quotes from Provincializing Europe, I read an enormous challenge for art history: transposing Chakrabarty’s description from the Enlightenment to art history, we might ask how—by what historical practice—art history’s version of events became “obvious.” What, beyond the “progressivist notion,” naturalizes the master narratives outside of the North Atlantic? A great deal, I think. Toward the end of his essay Moxey says it will be possible to

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move from one temporality to another—from Pollock to Sekoto and back—”when the kaleidoscope of values that informs the powerful markets of the artistic capitals of Western culture can accommodate those working on the periphery” and even see them as a “source of inspiration.” Markets may well move, and take narratives with them, but so far at least it has proven impossible to dislodge the master narratives from even the most thriving markets. A case in point is China, which continues to produce a large, vexed, and conflicted literature about its dependence, or independence, of North Atlantic art. For the purposes of this chapter the issues raised by Moxey’s essay will have to stand for structurally similar problems raised by other accounts, which tend to be celebratory and therefore lacking in practical ideas about overcoming master narratives. In the large literature, perhaps the most important development is the appearance of meta-critiques that accuse the theories of multiple modernities of Eurocentrism. Among these Sujata Patel’s critique of multiple modernisms is especially pertinent. She claims that Shmuel Eisenstadt’s “lack of attention to Eurocentrism conflates his perspective with the ‘official’ theory of difference that is embedded within Atlantic theories of modernities. Thus in spite of his avowed standpoint, his theories merely reproduce the episteme built into the theories of modernisation.” Patel demonstrates how “theories of modernity were conceived in terms of binaries” of center and margin, or civilization and beneficiary, and those pairs organised the knowledge that was “produced and legitimised by modernity in terms of oppositions or ‘differences.” Hence theories of multiple modernities are products of European reasoning, multiplied and dispersed, rather than genuine multiplicity. (“Are The Theories of Multiple Modernities Eurocentric? The Problem of Colonialism and its Knowledge(s),” in Worlds of Difference, edited by Said Arjomand and Elisa Reis, 2013.) Despite the problems Patel emphasizes, it is attractive to say modernity was multiple, because it seems to clear away the universalizing claims often associated with high modernism (especially, in North America, with Clement Greenberg). I think the popularity of multiple modernisms stems from the freedom it seems to provide—if modernity was multiple, we are no longer obligated to think along the same restrictive lines that led Greenberg to insist on a medium’s “nature,” or Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried to speak about work that “compels conviction.” Multiple modernities are a license to think and work differently. It is not yet clear that histories of modernism’s multiple centers, or histories of multiple modernisms’ multiple centers, can ever be more than adjustments, elaborations, and correctives to what is understood as the unity, universality, and independence of North Atlantic modernism. They divide and defer the problem of modernism’s concepts and narratives, but they do not erase those concepts and narratives. The problem here is strictly symmetric to that of replacing older assertions of value with the critical tools of postcolonial studies: in replacing older ideas, we risk losing a sense

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of the way the modernist artists understood themselves. (That may be why Moxey only mentions Oguibe’s revaluation of Sekoto in passing: it changes the conversation instead of joining it.) In the case of aesthetic value, there is the fact that modernists in many countries aspired to the avant-garde, to value and quality and originality. In the case of multiple modernisms there’s the fact that modernists in many countries sought to emulate European or North American modernism. Those desires can be dissected and their ideology can be revealed, but then they no longer appear as desires, and a sense of the particular historical situation may be lost. Multiple modernisms divide but do not conquer. I pursue this more difficult sense of multiple modernisms in chapters 8 and 9. Some political and economic accounts of multiple modernities have the luxury of eliding the continued existence of a central or master narrative. Dilip Gaonkar’s “On Alternative Modernities” sees “Western discourse on modernity” as a “shifting and hybrid configuration consisting of different, often conflicting, theories, norms, historical experiences, utopian fantasies, and ideological commitments,” which has “an almost iridescent quality; its contours shift depending on the angle of interrogation.” (Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, 1999, p. 14.) A complex version of this is Shalini Randeria’s “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-Colonial India,” which proposes that “Western modernity” be “pluralized,” and then, following the lead of contemporary anthropology, scholars study the “creative and selective appropriations” of various aspects of those modernisms. (Randeria’s essay is in Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohe­ sion to New Practices of Connectedness, edited by Yehuda by Elkana, 2002, pp. 284–311.) Theories like Gaonkar’s and Randeria’s present such a “fragmented,” “pluralized,” “deconstructed,” “uneven” modernism that the master narrative can be assumed to be effectively deactivated. But the majority of political and social theories of multiple modernisms are closer to the history of modern art in that they have some difficulty when it comes to representing what I have been calling the master narrative or trajectory: the “original” or institutionally entrenched modernism from which the others have divided. Shmuel Eisenstadt has noted that “in acknowledging the multiplicity of continually evolving modernities, one confronts the problem of just what constitutes the common core of modernity.” It is a problem, he remarks, that has only become more difficulty with the “deconstruction or decomposition” of “‘classical’ models” of the nation. (Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, 2000, pp. 2–3.) Despite these issues, modernisms were certainly multiple in many ways, and Green is right to keep reminding us of the fact. Even if no one has written a full-length answer to Art Since 1900, and even if “new” centers of modernism and modernist ­artists are likely to be swallowed into the bulging canon of modernism that is still growing in North Atlantic scholarship, there are few things as sensible as continuing to point out what has been overlooked, and why.

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6. Avoid “Euramerican” terms by looking outside the artworld This last category isn’t really a category: it’s a report on just one book by John Clark. Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980–1999 (2010) is an attempt to rethink what I have been calling the master narrative and what Clark calls “Euramerican” art historical writing. Clark’s work figures in various chapters of this book, but this is the only place I will be mentioning this book, because it is unusual both in his own work and in art history in general. I don’t think it is an exemplary solution, but I do think its strategy of looking to science—and in particular to evolutionary theory— is promising. When a language is as compromised as art history’s, there is a lot to be said for looking elsewhere. Clark proposes that evolutionary theory might elucidate the ways that different modernisms are related to one another. He hopes that “Western modernity in art can be relativized and seen as one provincial result of cognate processes underway in many cultural discourses, and within the same typological family” (22). He hopes to do this by employing concepts used in evolutionary theory and taxonomy he can avoid the usual conceptual crutches—“influence,” “modernism,” “center,” and so forth. He proceeds as rationally as possible, listing “thematic areas” he finds in both Chinese and Thai modernisms, and setting out four “basic modes of modern discourse,” including “conservative modernity reappraising the past” and “modernism as self-referential discourse” (20, 23). He then introduces elements of evolutionary theory, paying special attention to new models of evolution that modify Darwin’s “family tree” kind of evolution (which could imply, for example, that Thai modernism came from French modernism). The newer models, exemplified by Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of “punctuated equilibrium,” give Clark tree-graphs of the “evolution” of modernisms that give Asian modernisms some breathing room: they might be members of a “genus” of modernisms that were all developing without “original or primary” instances. Likewise it is possible that Asian modernisms are the result of “multiple… leaps” of speciation, which don’t descend in linear fashion from an originary European movement. Clark uses these and other taxonomic models, and he also experiments with nomenclature, naming Moderna and Modernb, and proposing to “make up a list of the standard deviations of Moderna found in China and Thailand” (27). His hope is that these and other ideas will permit an entirely new way of talking about modernisms. Perhaps, he writes, “by this very distant analogy we could interpret modernity as a kind of species adaptation to a situation of a rapid and widely distributed series of relativisms” (32). The best parallel I know for Clark’s project is the historian of science Peter Galison’s book Image and Logic (1997), which opens with a chapter on the idea of creoles and pidgins as models for what happens to the subcultures of twentieth-century physics. But there is a world of other literatures out there waiting to be used by art history.

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Clark himself mentions Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological critique, and there are many more theories beyond the humanities and social sciences. Ultimately the fruitfulness of attempts to move outside the humanities and social sciences is dependent on the “language” of the critique they create. Some years ago the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter collaborated with the composer Douglas Cope to create software that would mimic Rachmaninoff. (Virtual Music: Computer Syn­ thesis of Musical Style, 2001.) Hofstadter claimed that when the software was perfected—when it could fool even Rachmaninoff experts—then he and his collaborator would have achieved “the best explanation” of Rachmaninoff. At an aesthetics conference, I took exception to the claim, arguing that their “explanation” would be in code (Python, C, or some other programming language) and would not contain any of the words that had created the cultural value that has been accorded to Rachmaninoff (words like “sublime,” “romantic,” “Russian,” and so on). Hofstadter said it wouldn’t matter, because in science the most accurate explanation is the best. But in the arts and humanities, dialogues are what create meaning, and so gambits like Clark’s and Galison’s remain outliers, as promising and rational as they are.

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Reasons Why Escape is Not Possible

Perhaps since Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), and certainly since the rise of the study of global art history, there has been growing interest in freeing the discipline from the master narratives of what I am calling North Atlantic art history. The strategies I named in the previous chapter are attempts to avoid, deconstruct, reimagine, or otherwise critique the master narrative I have exemplified by Art Since 1900. The terms against which scholars write vary: some critiques are aimed at influence, others at the binarism of center and margin, or at belatedness, universalism, the local, or the avant-garde. But the overall purpose of the new scholarship is to find a way to engage and include practices that appear dispensable when they are seen from the perspective of a book like Art Since 1900. This purpose is sometimes proposed as a less Eurocentric approach, one that “provincializes Europe” in Chakrabarty’s expression. When the new work is positioned that way, it can seem that its aim is to find a way to write art history that is effectively free of European, “Western,” or modernist assumptions. These two ways of imagining contemporary global art historical writing—first, that it is working to free itself of earlier modernist thinking, and second, that it is exploring ways of working outside European and North American models—are subtly but crucially different. I am very much invested in the first: this entire book is about models and prospects for writing that negotiate freedoms from the narrative exemplified by Art Since 1900. But I am skeptical of the second. I do not see evidence that any of the projects I discussed in the previous chapter manages to free itself from North Atlantic art history. I do not think it is possible, within the current horizons of what can count as art history, theory, and criticism, to escape from modernist conceptualizations or North Atlantic understandings of art’s history. The condition of our understanding of what an art history might be is one of resistance, negotiation, critique, and dialectic exchange with the master narratives and other elements of earlier traditions. For me, this on­

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going, vexed, interminable conversation is what makes the subject interesting. It is intriguing rather than disappointing that circulations do not resolve problems of influence, center, and periphery. It is challenging that ideas of the local have so far not worked as stable alternatives to modernism’s universal claims. It is significant that multiple modernities fail to free themselves from the problems posed by the single modernism of earlier scholarship. In this chapter I will describe my position on these two options, using two examples: the study of Chinese painting by Western scholars, and the book Circulations.

1. The entanglements of Chinese art history and the West To argue that it is not possible to find a kind of art historical writing that is effectively free of the assumptions that concern the writers in the previous chapter, it is necessary to make some careful qualifications, to set out evidence carefully, and, inevitably, to present evidence at some length. The qualifications would be the ordinary ones of historical writing: the argument turns on what might count, at any given time, as art historical writing. For writers who identify as visual studies scholars, sociologists, economic historians, or anthropologists of art, the theme I am pursuing here may well be a non-issue because there is already a tremendous amount of writing on modern and contemporary art that is entirely free, even oblivious, of the problems posed by master narratives. It is also always the case that historical scholarship continuously redefines itself; it is hard to imagine a future in which these issues won’t have changed beyond recognition. Against these qualifications I would only say that the idea of art historical writing I am employing here is without any limits I can articulate to myself: I am not invested in any shape or direction of the discipline, and I am, I think, as open as anyone to what might possibly count as art history. The argument against the possibility of escaping also needs to be given carefully and at length, because it depends on the texture of the writing itself, and not on general characterizations of art history. Here I can only summarize the kind of inquiry that I think might be sufficient. In 1999 I published a book in Chinese, proposing that what appears as Chinese landscape painting in recent scholarship is effectively a Western practice, because it is informed by the past hundred or so years of European and North American scholarship on the subject (《西方美术史学中的中国山水画》潘耀昌，谷灵 译，杭州中国美术学院出版社 1999). Over a decade later a revised version appeared in English as Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (2010). The book was meant as a case study in the possibility of freeing art historical scholarship from what I called, following Chinese usage, “Western art history.” But it took a book to establish the argument, so it was not widely received outside of Chinese area studies. The book opened with the observation that Western scholars used to project

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Western periods onto Chinese painting in order to understand the “new” material they were encountering. There were claims that Chinese painting had undergone a “Renaissance” in the Yuan Dynasty, that the Han Dynasty was essentially “modern” (for its interest in “abstract” decoration, despite the fact that it came well before the Yuan), and that the Yuan Dynasty artist Ni Zan was “classical” or “neoclassical.” In the decade around the Second World War it became apparent that these were projections of Western conceptual categories. Art historians then revised the terms of their comparisons, avoiding words like “Baroque” and “classical” and using instead some of the critical terms that characterize and define those periods, like “dynamic” and “linear.” Some historians tried to improve the use of Western parallels by looking at shorter periods— instead of Dynasties, they studied Emperors’ reigns or other periods. But the structure of comparisons was still intact. That history raises an interesting question: is it possible to find an optimal sort of comparison, one that is minimally a projection of the historian’s own frame of reference? One possibility is what I called the comparison of historical perspectives. Its central instance was a parallel between the Yuan Dynasty in China and the Italian Renaissance. In both periods there were writers who became aware that their past had a particular structure: it was comprised of a recently completed period, which was considered not appropriate for emulation, and a more distant past, which was proposed as an optimal resource for the present. In the Italian Renaissance, 15th century Italian artists like Leon Battista Alberti articulated this sense of history; for him the recent period was the late middle ages, and the more distant one ancient Rome. In China the recent period was the Northern Song Dynasty, and the more distant one was the Tang Dynasty. In both cases the historical record was incomplete for the older period, which aided the writers in constructing a schematic history of revival or renascence without the obstacles of history’s real complexity. This kind of comparison would seem to be optimal, because it relies on contemporaneous theorists in both cultures, and not on contemporary art historians, some working in countries thousands of miles from China. It also avoids the trap of projecting style and period categories onto very different cultural contexts, as in the claim that Ni Zan was “classical.” (I am leaving aside the fact that those style and period categories were themselves relatively recent, stemming in part from Heinrich Wölfflin and from 19th century historiography; even if they had longer roots, they would still be Western projections onto Chinese material.) Several Chinese specialists, reading drafts of my book project, remarked that the comparison of historical perspectives was yet another “Western” invention, because it arose from the project of writing world art history. My interest, they pointed out, was part of a long history of world art histories, universal art histories, and global art histories—otherwise I wouldn’t have wanted to write the book to begin with. Stan Abe, Harrie Vanderstappen, and Marty Powers in particular convinced me that I should

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doubt the comparison of historical perspectives, because it is a development of a history of Western scholars seeking comparative analogies. That was a cogent critique, and it could be applied to the present book as well. It is plausible that the kinds of concerns about global art history that motivate me, and also motivate the scholars I mentioned in the previous chapter, and the ones I will discuss in chapters 7 and 8, are fundamentally the product of European world art histories beginning in the 19th century. Against that criticism it might be urged that this is the condition in which we find ourselves, and that attempts to think about global practices are increasingly the property of world scholarship. In addition there is no way to avoid projecting ideas onto unfamiliar material: that is, in effect, how historical meaning is made. It applies as much to a German scholar in the 1920s trying to understand a Han Dynasty bronze vessel, as it applies to a curator trying to understand an art practice that she hasn’t seen before: in both cases, comparison creates meaning, at least initially. The question would be how reflective we can become about our motivations and our methods. The comparison of historical perspectives was originally designed to find out some truth about Chinese landscape painting. It was supposed to be a relatively unproblematic, reasonably ideologically acceptable model. As it turned out, it was a tool of rhetoric, a way to discover how Western art history guides the exposition of the development of Chinese painting. And once it becomes apparent that even such a carefully adjusted, reflectively deployed interpretive tool can be assigned to the history of European art history, it is difficult to think of any other art historical strategy as effectively neutral. Indeed, the named methods of art history, including iconography and iconology, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, formal analysis, feminisms, linguistics, gender studies, historiography, and even discarded methods such as style analysis and connoisseurship, are all demonstrably European in origin and part of the pedagogy of North Atlantic practice. Art history is also North Atlantic, or “Western” in the terms of the study of China, on account of its institutional forms: departments of art history, a “discipline” called art history, training that is distinct from an education in aesthetics, training distinct from training in art criticism, international conferences, expository essay-writing forms, refereed journals, monographs, academic publishers, scholarly apparatus (including the protocols of footnotes and bibliographies), and the privilege accorded to the archive— all of them have demonstrably European and North American histories. The book Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History ended on this note. The book’s central example, historical comparisons, are built into the discipline in ways too deep to be excavated. The virtue of looking for the best available comparison, on the largest possible scale, and following it to see where it leads, is that such an inquiry can help reveal part of the apparently inevitable shape of art historical understanding. It is crucial to keep trying to understand how art history is built around North Atlantic

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concepts and assumptions. But any such attempt will remain within North Atlantic art history, and if an account succeeds in throwing off its enabling structures it will no longer be recognizable as art history. The repertoire of interpretive methods, critical concepts, and cultural comparisons effectively is art history. Comparisons, for example, can be criticized, analyzed, amended, and improved, but they cannot be expunged without dissolving the sense that Chinese painting has a history. The cardinal overconfidence of some recent writing, both in Chinese studies and in art history as a whole, is that self-reflexivity, critical analysis, and the turn to new subjects will yield an effectively new narrative, shorn of Western perspectives. (See further the ten-year assessment of the book in Journal of Contemporary Painting, edited by Sunil Manghani, 2021.)

2. Why the concept of “circulations” will not free art history for new directions My second example pertains to the book Circulations, which I sampled in the ­ revious chapter; it is one of the most extensive attempts to reformulate problems of p center and periphery, avant-garde and belatedness, in this case by turning scholars’ attentions to the geography of art and its circulations, and away from the obsessive concern with priority, innovation, and influence. Toward the beginning of chapter 5, I mentioned that Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann finds Keith Moxey and Michael Holly’s work puts indefensible stress on the incommensurability of cultures—a position that would prevent the kinds of cross-cultural comparisons and geographic study he and his co-editors want to promote. I am closer to Moxey’s and Holly’s positions in regard to cultural incommensurability than I am to Kaufmann’s emphasis on the study of things that can be compared across cultures, but my ideas regarding heterochronicity and relativism are more radical than Holly’s, Moxey’s, or Kaufmann’s in the sense that I find that theorizing on these issues, whether it explores incommensurabilities or is interested in avoiding them in favor of universal histories, remains North Atlantic in crucial ways. It seems to me that arguments for or against the possibility or existence or advisability of global art histories are presented in art historical contexts that are only comprehensible and potentially persuasive to people who are already well within what I call North Atlantic art history. Contributions to the subject of global art history are presented by, and aimed at, art historians who are already part of North Atlantic art history. Those are the historians who care; they are the ones for whom the questions in this book might have urgency; they are the ones who receive and debate these issues. This is my main point of divergence from the project outlined in the book Circula­ tions. In the Introduction the three editors note that the “universal or global approach

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has been accused of representing a culturally determined, hence political, prejudice, determined by its unconscious geo-political orientation.” That is true, but from my perspective the qualifying clause (“determined by its unconscious geo-political orientation”) isn’t right: the reason attempts at global art histories have been identified with specific politics and cultural contexts is that they are written by scholars who are familiar with the protocols, narratives, forms of argument, modes of citation, standards of evidence, historiographic precedents, publication standards, conference etiquette, uses of theory, sense of neighboring disciplines, range of references, current interpretive methods, principal scholars, and modes of employment and advancement, of what I call North Atlantic art history. The problem is more pervasive than a hidden ideology; it is more insidious than unconscious. This is why I do not think, as the editors go on to say, that “study of circulations allows for an escape from the Western limitations of art historical questions, methods, and institutions.” From their rhetoric to their references, from their publishers to their readers, from their concepts to their modes of argument, texts for and against global art histories are parts of a geographically and economically small part of the world. This isn’t to say that there aren’t audiences for international conversations on art history all around the world: but the conditions under which these arguments seem compelling or necessary are themselves not global. From my perspective texts like Art and Globalization, Circulations, or the others I have mentioned, are specific to their European and North American origins. There are many partial exceptions, which I will sample later, but every text I mentioned in that chapter aims its critique at a certain point within art history—its sense of the local, its allegiance to the avant-garde, its recurring interest in precedence and influence, its understandings of temporality, its formulations of the local, its linguistic and geographic and historical preferences—and remains silent about the fact that the argument itself is being made in a book or journal or conference or seminar that is legible and of interest only to people who are already participating in the wide spectrum of practices that count as North Atlantic art history. The theories can be persuasive and useful, and the texts engaging and challenging, but with each corrective to Eurocentrism and new project to avoid North Atlantic art history so much is brought in tow: the preferred languages; the styles of argument; the apparatus of footnotes; the choice of subjects, periods, places, and specialties; the permissible ranges of scholarly tone; the respected institutions where the scholars work; the selection of theorists and theo­ ries; the prestigious residencies where the texts are completed; the proper publishers who can disseminate the books, the ongoing sense of the discipline itself, its shape, its future, its function in the world. This is why, for me, Chinese landscape painting is Western art history: no matter how careful scholars of literati painting are, the products they produce—their monographs and essays—are examples of an art history that is unambiguously from the North Atlantic.

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Contributions to the theory of global art histories focus on circulation, belatedness, the avant-garde, influence, derivativeness, originality, and precedence, identity issues, subjectivities, social settings, market forces, economic frameworks, national and political constructions of meaning, particular contexts and localities (to name the headers in the previous chapter). All that is necessary, and I will be adding more strategies in chapter 8. They are potentially ways of freeing writing from the chains of narratives like Art Since 1900. But they are not ways of positioning writing to one side of North Atlantic art history. My position might be called entangled, because I find that redefining individual concepts—whether they are enormous, like space or temporality, belatedness, or cubism, or more specialized, like xiang, bir’yun, or bijutsu, or neologisms, like the glocal, the radicant, or contemporaneities—is not enough to provide a space between the new account and the bewilderingly complex discourse of art history that continues to articulate all our arguments. Writing about global art history is done for art history and in art history. It is entangled. It cannot escape without becoming something else, going somewhere else, existing for other readers, outside a project that might recognizably pertain to histories of art.

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Finding Terms and Methods for Art History

A common strategy in writing art history is to find concepts of art that were used in the local languages and contexts, and introduce them into art history as technical terms. This interest in indigenous concepts is counterbalanced by another approach, in which art concepts familiar to readers of North Atlantic art history are taken to be adequate for the description of the art of any culture. Thus words like disegno and des­ sein, or tableau and Bild, or spazio and espace, are understood as mutually intelligible but differently inflected versions of a shared vocabulary of art. The latter approach depends on the potential malleability or capaciousness of terms that derive from Latin and Greek. Can “space” and its cognates in European languages serve to describe Chinese art? Can “time” and its cognates work for cultures with different senses of temporality? Are “space” and “time” sufficiently diffused through world cultures, sufficiently neutral and abstract, so that they do not prejudice the description of any art? The first approach, of finding concepts of art that are employed in local cultural contexts, raises its own questions. Is it possible to understand Chinese ideas about representation without the word xiang and its allied terms? Is it possible to do justice to the notions of art and craft in Japan without words like kogei—roughly, “mechanical skill”—or 美術 bijutsu, a neologism coined in 1873 to translate “schöne Kunst” (itself an 18th c. translation of “beaux-arts”)? Or ideas of Chinese modernism without the coinage 前卫艺术 qianwei yishu, “avant-garde art”? The opening section of this chapter is concerned with this discussion. The second introduces the glossary concept, a way of thinking about how to translate or explain terms. It may or may not be the case that “space” can do duty across different cultures, but it is certainly not true that “abstraction” meant the same in Germany in 1937 as it did China in 1980. Terms for styles, movements, and periods are especially prone to changing meanings in different contexts. The glossary concept is an attempt to address this problem, which is a subset of the more general problem of finding terms for art history.

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The chapter ends with a hypothetical section. If it is of interest to work with unfamiliar concepts and terms, then why not work with unfamiliar interpretive methodologies as well? I broached this in chapter 3, asking if art theory is global in the way art history is. I have also suggested it as a way forward for visual studies, which has long had an interest in bringing unusual methods to the interpretation of art. (That argument is in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, 2003, pp. 110–20.) The closing section of this chapter revisits the possibility. It still has not been done, but it is a logical consequence of experiments with terms.

1. Using indigenous concepts The “critical terms” of art history seem to be generally agreed. Richard Shiff and Robert Nelson’s anthology Critical Terms for Art History (1996, second edition 2003) has thirty-one chapters on concepts from “Representation,” “Sign,” and “Simulacrum,” to “Fetish,” “Gaze,” and “Gender,” many written by well-regarded scholars on those subjects. Yet as Shigemi Inaga observed in 2006, there is not a single “non-Western” term in the table of contents. This may seem to be a simple lack, one that could be remedied in future editions. But the problem is not at all that easy to resolve. If Shiff and Nelson had included, say, a dozen terms from Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Yoruba, they would undoubtedly have been accused of tokenism. Root-level concepts such as “Modernism,” “Style,” and “Avant-garde” would still provide the sense and context for the inclusion of words from outside the North Atlantic. The new words would be excerpted from the cultural contexts and put to new uses, whereas the ­thirty-one “critical terms” all work in concert as parts of the conversation of art history. There is no easy answer to the problem of including new concepts, as Shigemi Inaga knows. On the other hand, more such concepts are introduced into art history every year. Most, but by no means all, are taken from outside western Europe. Michael Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980) is an example of the importation of unfamiliar European words, because he uses a number of obscure 16th century German woodworker’s terms to explain altarpieces by artists such as Veit Stoss. Most texts, however, propose non Indo-European terms, and in general their contributions are focused on explaining culturally specific practices. Some terms already have literatures explaining their possible translations and uses. In the study of Chinese painting, for example, there is 画 hua (painting),怪 guai (usually translated as “eccentric,” referring to several schools of painters), and the famously untranslatable term 气 qi (energy). The word 平淡 pingdan is a good example of a term that is both important and difficult to translate; it was applied to the Yuan Dynasty painter Ni Zan, and it means, very approximately, “plain” but it now has a complex his-

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tory of approximate translations including “insipid,” “level and weak,” and “bland.” ­(Jonathan Chaves, Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Song Poetry, 1976, pp. 114–25; my Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, pp. 13, 80.) In Sanskrit there is दर्श न dars.an, signifying a kind of viewing of sacred images; the concept made known in art history by Diana Eck’s book Dars.an: Seeing the Divine Image in India (1981), and it has become a common point of reference in introductory world art history classes. Japanese has several art concepts that have been widely discussed. In addition to 美術 bijutsu (or the Chinese pronunciation meishu), for example, there is 間 ma, a term used to describe gardens. It is mainly a word that describes awareness of space, interval, and distance, but it also denotes distance in pitch, and in time: it can represent “linear, planar, volumetric, temporal, or social spaces.” Andrew Deane notes that ma “is associated kūkan (空間 “sky space, empty space”; three-dimensional space), jikan (時間 “time space”; temporal time), ningen (人間 “person space”; human beings), and tokonoma (床の間 “display’s space”; an alcove).” This conceptual versatility made it attractive to European and North American curators and art historians in the 1980s, and it went through a vogue in Western curation. (Marc Keane, Japanese Garden Design, 1996, p. 196; Andrew Deane, japanesegardensonline, 2012.) A more philosophically entangled word in Japanese is 詞 kotoba, which means “word,” “language,” or “writing.” It was glossed as “foliage of speech” by Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983) in conversation with Heidegger, and it plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s text “Conversation on Language,” which pretends to report on a conversation the two had in 1954. The proposed gloss was partly an evasion, and Heidegger’s dialogue is also about the inadvisability of overly quick translations in philosophy. When Tezuka Tomio returned to Japan he wrote about his own share in the dialogue, making this an especially interesting case to think about apparent equivalences. (Michael Marra, “On Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s Question,” Philosophy East and West, 2004; Heidegger, On the Way to Language (1959); translated into Japanese by Tezuka Tomio in 1996 as 言葉への途上 Kotoba e no tōjo; Tomio’s report, “An Hour with Heidegger,” is translated in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 1989 [first edition 1975], chapter 7.) Anthropology impinges on art history when indigenous concepts seem to be aesthetic categories, or when, like 間 ma, they appear to combine kinds of experience that are not related in English or its neighboring languages. In the Australian Aboriginal language Yolŋu, for instance, bir’yun (brilliance) is “‘the quality of aesthetic’ embodied by the minytji, or cross-hatching design”; as Howard Morphy explains, it in turn represents “the marr, or power, of the ancestor.” The minytji (design) “creates the bir’yun (brilliance) that evokes the marr (power) of the clan ancestors.” It is a central term in Yolŋu practice, the kind of word that tends to be identified by anthropologists and art historians as “aesthetic.” (Morphy, “Too Many Meanings: An Analysis of the Artistic

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System of the Yolŋu of Northeast Arnhem Land.” PhD, Australian National University, 1977; Morphy, “From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among the Yolŋu,” Man, 1989, pp. 21–40; first quotations from W. H. Chong, on aboriginalartblog.com.) In the Kaluli language, spoken in New Guinea, there is a word mama; according to the anthropologist Steven Feld, it means “one’s image in water, or in the mirror,” or else the reflection of oneself in another person’s eye—but is also means “the lingering audio fragment of a decaying sound, its projection outward as it resounds by vanishing upward in the forest.” It is used in the expression ane mama, “gone reflection-reverberation,” “a spirit, a human absence returning in [an] imagined (often avian) presence.” (Feld, “Senses Places, Places Sensed,” Sensescapes, 2005, pp. 186–87.) There are dozens more, not counting the words that are only described in a single text rather than debated in the subsequent literature. In my experience there is little scholarly debate about the practice of finding and defining “new” terms in order to understand individual cultural practices. The difficulty arises when the terms might be more widely applicable, outside their original contexts. In the book Is Art History Global? the terms of this debate became clear in a brief exchange with David Summers regarding the terms ambulatio (Latin) and प्रदक्षिण pradaks.is.a (Sanskrit): what was at issue was whether the Latin term could be used to describe the Hindu and Buddhist practices of walking around holy sites, or whether the Sanskrit term should be used to write about Hindu and Buddhist rituals, and the Latin term reserved for Catholic rituals. Summers’s position in Real Spaces is that words that come from Greek and Latin roots are sufficient to describe the world’s art. At the time I took the opposite stance, mainly because I was interested in pressing the limits of critical terms that are derived from Greek and the Romance languages. The book On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (1998, reprinted 2011) has a ­chapter called “Different Horizons for the Concept of the Image”; it discusses words for “image” in China, in India (in Pali and Sanskrit), in Arabic (from the treatise Calli­ graphers and Painters by Qadi Ahmad ibn Mir–Munshi, which in Iran is considered as an art historical text), and in German. The purpose of that chapter was not to import concepts from other cultures into art history: it was to suggest that the philosophy of the image might be broadened to include unfamiliar concepts. Yet the chapter has been read as an attempt to enlarge art history by co-opting ideas from different contexts into historical critique. That impression was probably strengthened by the inclusion of the chapter in Emmanuel Alloa’s anthology Penser l’image II: Anthropologies du visuel (“Désoccidentaliser la pensée du visuel: les concepts d’image en Chine, en Perse, et en Inde,” Paris, 2015, pp. 557–88). In 2010 Monica Juneja, whose work is discussed in chapter 5, criticized what she saw as my position, arguing correctly that words taken from texts written in India in the 16th century cannot simply be exported as if they are a kind of textual repertoire of image production, available for 21st century art history. (See Sarah Maupeu and

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Kerstin Schankweiler, “Die Universalität der Kunstgeschichte?,” arthist.net, 2010.) In the book Circulations, discussed in the previous chapter, Juneja argues that “vision itself needs to be a subject of historical investigation rather than assuming it to be a factor common to human societies.” Just before Juneja introduces that claim, she proposes a spectrum of approaches from “the view which considers ways of seeing as constituting a human universal” (which she associates with John Onians) and “the extreme relativist position which advocates the use of each cultural tradition’s core concepts of visuality and the image, whose incommensurability and fixity are assumed” (which she associates with my work). It is necessary, she concludes, to take “vision itself ” as “a subject of historical investigation rather than assuming it to be a factor common to human societies.” The choices here are presented as a spectrum: on the one hand, a universalism (associated with Onians), and on the other, a relativism that assigns fixed values to different cultures (it is incidentally not a position I have advocated). I mention Juneja’s observations because I am still undecided about how “non-Western” terms might work in art history (aside from their commonest use as ways to specify local and national art practices, with no further application). I agree with her that it is not prudent to assume each civilization produces an image lexicon, or that such terms would be compatible with contemporary North Atlantic art history or with European philosophy of the image in general. And it is certainly not the case that such terms can be considered fixed and ready for export. Yet it is puzzling that Critical Terms for Art History, and the practice of North Atlantic art history in general, have not produced readings of Western artworks that are supported by concepts other than those deriving from Greek and Latin. Given that cultures and contexts are mobile, that the study of culture is increasingly global, that translation is always also misprision, and that any change of context changes meaning, there is not a clear way to argue that it is more appropriate to bring disegno into an art historical conversation than it is to bring 間 ma or bir’yun. I have experimented with “non-Western” interpretive concepts in a book called Visual Worlds (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2020). My co-author Erna Fiorentini and I decided to use the Pali word citta and the problematic Chinese word xiang, and to deploy them throughout the book to help conceptualize practices as different as modernist paintings and scientific diagrams. We were not trying to fully represent Chinese or Indian senses of the words, or hoping to contribute to a balanced account of the many cultures that we discuss in the course of that book. We used the terms the way we would use any technical terms imported from different disciplines: as interventions that will behave in unpredictable ways, disturbing business as usual. We hope that our uses of xiang, citta, and other non-European concepts suggest it is necessary to try to move beyond books like Critical Terms for Art History. Art history needs to experiment more with its international vocabularies, and to work with concepts that are potentially of broad and unpredictable use.

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I haven’t said anything about the broadest words, the ones that are so general, common, and indispensable that they can seem invisible or ideologically uninflected— words like space, time, material, and form. They are, I think, the most problematic of all, exactly because they seem so neutral. But they all have particular histories, and they are all European. None of them have been consistently present in writing on art from the Renaissance forward: “space,” for example, does not appear in any architectural treatise before the 18th century (The Poetics of Perspective, 1994). I think the cultural relativism of these terms is an enormous challenge waiting for some future generation: at the moment, it seems next to impossible to rethink such terms for art history. They are the ground of our explanations of our own and other cultures’ concepts of art and history, and we can only control them when we limit ourselves to special cases such as “atemporality,” “temporalities,” “perspectival space,” or “composition.”

2. Translating terms using the glossary concept One of the most useful strategies for managing art concepts across different cultures is the glossary concept. The idea is to redefine even the most basic historical and critical terms so they fit the period, practice, nation, region, or historical moment in question. In a book on global modernisms, for example, words like “cubism,” “conceptualism,” “avant-garde,” or “formalism” could be given new definitions at the opening of each chapter. That way it is possible to remain sensitive to the radical recontextualizations that mark so much of modernism and postmodernism. A chapter on modernism in Chile, for example, might begin with a contextual redefinition of the term cubism, noting that Chile scarcely produced any cubists, and that cubism was understood very differently than it was in France. The chapter could how cubism was regarded more as a formal experiment than a necessary move in the avant-garde, and how in the Chilean context it lacked the critical debate that surrounded and supported it in Paris. Readers could be asked to take the word “cubism” in that simpler and more schematic sense for the duration of the chapter. The glossary concept is a way of acknowledging what linguists call “false friends,” for example the way English speakers who learn French are told that expérience isn’t quite “experience,” but also “experiment.” The Slovakian scholar Richard Gregor has developed a similar concept he calls “the homonymic curtain”; that could be a good name for this strategy, except that “curtain” has the particular association of the Iron Curtain and central Europe, and “homonymic” isn’t the most mellifluous word. The glossary concept is useful for terms that are more general than the ones I considered in the first part of third chapter. Here are six more examples.

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(A) In Lhasa in the 1960s, student painters at the academy were just discovering Rembrandt, via a version of 19th century Soviet-style academic pedagogy, which was imported along with the Han culture. (This is in Claire Harris’s excellent book In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959, 1999.) Western-style painting in 1960s and 1970s Tibet was a de-politicized mixture of a number of belated styles, from Postimpressionism to Neoexpressionism. An essay on the subject could therefore be prefaced by a glossary defining “Rembrandt” as “A Western portraitist whose work is done in oil paint and Western-style brushes on canvas, using deep brown underpainting, thickened impasto, and glazes.” “Western painting” could itself be defined as “A practice taught in Academies in Beijing, Hangzhou, and elsewhere, imported from Soviet pedagogy, which in turn adapted techniques and pedagogic models from the French Academy and its descendents in Moscow and Leningrad.” It would also be possible to add Chinese or Tibetan terms. The general idea would be to suspend a reader’s received ideas about Western painting, Rembrandt, academic painting, and modernism, in order to make a sympathetic description of academic instruction in Lhasa in the 1960s and 1970s. (B) Czech cubism, which I will consider in the next chapter, has a large literature, some of which is intended to argue for its inclusion in the essential moments of modernism. Even though cubism was strong in Czechoslovakia, with artists like Bohumil Kubišta moving back and forth between Paris and Prague, the Czech movement has remained a marginal concern in histories of early 20th century modernism. The historiographic arguments in favor of reconsidering that bias sometimes turn on the idea that the Czech artists added a spiritual dimension to a practice what was essentially formality. But before that argument can be broached, there is the initial problem of introducing the painters and sculptors, which involves expressions like “Kubišta was influenced by his encounter with Picasso in 1910.” There may not be a way of entirely replacing sentences of the form “painter x is reminiscent of painter y,” or “movement m was influenced by movement n,” but the glossary concept can step in at the level of the variables like m and n, by redefining them. For example the statement “Czech cubism was influenced by Parisian cubism” can be made complex and interesting if “Parisian cubism” is redefined, for the duration of a chapter or an essay, to something approximating the understanding that the Czech cubists and critics had. “Parisian cubism” would mean something like, “A kind of painting that decomposes the subject into little cubes, but does do in a purely formal manner, lacking a spiritual or deeper meaning,” and “Czech cubism,” from the same viewpoint, would be the movement that works to restore those additional meanings. If that kind of redefinition could be done at some length, and in some detail, it could provide a challenging framework for readers unfamiliar with Czech practices in the 1910s and 1920s. (C) The glossary concept has been most fully worked out by Richard Gregor, under the name “homonymic curtain,” in an unpublished paper of 2013 subtitled “A Contri-

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bution to Thinking About the Differing Significance of the Artwork Depending on Its Place of Origin.” (This is posted online; we also co-authored a paper, “The Homonymic Curtain,” Umeni, 2015, 150–55.) Gregor’s concern is mainly conceptual art in Slovakia in the 1960s, but his theses could be widely applicable, as his subtitle suggests. His principal example is Soviet Social Realist art had “only a formal echo” in East-Central Europe. “The initial Czechoslovak” Social Realist practice “was projected,” he writes, “into an avant-guardist context.” Social Realist art “was only partly acceptable because it was mistakenly comprehended… as an intellectual challenge.” This contrasts, for example, with Boris Groys’s claim, which Gregor quotes, that Social Realist art “is not just an organic continuation” of the Russian avant-garde, but “in a certain sense also its culmination.” Gregor also gives the example of Pop art. Czechoslovakian artists, he says, did indeed identify “the critical (and subversive) aspect” of Pop art, but “viewed from behind the Iron Curtain, consumerism and advertising were in reality perceived as attractive counterweights to the grayness of Socialism.” A third example is art infor­ mel in Czechoslovakia, which was considered “as a reflection of a hostile attitude to the obligatory dogmas of Socialist art in Central Europe.” (D) The glossary concept might also account for the way some art practices become conceptual or nonvisual when they cross borders. An example is a study by Hannah Feldman of the exhibition “Art et la Révolution Algérienne,” which opened in Algiers in 1964 to mark the second anniversary of Algerian independence, and to serve as a kind of banner of freedom and “a form of cultural ‘reparation’” for Algeria’s disenfranchisement. (Feldman’s paper was given at the 2014 CAA conference in Chicago.) The exhibition had a miscellany of work by Matta, Erro, Wilfredo Lam, and others; but as Feldman argues, the appearances and styles of the works were irrelevant, because the exhibition was not a success, and when it closed the works were returned to Paris. Feldman’s question, “What does decolonization look like?” is answered by the ideology and fate of the exhibition. “Art et la Révolution Algérienne” did not “materialize” either as modern art or as “revolutionary commemoration,” she argues, because the Algerian state refused “both the aesthetic parameters of the gift” and its “memorial” meanings. The gift “ended up the reminder of the irrepressible multiplicity within the national public, in excess of its territorial confines.” All this is what constitutes the “look” of decolonization,” rather than “an aesthetics or a form.” This kind of nonvisual redefinition is especially important to consider, I think, given some recent writing on the visuality of politics and, in complementary fashion, recent critiques of the idea that all of visual culture is visible. (For political accounts, see Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s Right to Look, 2011; for the critique of visual culture, Whitney Davis’s General Theory of Visual Culture, 2011.) (E) In the essay called “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” Piotr Piotrow­ ski enumerated problems he had in writing a history of postwar art in Eastern Europe. He found that the Eastern European reception of political contexts and “Western artis-

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tic models” was “radically transformed” from its “original meaning.” For example, “the happening meant something different Czechoslovakia and the US,” art informel “meant something different in Poland and in France,” and “conceptual art in Hungary was not the same as conceptual art in the US.” (“On the Spatial Turn,” Umeni, 2008, p. 379.) Piotrowski’s book is full of these adjustments, which are especially clear examples of the glossary concept in a large-scale textbook. (In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, 2009, original Polish edition 2005; see also the review by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Piotr Piotrowski, Awangarda w cieniu Jałty: Sztuka w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej,” Umění 55, 2007, pp. 82–84.) (F) Ming Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (2011) is one of the most clearly and forcefully reasoned attempts to advocate for the importance of a “marginal” practice. Tiampo presents Gutai as a practice that was done in full awareness of the difficulties of competing with “central” art practices in Europe and North America in the 1960s. She retains center and periphery (see chapters 5 and 6), and she says belated­ ness (chapter 5) can be reimagined as a problem about “how historical value is ascribed.” She focuses on analyzing the concept of originality, and she proposes Gutai deployed three “strategies” to rethink the value accorded to originality: “translation, recontextualization, and quantization” (5). The third of these is about the ways Gutai made use of their geographic isolation by parsing and parceling their practice into units (77). The first and second are very close to the glossary concept: “translation” involved manipulating terms in new contexts (66–67), and “recontextualization” was “a strategy of creative interpretation,” using the “discursive space opened by Primitivism, Japonisme, and other exoticisms to enter into dialogue with Europe” (54). In other words Gutai artists played with the unavoidable misunderstandings of translation to create new meanings for themselves. From their point of view, they were recontextualizing; using the terms I am exploring here, they were creating their own glossary. In the end, the Gutai artists are said to have rethought originality, but not in such a way that it became unrecognizable (and therefore likely not to be valued). Paradoxically, their deconstructions of originality, belatedness, and marginality appear in Tiampo’s book as even more original, timely, and central. Her argument is complex but never ambiguous; as far as I am concerned it is close to best practice in the study of these problems. There is a distinction to be made between such redefinitions and a more complex kind of interpretation that may follow after readers have considered the glossary. Gregor calls the initial recontextualization the “first circle.” He adds: Even the first circle—works bearing, for contextual reasons, a different significance— may pose problems… for the terminology of western art history. But for the second ­circle—works or tendencies generated in reaction to the first circle—the use of those terminologies may be literally treacherous.

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He notes that the period 1945–48, when artistic exchange was still possible between eastern and western Europe, continued to provide models and ideas for artists in later decades. As a generalization one might say that when two traditions develop in relative isolation from one another, the ideas about artists, concepts, and movements that were current when they first separated continue to operate in the peripheral context, even when they evolve in the central context. It follows that moments when two art practices are actually furthest from one another might not be when their countries or regions were politically separated, but years later, precisely when it might appear the practices were moving in parallel. For Gregor “the real divorce of western and eastern modernism was not played out around 1948, but rather at the time when the notion emerged of their re-linking,” because by that time practices had genuinely diverged and had different meanings. Gregor’s “homonymic curtain” theory also accounts for some unexpected appearances of movements or practices. When art movements are rejected because of “homonymic” misinterpretations, that very rejection can serve to open possibilities for other kinds of art practice. Gregor’s example is “the non-acceptance of abstraction in its philosophical essence” in Slovakia, which he sees as “preparing” the Slovak art scene to “accept new, hitherto unexperienced stimuli.” Thus it is possible to read the regional fusions “of the aesthetic of ‘elite’ art informel and ‘popular’ New Realism… as a critical attitude towards the elitism of art,” which in turn prefigured “the later conceptualist critique of art as such.” Because the glossary concept is a work in progress, I want to append a possible problem with its implementation. Cultural differences of the kind Gregor, Harris, or Feldman study happen over large scales: in different decades, or different countries. It is not easy to know whether the concept could be applied to practices that are closer in time and space, for example two artists working together in the same city. A good example is Hanne Darboven and Sol LeWitt in New York City between 1966 and 1968. In an essay on this subject, Samuel Johnson points out that LeWitt’s effusive praise of Darboven was based on a particular, strategic misunderstanding, and her assimilation of North American minimalism was also based on an entirely different interpretive frame. For LeWitt, rules “barred subjectivity,” while for Darboven, they were narrative and had an “ethical cast”: they were responses to her alienated discover of postwar America. LeWitt “explicitly thematized the temporal horizon in his serial three-dimensional works,” but his interpretation “stood in direct opposition to Darboven’s.” Johnson explains: Her puzzlement at the praise heaped upon her corresponds to an actual paradox in the reception of her work in New York: largely ignorant of the critical discourse surrounding minimalism, which judged the European tradition of so-called relational art to have been exhausted and surpassed by the wholeness of non-relational objects in real space, Dar-

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boven essentially worked backwards, rejecting the trappings of Op Art for its foundations in the systematic concrete art of the 1950s, only to find herself on the leading edge of the conceptualist reception of seriality. [Paper given at the 2014 CAA conference in Chicago.]

The “paradox” and “backwards” method of Darboven are examples of the glossary concept, but in this case between two artists in the same city, working in the same milieu. It is close to a limit of the glossary concept, because it is close to the philosophic question of self-awareness. What artist does not misunderstand her own work? What corpus is unified in such a way that it does not shift in its understandings of itself ? Ever since Rimbaud’s je est un autre, and especially since the many critiques of intentionality and the unified subject (one of the best, I think, is Paul Ricoeur’s book Oneself as Another, English translation 1995), it wouldn’t be possible to limit the glossary concept to examples like Harris’s or Gregor’s. These philosophic questions are waiting for a good analysis. In practice, the glossary concept might go some distance to complementing the common strategy of finding concepts indigenous to the practices under study. A history of modernism and postmodernism under the banner of suspended terms might be exemplary.

3. Using unfamiliar, “non-Western” theories So far I have been addressing four overlapping kinds of concepts: local terms of interest in the study of specialized subjects; potentially wider concepts such as ma, citta, or xiang; very general terms of art such as “space”; and period or style terms that might be redefined in each new context. These considerations lead inexorably to the possibility of using unfamiliar, “non-Western” interpretive strategies and theories, even, or especially, in the analysis of North Atlantic art practices. Why not employ interpretive methods other than European and North American ones, such as concepts and theories outside semiotics, deconstruction, structuralism, or psychoanalysis? Why not look to India, China, or other cultures for the theories that will explain art? In Europe, North Atlantic art history is largely invested in French, German, English, and Italian theories, and in North America, it is almost exclusively focused on French poststructural theories (with the crucial and isolated exception of Walter Benjamin). Art theory, as I proposed in chapter 3, is effectively a global enterprise. Art historical studies of unfamiliar cultural contexts can appear new because they are full of unfamiliar points of reference—“new” geographies, languages, politics, and temporalities. A more radical possibility, one that is consistent with these interests, would be to defamiliarize the art historical study of any region’s art by deploying interpretive methods that are not used in North America or Western Europe.

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There are almost no examples of this is in the literature, and the reason has partly to do with jobs and careers. In Art and Globalization, Tani Barlow quotes my remark that a young scholar who tries to explain Renaissance altarpieces using the concepts that inform Peruvian huacas might not get a job in an art history department as a specialist in the Italian Renaissance. In theory such a person could get a job in a major university, but that job would most likely not be in art history—it would be in visual studies, anthropology, or philosophy. There is a world of texts that could be sources of analytic and evaluative concepts, from the Puranas to the anthropology of huacas, from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, from Giambattista Vico’s Scienza nova (one of Joyce’s “theory” sources) to the Shin’yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki (a compendium of difficult words)... the possibilities are literally endless. There are even 20th century French texts that could be used in place of the usual poststructuralists. Why not cite Proust’s sense of time instead of Bergson’s? This is a large-scale problem, because the disciplinary aversion to eccentric, unexpected, non-European transcultural interpretive strategies is not peculiar to art history. Because Gayatri Spivak reads Bengali, and works with Bengali communities and themes, and because she writes widely about interventions in academic structures, it seems likely she would be open to the idea of mixing Bengali interpretive theories with those she learned from Derrida. But she reads Derrida for his interpretive methods and does not take her theories from the Bengali texts—and she does not explain that choice, but simply presents Derrida as a model. (Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999; Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, 2003, p. 115–16.) The Indologist Vinay Lal is one of the few scholars who has proposed a radical rejection of Western interpretive sources and concepts in favor of Indian sources such as Puranas, but that suggestion has not been taken up by any scholars I know. It remains the case that a text on a Renaissance altarpiece, elucidated by reference to Peruvian concepts, would not be acceptable in a specialist art history journal or conference. There is a world of scholarship waiting beyond those borders.

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Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America

Modernist painting, broadly construed, follows a trajectory from David, Manet, and Cézanne to Picasso, expressionism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. The uncertain path of painting after World War II preoccupies contemporary historians, but prior to minimalism and conceptualism the principal artists, works, places, and concepts of modernist painting continue to comprise a lingua franca in which deeper discussions of modernism take place. The insistence of this narrative, and the way it pushes other artists and practices to the margins, is a principal reason for theories of multiple modernisms I introduced in chapter 5. Thinking of modernities as multiple relieves the pressure of inclusion and exclusion that is exerted by the master narratives, and opens the way to a field of asynchronous modernisms moving at different speeds in different nations. Yet I do not think multiple modernisms have vitiated the power of the master narrative, and in this chapter I will consider the problem of marginal, belated, or otherwise inessential modernisms in more detail. At points the options I will consider in this chapter will continue the list of responses to belatedness I offered in chapter 5. When modernist painting that was made outside the main trajectory is introduced into contexts that take the cardinal moments of modernism for granted, the unfamiliar work can appear unequal for at least three reasons. First, modernist painting outside the trajectory can appear uninteresting when the pressing problems of painting appear to be played out elsewhere. An interesting example is the “primitive” or “naïve” artists who stand at the beginning of several modernist traditions: their apparent naïveté, or their lack of pertinent academic skills, may not appear as exemplary as, say, Henri Rousseau’s. Paraguay’s principal self-taught early modernist, for example, is Ignacio Núñez Soler (1891–1983), whose work is exhibited at the Museo del Barro in Asunción. His work is much rougher than Rousseau’s—he had little patience for careful ­technique—but he functions in the narrative of Paraguayan modernism more or less analogously to Rousseau. In a comparison, however—and comparisons are what

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the narratives of modernist painting demand—Rousseau and the Montmartre “primitifs” appear to articulate the required contrasts with experimental modernism more clearly. Second, painting outside the trajectory can seem misinformed when it is the result of limited communication between a major artistic center and a local one. I mentioned the short-lived phenomenon of Chilean cubism, practiced essentially by only one Chilean artist in Paris, Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), who was primarily a poet and critic rather than a painter. In the standard account, cubism in Chile never developed much beyond a few echoes of Picasso, Braque and their circle, exemplified by the work Huidobro did while he was in that circle in Paris from 1916 to 1918. The glossary concept applies here because Huidobro’s notion of cubism can be deduced from his paintings and his writing, and it differs from versions that can be found in Picasso and his circle. Third, painting outside the main trajectory is typically done later than similar art in the centers, so that it frequently appears as belated, and therefore, in the logic of modernism, of slightly or distinctly lesser value. This is the default position of modernist painting that is not part of the master narrative, and examples are ubiquitous, from Keith Moxey’s example of the South African painter Gerard Sekoto (chapter 5) to Tibetan academics in Lhasa in the 1960s (chapter 6). Negative or neutral valuations of art outside the trajectory effectively corral the existing accounts of modernism to a narrow field of canonical—if debated—works and masters, virtually all of them in North America and Western Europe. The strength of the implicit proscription of non-canonical works and periods is particularly clear when the practices in question are strong, extensive, and international, for example Czechoslovak cubism, Hungarian postimpressionism, Mexican muralism, or Romanian modernism. There are remarkably few counterexamples—modernist movements that are admitted to the canon in North Atlantic art history departments—and their rarity also proves the rule. (The principal examples are Scandinavian expressionism and Russian cubo-futurism.) The profusion of current art-critical writing and curatorial projects throughout the world would seem, at first, to solve this problem. The inclusion of “unfamiliar” modernist practices has been taken as a sign that exclusions are increasingly a thing of the past, but that line of argument assumes such practices are integrated and not just annexed, and it implies that the problems that led to the exclusivity of the main trajectory—problems such as the claims of modernism’s universality, the assumption of a master narrative, or the implied universal nature of the avant-garde—are themselves not structural but simply traditional and therefore easy to jettison. Critical and curatorial literature can be strongly multicultural but seldom assays the link between its specialized objects of interest and worldwide issues of modernist painting. The same obstacles can be observed in periodicals; The Art Bulletin and Art History publish relatively few articles on modernisms outside the main trajectory. Editors are increasingly

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sensitive to this issue, and the proportion of essays on “unusual” modernist and postmodernist practices increases each year, but they are usually on subjects, such as Argentine and Brazilian modernism, that are of potential interest to scholars who work on the master narratives. It is important to see what can be done to expand the roster of modernism. Otherwise entire practices of modernist art will continue to be marginalized or wholly absent from curricula outside the countries they were made, and the historical study of 20th century art will continue to be centered on just a very small fraction of the actual output of modernism. The purpose of this chapter is to collect the approaches that are currently in use other than theories of multiple modernisms, aside from the sociopolitical critiques I have associated with postcolonial studies, and not including neighboring disciplines like anthropology and sociology—in other words approaches that take modernist values and aesthetics seriously, and do not avoid the magnetic pull of the master narratives. The proposals I review here expand the more conceptual or theoretical responses to the concept of belatedness that I listed in chapter 5. Here I take painting as my example, in order to keep to actual proposals and possibilities, rather than solutions suggested by the philosophic forms of the problem.

First answer: Add new avant-garde practices to the main trajectory A common strategy in art history scholarship is to report on times and places that can figure as avant-garde in relation to modernist painting in Western Europe and North America. (This is the first strategy I listed in chapter 6, section 2.) Studies of avant-garde painting in Brazil, former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, and Poland have made use of this approach. New scholarship on avant-gardes outside Western Europe and North America is promising, although there are still only a few specialists in such subjects in North American and Western European universities. In 2002 there were still no tenured full-time art historians in North American universities who worked on southeast European modernism. Now there are full-time faculty who work on Middle Eastern art, such as Nada Shabout, so it is only a matter of time before the world is better represented in North America and Europe. I wonder if the European case is unusually recalcitrant because the “margins” of Europe don’t seem to fulfill the conventional institutional drive to represent the world—that is, the Balkans or Baltic have lower priority than Central Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. The most common supplements to the main trajectory of modernism, both in terms of faculty hires and published work, are Central and Eastern European painting (mainly Polish and Russian cubo-futurism and constructivism), in part because of their

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strong connections with innovative moments in Western European modernism. In North America, it has become traditional for larger art history departments to supplement their modernist scholars with a specialist in Polish or Soviet avant-gardes. The choice largely reflects, I think, the dissemination of the interests exemplified by the journal October. One would hope that universities with such positions would be engaged in ongoing discussions about the historical reasons underlying their choices of specialist hires, but in my experience most of the talk has to do with the notion that hiring should promote as diverse a coverage of world art as possible, with little discussion about the historical moment in which such choices are made. (It is interesting, for example, that hiring specialists in the Russian avant-garde was a priority in North American art history in the first decade of the 21st century.) The focus on modernism’s innovative moments is subject to strong limitations for two reasons, one practical and the other ideological. In practical terms it becomes difficult to justify the inclusion of a large number of relatively unstudied avant-gardes in the primary sequence of modernist painting. The new instances tend increasingly to be minor in comparison to events in Western Europe and North America. They can even serve, indirectly, to justify work that concentrates on the Western modernist sequence at the exclusion of what are taken to be inessential movements elsewhere. There are many examples of painters who have been the subjects of scholarly studies designed to bring out the painters’ avant-garde qualities and make them relevant to the Western narrative. In Bratislava in 2003, I was urged to study the work of Štefan Bartušek Prukner (1931–2011). His painting is broadly expressionist, and he tried his hand at many styles, from Polish-style expressionism to a kind of primitivism à la Emil Nolde. The work is wild and colorful, but not innovative by wider European standards. In a catalog essay, the critic Dušan Brozman compares Prukner to Pollock, saying that Prukner avoids the usual symmetries and orientations of other artists in favor of a kind of all-over painting. The comparison is stretched, because Prukner’s painting is not allover, and his figures observe the laws of gravity. Even the scruffy, anthropomorphized insects in his Summertime on the Sea (1995) prance on a horizontal dance floor. The case for Prukner as an avant-garde modernist is weak, but the efficacy of the argument depends on the public it is intended to convince. For a gallerist or a collector Brozman’s argument might be helpful; but for an art historian pondering which artists to include in an undergraduate course on modernism it probably will not be persuasive. A large number of relatively unstudied painters could lay claim to being genuinely innovative and essential for the main trajectory of modernism. If the unclassifiable Czech painter Jan Zrzavý (1890–1977) were to be taken into the mainstream narrative, he might change its terms entirely. He is odd and wild enough to stand alongside or even replace painters such as Ernst, Klee, or Dalí in introductory accounts of the century. (Each of them is different, and none are similar to Zrzavý: I am only signaling Zrzavý’s potential to be seen as equal in interest to artists of his generation who are

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1  Jan Zrzavý, Cleopatra, 1942–1957, oil and gold on canvas. Národní Galerie, Prague.

parts of the master narrative.) Perhaps unhappily, it is not likely that anyone will write a textbook from which Klee has been omitted to make room for Zrzavý. In assembling this chapter 1 have deliberately tried not to report on new, “important” painters. Part of the reason not do so is to avoid the now-customary mining of “exotic” places and practices for art history, and the imperialist agenda that it involves. Another reason is philosophic. As Adorno argued, in order for the concept of the avant-garde to keep its purchase as a signifier of the new, it must remain possible that

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an avant-garde practice is initially unrecognizable. A recognizable avant-garde, one ready to be “discovered,” is also one whose criteria of innovation are already in place. If I find someone like Zrzavý, and decide he is a potentially important artist, I am using criteria that I have learned elsewhere, and my “discovery” is really only a recognition of things I have already known, presented to me in a new combination or in an unfamiliar cultural context. This creates a contradiction that is itself formative for the inclusion of unfamiliar artists in the main trajectory. On the one hand, the prevailing rhetoric of local practices, contemporaneities, and multiple modernities enjoins art historians to expand and diversify the canon; on the other hand, the principal tools for achieving that expansion are themselves derived from avant-garde moments that are already part of the canon. The question hinges on the nature of the derivation: Ming Tiampo has tried to “dissect,” “retheorize,” and “rethink” crucial concepts of the master narrative, especially originality (see the discussion in chapter 7); and John Clark has turned to biology for help (see chapter 5). But in most cases, “derivation” ends up being selective quotation and re-use, and the criteria are imported into their new contexts largely intact. For these reasons, when I encounter promising artists who are, by Western European standards, unknown, I try to resist the temptation to represent them to the West, or to nominate them as important discoveries. The philosophic grounds of my “discoveries,” and the ideological interest that drives the “discoveries,” are both suspect.

Second answer: Acknowledge the Westernness of the avant-garde and of modernism The interest accorded to avant-garde moments is not capricious or optional, but built into the structure of modernism itself. In other words, the main trajectory and the research that makes it significant impel Western scholars to pay attention to whatever can be taken as avant-garde. A good illustration of the dilemma this creates is the work of the Japanese scholar Shigemi Inaga, who has written on Japonisme and on Japan’s reception of Japonisme. He has described his feelings as a student in Paris in 1987, where he saw the exhibition Le Japon des Avant-gardes at the Pompidou Center. He recalls that he felt “awkward” for three different reasons. First, in the West, products (usually crafts), which are not categorized as art, are excluded from the avant-garde. Second, Western art historians assign these elements to the “Japanese tradition” so that Japanese art is disallowed from participating in modernism and the avant-garde. This can be called a consistent logical violence [shyubi ikkan shita bouryokusei]. And third, the West selects those modern Japanese arts which already have a similarity to the [Western] avant-garde, and then searches for their Japanese-ness…

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Inaga could not bring himself to accept this “perverse” [tousaku] logic in the name of “cross-cultural sociability,” but neither did he want to allow himself to simply feel “pain looking at a distorted image of my home country as a faithful patriot” might. The conjunction of two impossible positions left him uncomfortable [igogochi no ­warusa]: “Who am I,” he asks, “talking about this gap, and where am I located?” Inaga has also put the dilemma in a more elaborate form, arguing that the discomfort is actually double, with both sides compounded: the awkward relation between the excitement and guilt of telling other people about one’s culture, and the awkward alteration between superiority and guilt that comes from allowing oneself to interpret other cultures. The initial cause of Inaga’s discomfort at Le Japon des Avant-gardes was the fact that Western scholarship excludes crafts from fine art, which involves excluding much of modern Japanese art from the category of the avant-garde. The “violence” [bouryok­ usei] of the historical tradition that excludes Japanese craft, and that “perversely” [tousaku] searches for Japanese-ness in those remnants of the tradition that can be considered sufficiently modern—i.e., Western—is irreparable. Post-Renaissance Western thinking on art is predicated on the distinction between art and craft, whether the craft is Western or non-Western, so it is not possible simply to right the imbalance and begin again. The only “solution,” if it can be called that, is to foster awareness akin to Inaga’s warusa (“discomfort”). A heightened awareness of the writer’s dislocated and ambiguous position may be an optimal strategy for writing about modernism outside of the mainstream. It can be adapted to each scholar’s viewpoint, and changed as conditions change. It also has the advantage of being well attested in the literature of cultural studies, from V. S. Naipaul to Homi Bhabha. Yet it also begs the question of the relation between the standard trajectory and the material under consideration. By suspending or rejecting the judgments of modernist discourse, an approach such as Inaga’s defers the “logical” clash of systems and postpones difficult questions concerning the value and place of the unfamiliar work. By the modernist logic of Le Japon des Avant-gardes, Japanese crafts simply cannot be valued in the way that modernist paintings are, and Japanese avant-garde paintings, in turn, are found wanting. Faced with those unacceptable conclusions, Inaga is impelled to reflect on the dilemma of choice. His work is exemplary of non-Western scholarship on Western art, and his reaction to Le Japon des Avant-gardes is also exemplary, but it is an open question whether a meditation on the dilemmas of choice and judgment contributes to the understanding of modernist art. The “consistent logical violence” of modernist discourse demands that new material be evaluated, and the longer that valuation is postponed, the more artificial and elaborate such meditations become. The impetus behind Inaga’s anguish can only be a belief in certain core concepts of modernism, even when he seeks to dissolve or at least complicate modernism’s harsh judgments about what is not Western.

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Writing about cultural dilemmas—like Inaga’s meditations, like this chapter be an optimal strategy for avoiding “logical violence,” but it defers participation and revision of the narratives it addresses. Scholarship that acknowledges the Westernness of the avant-garde and of modernism must still negotiate the fact that the impetus to write about modernist painting comes primarily from the West, and brings with it concepts of the avant-garde. Inaga’s meditation is a pause in the search for a working answer, not—as he knows—an answer.

Third answer: Follow the local critical tradition It may seem more appropriate to focus on the local reception of the work (however that is understood; see the options in the previous chapter) rather than on the largescale problems of its possible relations to the mainstreams of modernism. That approach seems reasonable. After all, artwork finds its meaning and significance in the context in which it is made and exhibited. The overwhelming majority of modernist paintings, those done by little-known artists, have minimal critical contexts, but when there is textual evidence associated with the work—a newspaper review, a catalogue essay—then the work has the elements of a local critical tradition. A newspaper review or a mention in an exhibition brochure is enough to provide an opening for a historian to understand how the work was understood in its own setting. The difficulty is that the local tradition often depends on the redaction of international comparisons, and conversely international comparisons tend to conflict with, and often undermine, local interpretations. I will illustrate this with two anecdotes and a longer example. In a gallery in Buenos Aires in 2003, I was told I was lucky to be able to see “the world’s finest Macció.” I knew that Rómulo Macció (b. 1931) was one of Argentina’s foremost modernists, and the painting I saw turned out to be a very large canvas, done in an Abstract Expressionist style, depicting a towering figure holding a child. Given the painting’s handling, the gallerist could have said “Macció is Argentina’s De Kooning,” or “Macció was following CoBrA painters.” It turned out the gallerist did not think Macció knew de Kooning or CoBrA. But even if Macció had thought of either, the gallerist wouldn’t have wanted to tell me. Macció’s international connections are not secret; they are set out, for example, in Mercedes Casanegra’s book Nueva figuración 1961–1965: Deira, Macció, Noé, de la Vega (2010) and in a 2002 retrospective, Rómulo Maccío: retro­ spectiva „De la figuración a la parafiguración.” (I thank Daniel Quiles for these sources.) Yet without that parallel, inexact as it would have been, there was no way for him to place the painting in an international context. It could only be interpreted on the spot, as a startling and oppressive picture of an enormous parent and its child.

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In Bulgaria in 1999 I attended an exhibition of the Bulgarian modernist Dechko Uzunov (Дечко Узунов, 1899–1986). Uzunov had worked under the Soviet regime as a portrait painter, but later in life he painted Bulgarian towns in an increasingly abstract idiom. Some paintings from the 1980s were aerial views of villages, showing the concentrated centers with their red roofs, and a constellation of larger field patterns, which I was told could be recognized as collective fields. The paintings were effectively abstract except for their titles. When I suggested that Uzunov had been looking at painters like Hans Hartung, the curator told me Bulgaria had been deeply isolated, and Uzunov hadn’t known about European abstraction. The Bulgarian art historian Clemena Antonova told me that posture is called samobiten in Bulgarian and samobjitnii in Russian: it is “one of the clichés of Socialist literary and art criticism,” she wrote, and it means “that which has not experienced any outside influences”—as in “Soviet writer,” or “Soviet artist.” I could have written about Uzunov as an isolated artist, unaware of mid-century European abstraction, but that local interpretive tradition would not have appeared plausible to international readers. Here is a more extended example of the same dilemma. Metka Krašovec is a Slovenian painter who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the late 1980s she painted neoclassical faces of women, but when I saw her work in the Galerija Equrna in January 2003, she was represented by several surrealist landscapes. One depicted a French garden, set on a height over the ocean. In the painting, two lovers stand alone next to a fountain. Beyond them is an ocean, delimited by the curve of the Earth. The picture has the stillness associated with de Chirico’s metaphysical style, a solid functional sense of illumination as in Delvaux, and the hyper-realistic crystalline detail normally exemplified for the later twentieth century by Dalí. And yet, so the owner of the Equrna Gallery informed me, Krašovec does not think of herself as a descendent of any of those painters. The owner opened a copy of the Oxford History of Western Art (2000) and turned to page 497, where Krašovec’s paintings are described as “a new mannerism.” That English-language reference is about the only description of Krašovec’s work in a language other than Slovene, and the owner offered it as proof that a non-Slovenian observer would agree that Krašovec is not a principally a surrealist. The author of that section of the Oxford History of Western Art, Paul Crowther, is not a historian of modern art but an aesthetician, phenomenologist, and expert on Kant. He is given to idiosyncratic aesthetic judgments such as “the key artist in understanding the transition from modern to postmodern is Malcolm Morley.” (I do not know any similar claim made on Morley’s behalf: he is a photorealist with an uneven reception.) Crowther’s appellation, “new mannerism,” is only meant in the most informal fashion, and does not imply that the work is not indebted to surrealism. The owner then showed me the Slovenian press clippings for Krašovec’s work, which avoid the word surrealism in favor of general references to Slovenian “feeling” —what is in other contexts referred to as “utmetnostni dialekt” (artistic dialect). The expres-

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2  Metka Krašovec, Trojno ogledalo (Triple Mirror), 1992, acrylic on canvas. Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

sion was apparently first coined in the 1961 Congress of Slovenian Art History, partly as a way of describing a difference, and a national character, without spelling out what exactly the difference or character might be. In the press notices of Krašovec’s work, descriptions of the work imply a kind of utmetnostni dialekt, and a non-Western genealogy, without stating it in so many words. The strength of the local historical tradition is that it remains faithful to the particular constellation, the feel and detail, of the local scene. It may also be informed by oral histories and experiences of landscape that cannot be easily communicated, as in Panoho’s work, discussed in Chapter 7. The successful reception of Krašovec’s work in Ljubljana depends on not dwelling too much on names such as de Chirico, and also not saying too precisely what alternate influences might be. This is a common situation wherever the work itself is per-

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ceived, rightly or wrongly, to have a quality that might be damaged by too close an association with obvious and famous predecessors. The critical notices of Krašovec’s work are enough to begin a history of reception, but if I were to follow these leads in her case, I would be unable to link her paintings to the Western stories of art history. They would float free in their own elusive, evasive genealogy. The work would appear disconnected from the main trajectory of Western modernism. Such a description would preserve the work for its local context, but defer the moment when Western modernism could be brought to bear.

Fourth answer: Disregard the context and describe the work sympathetically It may seem better to leave the local historical sense of an artist to one side, and try to describe the work on its own terms. If I were to write about the historical terms according to which Krašovec’s work has been understood, I still might not have an account that would make sense for a reader interested in the wider histories of art in other countries. It is dubious to insist that her practice be given a new genealogy distinct from de Chirico’s metaphysical style, or that she be discussed in terms of the meanings of national style in Slovenia, rather than in terms of the international practices of surrealism. Although it is not my immediate concern here, it would be evasive to avoid all mention of previous styles in favor of an analysis of the Galerija Equrna’s place in Ljubljana’s art scene, because that would avoid coming to terms with either the local or the international critical writing. So perhaps it is better to leave aside the historical settings proffered by critics and historians, and try to describe the work on its own terms. The first-generation Slovenian impressionist Ivan Grohar (1862–1911) is a good candidate for this fourth possibility, because the historical reception of his work within Slovenia has stressed his uniqueness. He is taken as a foundation for Slovenian modernism, and so his affinities with van Gogh or Giovanni Segantini are played down in favor of an appreciation of qualities that are said to be uniquely his—and therefore uniquely Slovenian. His painting The Sower (1907) is one of dozens of the same motif that were made throughout Europe beginning with the Barbizon School. It can seem that each country has its own sower, who is interpreted in terms of each country’s sense of its heritage. In Austria, for example, there is Albin Egger-Lienz’s (1868–1926) powerful The Sower (Der Sämann, 1908). The coincidence in dates is often remarkable. In this case, Egger-Lienz was six years younger than Grohar, and painted The Sower one year later. In Grohar’s case, the subject is associated with Slovenian work ethic. A sower is seen less as a symbol of the country’s fertility than of the hard work necessary to make it fertile.

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3  Ivan Grohar, Sejalec (The Sower), 1907, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana.

Grohar painted several canvases around the same time as The Sower. Another of equal importance, which hangs next to it in the Narodna Galerija in Ljubljana, is The Larch (Macasen, 1904). A larch bisects the canvas, and beyond it is a view to a steep field. Toward the top of the frame the field gives way to forests and there is a view of mountains beyond. The exact location of the scene has been verified by photography, and what appears to be snow on the mountains is actually characteristic whitish scree slopes. Grohar cut the canvas down, and Andrei Smrekar, then director of the Narodna Galerija, told me that Grohar also erased most of his native village in order to make the scene more modernist. He left a single farm building on the slope and some barely discernible houses on a hill at the top left. The result is not only flatter and more modern-looking, but also more directly about the wild country. Grohar painted his name carved in the larch, placing himself in that exact spot, and the painted carving mimics the sculpted look of his paint. Both are thick, pasty, and nearly wooden. Like The Sower,

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The Larch is a wild subspecies of postimpressionism. The marks are dense and heavy-­ handed, sometimes even scrappy, like Adolphe Monticelli’s. In places, Grohar let the raw red-brown burlap show through between patches of paint. Grohar is the most important of a small group of seminal Slovenian postimpressionists that also includes Rihard Jakopič (1869–1943), who mounted the first modernist exhibition in 1910, Matei Sternen (1870–1949), and Matija Jama (1872–1947), who was more faithful to Grohar’s manner. They are understood as characteristically Slovenian, and for that reason the scholarship they have attracted has not made much of their debt to non-Slovenian art. Jakopič in particular played an important role in defining Slovenian art; he reinterpreted the region’s art as going back to the eighteenth century and was once caricatured as Moses. In these last paragraphs I have paid attention to the paintings themselves, rather than their indebtedness to non-Slovenian art. I have not said much about the local historiographic tradition, which stresses Grohar’s nearly complete independence of Segantini. (One Slovenian art historian told me that for Grohar, Segantini just “meant modernism.”) It is entirely possible to go on in this vein and write monographic treatments of artists focusing on their works. Such writing exists wherever art history is a developed discipline. By focusing on what are understood as intrinsic properties of the art, this kind of writing replicates the concerns of art historians who have tried to write about Western artworks on their own terms. Yet there is a difference: Grohar’s The Sower is not a unique painting, but one of dozens like it in several European countries. A monograph on Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie might be justified in keeping rather strictly to the object itself, but a monograph on Grohar’s The Sower would not. Writing about the object itself has a significant and eventually crippling limitation: it ignores history. This fourth solution has resulted in some interesting texts, but in comparison to art historical narratives about canonical figures, it is not history. It can be reflective and evocative, and it can propose links to all sorts of cultural events and ideas within the region or nation. However, if such writing does not investigate the painting’s link with the broader history of painting, it is not art history in a full sense. When the writing is thoroughly researched it can be significant as local history (the third option), and when it is less well researched it can work as an evocation of the art (the fourth option). Whatever it is, such writing is not clearly part of the larger collection of texts that are aware of one another and of the sequences of art and ideas that comprise modernism. I will return to this question of the limits of sympathy in the next chapter.

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Fifth answer: Write the histories of institutions John Clark’s Modern Asian Art (1998) surveys about twelve countries, from the inception of modernism to contemporary art. He is skeptical of the search for avant-gardes, because it is part of the relatively unreflective search for new branches for the master narrative. He presents his book as what I would call institutional history, in which phenomena that count for some observers as “avant-garde” are seen to be the effects of specific socio-economic conditions. In his methodological Introduction, Clark considers the work of the Japanese painter Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927), a prominent Japanese modernist. Of Yorozu’s painting Naked Beauty (1912), Clark writes: it “could be interpreted… as evidence of the vain longing to be up to date at the periphery, whose position is always constructed as dystopic by its very distance from the utopian centre.” (Nude Beauty, the translation Clark prefers, is probably closer to the painter’s intentions, but the museum uses the translation Naked Beauty.) Yorozu’s Portrait of a Woman (1910) would be similarly “positioned” by the “critique of ‘Orientalism,’ which has now become orthodox in the Euramerican academy… as a poor and inauthentic copy.” Clark calls that kind of interpretation “Orientalist” (in quotation marks, perhaps to signal that such orientalism would be an illegitimate extension of the original French orientalism, which was directed at the Middle East), and he wants to correct it by considering the Japanese perspective. “In fact,” he continues, the painting “marks the re-situation of discourse that has already been entirely assimilated”: Yorozu took what he knew, and what he needed, and put it to work in a new context. It is that new context that matters—its “local discourse needs,” its goals and meanings. Clark prefers a “deliberately neutral” approach (at least in respect to aesthetics), one that “consciously stands aside from the search for what is modern or radical.” A sign of this neutral attitude is that Clark considers the avant-garde in just one chapter of his book, about two-thirds the way through, between chapters on the salon and on nationalism. The avant-garde, he says, is really only a modernist value, and it refers to those who are “ideologically equipped to criticize earlier positions in the discourse.” It names a certain position taken in regard to history; a position that demands innovation and seeks to understand previous ideas in a comprehensive sense. Because it “draws its authority from origination,” the avant-garde “becomes forced to absolutely privilege the new.” These definitions make it possible for Clark to analyze the modernism of Tokyo around 1900, in which Yorozu worked, as just a modernism among others, with an avant-garde among others—different, but potentially comparable, to avant-gardes elsewhere. “What appears derivative from a Euramerican perspective,” Clark concludes, “has its quite originating avant-garde function within that Japanese context.”

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4  Yorozu Tetsugorō, 裸体美人 (Naked Beauty), 1912, oil on canvas. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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There are many such formulations in Modern Asian Art, and some detailed considerations of the level of awareness of the West that was obtained in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Contact between Paris and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts was exceptionally close in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Futurist Manifesto was translated in 1909, and Yorozu’s teacher, the modernist painter Kuroda Seiki (b. 1866), mentioned in 1912 that he had just been sent a recent Futurist exhibition catalogue. In March 1914 there was an exhibition of Der Sturm prints; and Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du cubisme (1912) was translated into Japanese in 1915, just two years after the English translation. These facts contribute to the sense that Yorozu and Kuroda were well in control of the reception of the Western avant-garde, and therefore that they should be evaluated by different criteria rather than being considered as belated post-impressionists. Naked Beauty was, Clark says, a “deliberately provocative display of recently received post-impressionist mannerisms.” What matters for its appreciation is the contemporaneous Japanese sense of certain French modernism, and the e ­ conomic, political, and strategic reasons why elements of French practice were adopted. The devaluation of non-Western avant-gardes, Clark says, stems from “an ideological debate about authority,” and ignores “the relativizing function of the avant-garde.” For example, the appearance of Der Sturm prints in Tokyo in 1914 “should be seen as the functioning of the avant-garde as a transcultural group in communicating among themselves.” Japanese artists such as Yorozu and Kuroda were not derivative because they were “actors in an international movement where cultural origin provided only a context of origination not of authentication.” The phenomenon of the avant-garde, together with its concept of originality, should be seen as an ideology shared by many cultures. Even the concept of originality might be relative, because it might be different from one place to another. Three arguments are entwined here: the claim that avant-gardes are relative to their contexts, so that one may be as interesting as another; that Yorozu was thoroughly familiar with the European precedents and was playing a “mannerist” game with them; and that he was part of an international avant-garde that traded ideas back and forth. I am only concerned here with the first of these. The difficulty with accounts like Clark’s, I find, is that after a while they become counter-intuitive. I can read with interest about Yorozu and Koruda, but a time it becomes increasingly difficult for me to remain engaged by their paintings. Yorozu’s and Koruda’s works clearly depend on simplified or impoverished versions of Van Gogh and other European painters, and as much as I may want to undermine that judgment, it returns insistently. Despite the striking appearance of Naked Beauty in the original— it is larger than it may seem in reproductions—becomes difficult for me to sustain interest in Yorozu’s paintings as independent works, comprehensible and viable without their Western references. The work looks derivative, and so does the art scene in Tokyo. Clark could say that such an opinion is just a repetition of Western orientalist

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prejudices, and that it is a consequence of the thrall of the ideology of Western avant-gardism. But I wonder if the Western perspective is quite so easy to discount. The art practice at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts is certainly specific to its time and place, and I agree that it constitutes an avant-garde that is identifiably different from the one in Paris in those years. But the ideological, economic, and cultural differences are not enough to prevent the work from being seen as derivative, and that will be true not only for Western observers but for anyone who studies modernism in the West. I may prefer Yorozu’s Naked Beauty to a painting by van Gogh, but that does not erase Yorozu’s dependence on van Gogh. I may devalue the very notion of dependence as a Western construction, but that does not prevent me from experiencing Yorozu’s painting as dependent. I may not care about the direction of influence, but that does not stop me from experiencing it as part of the work’s meaning. Clark wants to change the terms of the conversation in modernist art history so that works like Naked Beauty will not be devalued or ignored, but there is a severe obstacle in the way of that admirable goal: the very structure of art history and modernism. There is no sense to modernism without the privileging of innovation and of the avant-garde: you cannot subtract away those terms, or claim they are relative, without dismantling the very idea of modernism. Clark would like to rewrite the concept of the avant-garde so it can be sensitive to differing cultural contexts, but that cannot be done by claiming that originality is relative, or that new contexts rewrite the notion of what is innovative. The avant-garde in the non-relative sense, the sense to which Clark objects, is like a vital organ. It cannot be removed without destroying modernism’s sense of itself. It seems to me that if Modern Asian Art were to succeed in relativizing the avant-garde, it would no longer be called Modern Asian Art, because there would no longer be any sense in writing about modernism. Or, to put this another way: if Clark’s strategies were effective, then art historians would be equally interested in avant-garde practices wherever they have occurred, whether it was Tokyo in 1912 or Samoa in 1990. (American Samoa had one of the more belated modernist moments in world art.) In fact historians remain interested in the times and places where innovation — the avant-garde — was strongest, and it is no small part of Clark’s interest that the people in the Tokyo School of Fine Art were virtually neck-and-neck with European theorists. Art historians are not interested in avant-gardes just because each one is economically and ideologically unique: they are interested because the work itself seems original. It enriches art history to be asked to reconsider Western values, and to think about concepts such as belatedness as the conceptually narrow concern of a naïve Western historiography. I find a great deal of interest in Clark’s discussions of particular avant-gardes, and it is especially significant that after reading a postcolonial account, a run-of-the-mill Western text may well seem unreflective. I just do not think it is as easy as Clark supposes to rethink concepts such as originality and innovation, to rede-

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fine ideas such as dependence and influence, or to relativize ideas like the avant-garde. It is not enough to stress local historical situations, because that only defers the moment when it is necessary to come to terms with the fact that the work is dependent on Western models. If I subtract concepts like “belated” and “dependent,” and try to redefine the avant-garde as an “international movement,” then I end up with a maimed concept of modernism. The full game of art history is significantly more challenging. It requires me to be sensitive to the unique characteristics of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts around 1900, and it certainly asks me to be understanding and sympathetic with paintings like Naked Beauty, but it also reminds me that Yorozu’s paintings do not work well alongside van Gogh’s. That last clause sounds strange if you hear it with ears attuned to local historical inquiry. But demands for comparison are built into the logic of modernism, and modernism is itself what underwrites the interest of contexts like the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1912. Paintings don’t compete with one another in art history, but they do in the discourse of modernist artists and viewers. In theory, in a scholarly world where socioeconomic differences are what matter, and not specifically art, Yorozu’s painting could certainly be understood to be just as interesting as van Gogh’s. But that world does not yet exist, and the proof is simple: Clark’s Modern Asian Art is a work of Western art history, shot through with Western postcolonial theory, Western protocols for the writing and research of art history, Western interpretive methods, and a very Western concern with modernism. To imagine otherwise, as Clark does, is crucial and unusual, but unpersuasive. In the book Art and Globalization, Clark pronounced his verdict on a week of seminars held in Chicago on worldwide practices of art history. “In short,” he wrote, “this was another case of discussion in Euramerica which will end up being for Euramerica, and its very inconclusiveness points to an aporia which will become more apparent with time.” On the one hand, I couldn’t agree more: Art and Globalization is a long, complex book, with many voices, and to read it carefully and thoroughly it would be necessary to be steeped in North Atlantic art history. On the other hand, I wonder if Clark is as far outside the immense self-lubricating mechanism of Euramerican art scholarship as he proposes.

Sixth answer: Define the work per negationem I showed an outline version of these first five solutions to the Slovenian scholar Tomaž Brejc, who taught art history and theory at the Academy in Ljubljana. He proposed a sixth answer, taking as an example the Slovenian painter Rihard Jakopič (1869–1943).

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5  Rihard Jakopič, Pri svetilki (By Lamplight), 1912, oil on canvas. Narodna Galerija, Ljubljana.

How, Brejc asked me, should I write about this painter, who is one of the seminal figures of Slovenian modernism? Take for example Memories (1912) in the Narodna Galerija, which hung at the time one room away from Grohar’s The Larch and The Sow­ er. The painting is certainly indebted to Intimist work, but it is not mistakable for a Vuillard. In a broad sense, it is impressionist, and that is the way Jakopič is usually

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identified in Slovenian art criticism (and, for that matter, on the 100 Tolar banknote issued in 1992). Yet Jakopič is not an Impressionist in the way that Monet or even Sisley are, nor is he very close to German or Hungarian impressionists. Brejc wrote a book on Slovenian modernism, and he told me he had long wrestled with this problem. In the end, he favored specifying the artist by saying what he is not. This definition per negationem, as he called it, has the virtue of being faithful to whatever the painting at hand actually is. Memories is not Vuillard, Monet, early Nolde, or early Schmidt-Rottluff, or any number of others. Jakopič was never a Fauve, even though he used complementary contrasts in his painting. Something in Memories builds from the Slovenian reception of Signac, and later there was also the influence of Kandinsky. It is possible to work through the possible antecedents and say, in each case, what Jakopič was not. I was impressed by Brejc’s application of this method, which seemed to me ideally sensitive to the often unnamable differences between painters and their prototypes. Brejc’s book, unfortunately not translated from the Slovenian, could be exemplary in that regard. Yet, I also wonder if the definition per negationem is not compelled to depend, at each point, on existing Western descriptions. Without the existing literature on the Fauves, for example, it would not be possible to make sense of the claim that Jakopič adopted the Fauves’ color practices but not their other concerns. Brejc’s via negativa is promising, but I do not think it can be a model for the description of “non-Western” work.

Seventh answer: Adjust the stress Several times, when discussing this problem with friends and colleagues, it has been suggested to me that the question is not so much one of theory, but of emphasis. Place less stress on Western painters, people say, and the problem will eventually be ameliorated or solved. If the plurality of art historians in all countries spent more time on lesser-known artists, then the burden of art history’s emphasis would shift and finally the margins would become a new center. In effect, my friends have told me that the problem is only a question of the privilege that has historically been given to canonical Western modernists, and that the next generations of art historians can solve it passively, by refusing to contribute to the growing mass of scholarship on the major figures. One way of paying attention differently would be to give up the metaphor of the family tree of modernism, where the sturdy trunk is Western European and North American modernism. The metaphor of rhizomes, made popular by Gilles Deleuze, might be a substitute. Rhizomes, according to Deleuze, proliferate in all directions, so that there is no preferred direction or central node. Deleuze’s metaphor is not quite

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accurate because rhizomes are offshoots of root processes, so no matter how tangled they are, they lead into a large central plant. Still, the many modernist practices that flourished throughout the world in the first half of the twentieth century could be pictured as rhizomes, distantly or indirectly connected to the massive central core of modernism in Western Europe. A better model might be mycelia, the vegetative bodies of fungi, because they are truly without a center. They branch and divide through the soil with no pattern whatsoever, and they grow from spores that might be scattered anywhere. A mycelial model of modernism would let each local center be as important as every other center, and there would be no central body—no equivalent, in this fungal metaphor, of the mushroom. A rhizomatic model, in which a cloud of tiny randomly oriented shoots surrounds a central stalk, is a fairly good way of picturing the situation in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It reflects the fact that artists on the margins did not always imagine their relation to the center as if they were branches of a tree, but in more complicated ways. It also does justice to the fact that artists in the center—for example ­Picasso working in Paris in the 1910s—knew of the existence of many modernisms, even if they might not have had a clear understanding of some of them. From Picasso’s perspective, the many offshoots of modern art must have appeared as a halo or cloud of minor interests. The difference in weight is also well modelled by the rhizome theory, a massive and compact art scene in the West, and a widely dispersed but lightweight system of interrelated art scenes elsewhere. The mycelium model, on the other hand, replaces the center in the name of equality, and posits a world filled with labyrinthine connections to equally weighted centers. It models the situation within some regions, but it is not an accurate model when it comes to the influence of the main trajectory. There could be many more models, as many as there are ways of paying attention to different art practices. I mention the rhizome and mycelium metaphors because they capture two major alternatives. Another botanical choice might be Nicolas Bourriaud’s radicant—an adventitious vine—discussed in chapters 6 and 7. All such options, I think, are ultimately unrealistic. It is idealistic to say that the problem of the overbearing influence of the West can be mitigated by paying more attention to the margins. The overwhelming influence of the center, or centers, was an historical fact over much of the twentieth century, and in order to effectively critique it, more will be required than just shifting the emphasis. Even if art historians decided, on a worldwide basis, to stop writing about Picasso and Matisse, the presence of those artists in art historical discourse would still inform future accounts of other artists, at least until a currently unimaginable future in which accounts of currently “minor,” “unknown,” or “marginal” artists have become as rich, fruitful, and widely read as existing accounts of canonical works and artists. That is the root-level problem that is not solved by paying attention differently.

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6  Fujita Tsuguharu, Self-Portrait, 1931. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.

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Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968) is a good example of this quandary. I was introduced to his work by Clark’s account; he was an artist with very divided loyalties, and his works appear to reflect that fact. He graduated from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1910, and went to Paris. He was back in Japan during the China War in 1938, working as a war artist. During the war in the Pacific he was back in Paris; and even though he was barred from exhibiting there after the war, he eventually became a citizen in 1955. Clark makes some sensitive observations on Fujita’s dour graduation self-portrait of 1910, wondering if his “domineering downward-looking stance” might mean he already has begun to “disown” his culture. Clark wonders about the white background in a self-portrait done in Paris in 1926, which is similar to the ground in the image reproduced here: is this, Clark asks, “the past turned to nothing, or is it the nothingness of the past that the (Parisian) world he inhabits cannot recognise except in the elaborate play of brushwork?” It is seldom clear exactly how Fujita triangulated his position: the 1910 self-portrait is a species of late Western academic painting, and its hauteur was perhaps intended to work in that context; but the 1931 self-portrait is a mixture of Klee, Dufy, Shahn, and Matisse, and its virtuoso line and airy white emptiness are expressive in relation to those particular precedents. Paying attention differently can be rewarding and historically specific, but it defers the question of the nature and status of the narratives that are serving as references.

Eighth answer: Just give up It is possible to “give up” by changing the objects of study. If I look at contemporary international art, most of these issues recede, because they are peculiar to the universalizing ambitions of modernism. The same happens, with variations, if I look back before modernism. But if I want to study modernist painting, these problems can be nearly intractable. What to do? Some kinds of painting are especially far removed from the discourses of modernism, for example the debased landscapes offered to tourists on Montmartre, or paintings of jungles and coral reefs on the walls of shopping malls. Such work probably cannot be well described in the language of modernism or serious art history. It needs to be appreciated differently—“on its own terms,” as people say—and the whole project of historical writing should probably be set to one side. It could be argued that such work is not only a major component of the sum total of modernist painting, but the majority of all painting done in the last century. An interesting place to think about this is the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Because it is the result of Rudolf Leopold’s personal sense of Austrian modernism, and because

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7  Gustav Hessing, Landschaft (Landscape), 1980, gouache on paper. Leopold Museum, Vienna.

the display space is extensive, it raises sharp questions about what can, what might be, and what should not be recuperated for the history of twentieth-century painting. The collection includes major painters, essential in any account of modernism, among them Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Lovis Corinth. The collection also includes work by followers, who figure in accounts of Austrian modernism: for example, Koloman Moser (1868–1918), a more decoratively-minded member of the Secession, and Anton Kolig (1886–1950), a member of the movement called Carinthian Kolorismus. But among them, Leopold has hung painters whose contribution to European, and even Austrian, modernism is dubious. In the winter of 2003, for example, Gustav Hessing (1909–1981) was prominently displayed, but his loose adaptations of cubism are unconvincing, and his long career only seems to make that point over and over again. Josef Dobrowsky (1889–1964) is represented by several dark, overwrought adaptations of Breughel, a painter whose work has long been an important presence in the nearby Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum. But Dobrowsky’s paintings, even as a record of the historical reception of Breughel, are not very interesting. Another such artist is Leopold Blauensteiner (1880–1947); he was an extremely literal-minded pointillist who preferred his dots in neat rows as if they had been painted with an inked comb. In one room Leopold has hung a series of flower paintings, including one by Egge Sturm-Skrila (1894–1943), another by Anton Faistauer (1887–1930), and a third by Anton Kolig (1886–1950), which shows evidence that Kolig was looking at Matisse.

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The pictures are modernist, but in parts also indifferent to modernism, as if they were answers to the question: If you like flowers, and you are a modernist in Austria in the 1930s, how can you paint? Together with Schiele, Faistauer and Kolig comprised the short-lived Neukunstgruppe, and that is enough to ensure their presence in art history. Sturm-Skrila is a more obscure painter. The canvases in the Leopold Museum are grouped, however, as flower paintings, making the difference less visible. Each is lovely. They have a particular solidity that I take as an echo of Courbet, an important progenitor for expressionism. They also share a rich crimson that is typical of the decade in much of Central European modernist painting; it occurs again in the Carinthian Kolorismus painters. Kolig taught in the Wiener Akademie along with Josef Dobrowsky, who also painted flowers, and one of their students was Karl Josef Gunsam (1900–1972) who also painted modernist flower arrangements. If I go on like this, I am only distracting myself. These paintings do not belong in art history: they belong to the private moments I have on my way from one historical encounter to another. These paintings take themselves out of history, they are a hiatus from thinking about Vienna, or about Austria’s contribution to modernism, and I imagine that may have been Leopold’s intention. The private enjoyment of flower paintings is not at all a poor thing. Anyone who loves painting knows that it often works by producing just such incommunicable feelings that seem detached from historical meaning. I forget myself in front of Sturm-Skrila’s mediocre bouquet, and then I remember myself in the next gallery. That lull in cognitive intensity, that aesthetic encounter, that lapse into subjective space—call it whatever you like—is central to what some modernist painting is about. I do not want to parody, devalue, or criticize it. But it is not relevant to the problem at hand, which is the production of historical meaning. If I give up trying to write a historical account of Yorozu, Grohar, and the others, then my task does not necessarily become simpler: I am still faced with the challenge of trying to put my personal reaction into words. But my task is different, and it no longer has to do with the problems I am pursuing. An insidious and tremendously difficult question lurks here. It makes sense not to consider Sturm-Skrila, Faistauer, Kolig, Dobrowsky, and Gunsam in terms of the history of modernism, to exclude them from the essential canons of the history of art. Their flower paintings just aren’t necessary for a serious consideration of modernism. It would be artificial to try to find a place for their flower paintings in a history of twentieth-century painting. If I did so, I would be misusing the paintings and misunderstanding their intended publics. But if I exclude those paintings, where do I stop? Can I then say flower painting as a whole is not part of twentieth-century painting? Aren’t there ambitious and important flower paintings by Matisse, Nolde, Mondrian, Picasso, Bonnard, and Lucian Freud? Weren’t the Pop appropriations by Warhol, Tom Wes-

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selman, Alex Katz, and Wayne Thiebaud made possible by the earlier history of modernist still life paintings? Especially after Rancière, how would an historian go about excluding flower paintings on the basis that they do no political work? Isn’t their marginal status a fossilized remnant of the Baroque hierarchies of genres? Once I begin to exclude certain paintings and types of paintings, there is no way to know how to stop. My simple intuition that Sturm-Skrila is not appropriate for an historical account raises questions that are lodged deep within the discipline.

Afterword There is no simple solution to the problem of writing art historical accounts of the world’s modernist painting. We should take heart from that, because if there were a single answer, it would mean we’re not perceiving significant differences between paintings made in different regions or countries, and that we’re taking modernist painting as a massive worldwide project--something akin to modern physics--and therefore suitable for a single explanatory model. Happily, that is not true. But the lack of a good answer should also be regarded as a serious challenge. If we do not continue to work on this problem, then paintings made in peripheral places--in smaller art centers, away from conversations on modernism--will be lost to the international conversation of art history. The voices of such artists will grow even fainter, and the trumpeting of the Picassos and Pollocks will get stronger each year. On the other hand, there are many indications that the problem as I have posed it in this chapter will naturally dissolve in the mixture of new disciplines and subjects. Art history is growing in such a way that it will naturally, inevitably lose its interest in the master narrative. As Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, Indian, and other centers of art history grow, the concerns of the field will naturally shift. In the last two decades visual culture studies and Bildwissenschaft have been drawing students away from art history, and it is entirely plausible that the discipline will be overcome by a sea change in how art and its histories are imagined. This hasn’t happened yet: there are still plenty of scholarly and critical voices that are engaged in articulating the significance of Duchamp or Matisse, or the meaning of the avant-garde. But once those locations of culture are drowned out by new ones, then the master narrative, the North Atlantic model, and the discipline that has ensured they remain central, will fade. (Farewell to Visual Studies, 2013.) It will then no longer be necessary to “adjust the stress,” because the concerns of art historians and the places where art histories are written, will have produced, in effect, a different language. Meanwhile the discipline of art history continues to produce self-descriptions that imply a degree of stability, a longevity, that I doubt the field actually possesses. Some recent studies of the history of art history assume that the Kantian and Hegelian foun-

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dations of the discipline will remain important for the foreseeable future, and that it will remain important to teach graduate students the history of the discipline that includes names like Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg, and Panofsky, and concepts like style analysis and iconography. This sense of art history is one of the principal supports for the values that produce the critical problems I have been exploring, and in that sense they are indispensable for the discipline’s sense of itself. (Christopher Wood, A History of Art History, 2019, and Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, reprinted 2017.) On the other hand, given the proliferation of places art history is practiced, the increasing “presentism” of art history graduate students, and the changes in media studies, visual culture studies, and other fields, it may be idealistic to continue to study and publish on this particular sense of art history, as if the next generation of art historians will be as interested in European art and philosophy, or even in the existence of a discipline called “art history.” Another way to “just give up” would be to relinquish the discipline that supports the values that in turn produce these problems, or to wait until the discipline changes enough so that the values are no longer important. Still, at the moment nothing much has melted away. Art history is still inside modernism, if that term is understood to include the values of originality, the avant-garde, the innovative, and the critical. Otherwise the problems of writing about modernist practices outside Western Europe and North America would not appear as problems. In the current condition of discourse, perhaps the best approach is affective or psychological, as Shigemi Inaga’s warusa, his discomfort, suggests.

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The Most Difficult Problem for Global Art History

I have often found it useful to distinguish between texts that are useful as art history, and those that are useful for art history. The latter would include archival material that can be cited and put to work in art historical publications—letters and emails, photographs, legal documents, and so forth. It would also include texts that have concepts that might be of interest, such as poststructural theory or the Indian, Arabic, and Chinese books I mentioned in chapter 7. When an art historian uses that kind of material, she places texts, artworks, and concepts in art history: those texts are of interest for some art historical practice, but they aren’t examples of art history. The other category, texts useful as art history, would be whatever is presented or understood as products of the discipline—not only the essays in the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Storia dell’arte, Perspective, or Art History, for example, but also texts in any number of venues and places are taken as instances of disciplinary art history. This a useful distinction because it can separate some art criticism from some art history: for example, the biographical notices of Paraguayan artists written by the artist Olga Blinder (1921–2008) for a newspaper in Ascuncíon can serve as the material for art historical accounts, but by themselves they would not normally count as art history (nor were they intended to). The difference between as and for can also clarify the distinction between some historical practices and contemporary or currently viable forms of art history. The book Famous Paintings Through History (Lidai Minghua Ji, 歷代名畫記) written by Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815–877 ACE), is not an example of art history as it is currently understood, but it is a crucial source for Chinese art history. A similar observation could be made of Giorgio Vasari’s Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architetti (usually known as the Lives of the Artists, 1550, second edition 1568): it isn’t the way art historians write now, but it is central for Renaissance art history, and also for the discipline’s sense of its own history. (The differences between Zhang, Vasari, and current art history are debatable; they are discussed in my Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, p. 58.)

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The as and for distinction can also be applied to the poststructuralist authors who are often required reading in graduate seminars. Derrida’s Truth in Painting, Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meniñas, or Walter Benjamin’s essay on photography are not instances of art history, but they are widely taken as crucial for art history. Much of French poststructural theory has this double nature in relation to the discipline: indispensable for young historians, but not an example of their practice. The for/as distinction helps name that strange condition. (See “The French Poststructuralist Model,” tinyurl.com/odfyfll.) I find the most interesting use of the distinction between writing for and as art history is to mark what is and isn’t currently viable on the job market, in publishing, and in universities. A young art historian writing in the manner of Zhang Yanyuan or Vasari would not get a job in a major university, and she would have difficulty publishing in art history journals. The same could be said, less hypothetically, for a young scholar whose writing is exclusively art criticism, archival data, or biography. And it is not uncommon to encounter young scholars whose writing is too theoretical—too much like Derrida, Deleuze, or Rancière—to count as art history. I think it is a common experience among faculty to reluctantly turn down a job applicant because her work seems to lie too far beyond the for/as boundary: it may be too much an instance of theory or critique, or not quite enough like art history. Editors, too, deal with this same issue: some essays, and some book manuscripts, may not be accepted for publication because they seem more like material for some art historical inquiry rather than an example of such an inquiry, or else more like instances of anthropology, sociology, or critical theory than examples of art history. These are permeable boundaries, but the for/as distinction can go a long way toward clarifying how the discipline imagines itself at any given moment. The proposal I would like to make in this final chapter has to do with this difference. Most studies aimed at understanding global art history have focused on places where the texts that are produced are legible as art history. In other words, people have looked at practices that already resemble what they do, at least to the point where they can be read as contributions to art history. Diversity, in this way of doing things, is the sum total of practices of any or all writing that might be viable as art history. I think diversity in global art history is different in kind. We need to ask two things of texts that appear to be principally of interest for art history. First, we should ask if some texts that might be useful for art history might not actually be participants in an unexpectedly wider sense of the discipline. This would entail looking at writing as close as Derrida or Cixous, or as far afield as Zhang Yanyuan and Vasari, and c­ onsidering whether they might work—partially, with suitable reframing and editing—as art history. It would also entail reconsidering the ways the discipline currently understands international exchanges, fellowships, and conferences. As things are now, most such projects involve the circulation of scholars who are already reasonably conversant

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with the ways that international—North Atlantic—art history is conducted. But there are places where art history is practiced sufficiently differently so that it does not appear as part of this international conversation. Those places, I think, need to be considered as different rather than as in need of more communication, conversation, and collaboration. I will illustrate this first point with some thoughts on some recent attempts to promote international exchange among art historians, and with an example of art historical practices in Tbilisi, Georgia. The second question regarding texts of interest for art history is, I think, even more challenging, and it is my final thesis in this book. I think we need to reconsider writing that does not seem quite up to the standards or expectations of whatever context is involved in judging, whether it is a university looking to hire a new lecturer, a journal considering the publication of an unsolicited essay, or a conference organizer pon­ dering a proposal for a talk. Such writing is proposed as art history, but for one reason or another doesn’t quite make the grade. For most professional art historians, this is a common occurrence: most submissions to a journal won’t be accepted, and most applicants for a job won’t be successful. But there is a particular subset of texts that raise the question of global art history in an especially acute manner. I am thinking of essays written by provincial art historians, by art historians in academically isolated institutions, by art historians working in economically or politically isolated locations, whose writing may be interesting, but somehow disconnected from the North Atlantic conversation. Perhaps the historian’s references are too narrow, her way of arguing is awkward, her research seems incomplete, or she seems unaware of parallels and larger contexts. An application, or a proposal might be rejected for any of these reasons. Such scholarship proposes itself as art history, but becomes, in the context of these routine rejections, material that might be of use for some other art historical inquiry, or for some other journal or conference or university. My second, and central, proposal is that we need to reconsider such scholarship because it is, unexpectedly and problematically, the actual remaining source of diversity in the global production of art history. Diversity comes less from under-represented traditions of writing in different places, but from subtler cultural and regional differences that appear simply as inadequacies. Such differences are the diversity of global art history in the 21st century. I will consider this in the closing section.

1. Limits of the current search for different practices of art history The international travel grant I mentioned in chapter 2, in the section “Central and Peripheral or Marginal,” was intended to help art historians travel to North America to attend the principal US conference on art history. In order to apply for the grant, applicants had to have enough knowledge of the institutions, language, and purposes of art

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history to present themselves as lacking some specifiable resources, knowledge, or connections. Many of the applicants described their countries’ cultural and scholarly situation as “marginal” or “belated,” and when they were asked who they might want to meet at the conference, a number mentioned art historians and philosophers such as Jacques Rancière, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Hal Foster. Some applicants, in other words, were aware of the preferences and interests of contemporary internationalist art history as it is practiced in North America. Conversely, the grant attracted only a few applications from people who did not know how to present their lack of knowledge as art historians, and spoke instead in general terms about art and its importance in culture. The jury’s consensus was that such applicants would not benefit from visiting the conference because they were insufficiently aware of what art history is. This raises two questions. How could such a grant committee decide what degree of familiarity with North American art history would be required for an applicant to benefit from the conference? And how, in the future, could such a grant be configured so that it might attract people who had not applied because they did not know enough about art history, or about grant applications in general? Another generously funded project that sought to bring art historians together was funded by the Mellon Foundation and run by the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. They were involved in two extensive projects to travel to art history centers outside North America and western Europe. The first was called “Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in East-Central Europe after 1989” (2009–2011), and the second was “Trade Routes of Art History” (2011–2014). Their titles obscure their similar structure: in both cases groups of art historians from the Clark Art Institute visited universities, first in East-Central Europe, and then in Southeast Asia, and there were follow-up visits by art historians in those places to the Clark. In both cases, the art historians chose institutions where art history, as a discipline, was already established. It was then possible to have fruitful conversations about such things as methodologies, journals, conferences, the latest literature, the Eurocentrism of textbooks, and university positions in different countries. Before I go on to describe some institutions and places that do not offer this kind of parity, I want to signal some reservations I had about the Clark projects, not in order to fault them in particular, but to point out systematic difficulties in the conceptualization of any such project. Before the Clark project visited East-Central Europe I had been to several of the places they visited, including Tallinn and Bucharest. Some scholars who had either declined to participate in the program, or had attended only sporadically, described their skepticism. One wondered if the North American scholars were in search of research materials they could use; another thought that the idea was to help “native” art historians do better art history. In the event, neither of those was true, and I am also aware of several friendships and collaborations that have resulted from the Clark project. There was no colonialist or post-colonialist motivation: no

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one, as far as I know, hoped to learn the latest theories from the “center,” or educate the “margins.” But as in the case of the international travel grant, the philosophic cogency of the Clark project remained unclear. If the purpose of going to Tallinn, and bringing Estonian scholars to Massachusetts, was neither to teach Baltic art historians contemporary art history, nor to find promising new subjects, methods, or theories for North American art history, then it must have been to promote the general collegiality and interest of art history in an international setting, and to establish new connections between individuals and institutions. But as motives, those require elucidation. The travel grant committee saw itself as contributing to the “enrichment” of art history by bringing new scholars to North America; and conversely, they hoped to play a small part in art history’s dissemination outside its historical centers. But why want to increase the “richness” or complexity of art history in this way? Is richness itself a good, without qualification? It seems reasonable to suppose that some art historical practices might count their particular connections and methodological resources as appropriate or necessary, and that there might be many possible kinds of “enrichment” that would be inappropriate or unnecessary. And why aid in the dissemination of a North-­ American style art history? I understand that questions like these were sometimes discussed in the Clark meetings, but it seems to me they would have to be extensively and carefully examined in order to articulate the Clark project. My main concern however is independent of the ways such questions could be determined. What concerns me is that the global diversity of art history is inevitably lessened by such projects. The Clark projects and the travel grant were small in contrast to the size of art history, criticism, and theory. But conceptually they raise a thorny question. If the travel grant had operated on a large scale—say, hundreds of successful applicants each year—it could eventually have had an effect on art history as practiced in North America and elsewhere. The same is true of the Clark projects: if there were dozens of such projects, operating worldwide—as there might plausibly be in the coming generation—they would inevitably lead to a decrease in the varieties of art history in different places. The same issues come up in regard to international publishing ventures. As I mentioned in chapter 1, the journal AIT, Art in Translation has tended to publish essays that are familiar in terms of their leading concepts (the avant-garde, modernisms, post­colonial interests) and interpretive strategies (Lacanian psychoanalysis, Benjamin, Warburg, Rancière). Their subject matter may be unfamiliar to English-language readers, but their form is readily recognizable. There are few journals like AIT, so it can’t be said that it has any effect on the homogenization of art historical writing: but if there were more such journals, that question would become pressing. A parallel example is the Terra Foundation’s interest in Chinese art history. Beginning around 2011, the Terra embarked on a series of exhibitions and lectures in China, as part of its mission to disseminate North American art worldwide. At one point I was

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asked which books of North American art history should be translated into Chinese, and I proposed that the Terra first allocate funds to translate some Chinese scholars’ work on American art into English, so that the Terra scholars could appreciate some of the cultural differences instead of assuming that North American art history is sufficiently homogeneous so that its reception in China would be more or less assured. (For recent developments, see their Institute for the Study of American Art in China center in Nanjing, first reported by Brian T. Allen in the National Review, November 9, 2019.) The travel grant, the Clark programs, AIT, and the Terra Foundation initiative are all related in that they can ultimately not help but produce a more uniform practice of art history worldwide. The same could be said of the general circulation of art historians in organizations like the CAA, CIHA, AICA, AAH, and the ASA (American Society for Aesthetics), although the purpose of the travel grant, the Clark initiative, AIT, and the Terra is more explicitly about “richness.” I mention these issues, at the end of the book, in order to propose that any future projects like the Clark’s might set aside some funds and time to the consideration of what kind of richness or complexity they hope for, why they find richness or complexity appropriate goals, and how they might proceed without leveling the global practices of art history.

2. Varieties of art history There are signs that the discipline of art history recognizes the existence of national and regional ways of practicing art history. The travel grant program had an informal limit of two successful candidates per country, in order to maximize the diversity in terms of nations. That assumes nations have different kinds of art history: otherwise the goal of including as many nations as possible would only be a matter of bookkeeping. It might be possible for the travel grant committee to address different understandings of art history by asking applicants to describe their kinds or styles of art history, or the committee might omit national­ ities from the application forms, so that they could be alert to differences without assigning them to particular regions or nations. More generally, there are studies like Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Trans­ national Discourses and National Frameworks, edited by Matthew Rampley and others (2012), which discusses national variants in art historical practice throughout Europe. I think a goal for the next several decades could be the articulation of characteristics of national art histories along these lines, extending beyond Europe and especially taking into account cities where art history is taught at several institutions, creating a “flavor” or “style”—places like Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, and Seoul.

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3. Writing of interest for art history The Clark Art Institute’s initiatives largely omitted places where art history is not practiced in ways that could facilitate conversations on such things as methodologies, journals, conferences, and university positions. There are still many places in the world where art history is done sufficiently differently so that it may appear as a practice of interest for North Atlantic art history rather than as North Atlantic art history. In Tbilisi, Georgia, for example, there is an art history research institute, the George Chubinashvili National Research Center for Georgian Art History and Heritage Preservation. Scholars there are divided into two groups, one studying medieval architecture and icons, and the other specializing in modern Georgian art, architecture, and theater design. The preponderance of research is traditional archival, stylistic, and iconographic work, what I have called “normal art history”: it is concerned with local issues and has a minimal investment with art theories. In 2015 the Center’s director Miriam Didebulidze suggested I look at an essay by Teimuraz Tumanishvili as an example of the Center’s best work in a European language; it is a thorough and careful stylistic analysis of “Oriental-Christian” architecture in Georgia. (Annual Rapport [sic], 2014, online; Tumanishvili, “Zur Typologie der Orientalisch-Christlichen Baukunst,” 1977; Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing, 1997, new edition 2000, pp. 11–13.) But art history in Georgia is not just distinctive in what it considers appropriate for research. The periodization of modernism is also significantly different than in neighboring European countries. When, in an essay introducing a volume on the painter Esma Oniani (ესმა ონიანი, 1938–1999), the critic Giorgi Khoshtaria says that the “first stage of modern painting (1860s–1940s) is characterized by deepening intensification of language specificity (plane, paint, color, format, etc.),” it is hard to know exactly what “intensification” means, although the context makes it clear that “language specificity” should have been translated “medium specificity.” Still it is difficult to see how this roster of formal criteria can stand for developments that span nearly a century from Impressionism to mid-century abstraction. The “second stage,” which is said to run from the 1950s to the present, “is characterized by broadening or even obliteration” of the boundaries between media. Khoshtaria notes that despite the many changes of the last half-century, painting, in the “first stage” of modernism, is still an ongoing concern: but the examples she cites—“Matisse, Vlaminck, Rouault, Chagall, Soutine, and others”—make it clear that the “first stage” is actually centered on the School of Paris. (Khoshtaria, “Esma Oniani’s Work,” in Esma Oniani, Painting, Drawing, Poetry, 2003, p. 11.) This makes sense in relation to the essay’s context, a volume on the painter Oniani, whose work is partly a response to painters like Soutine; but it might would not be persuasive outside its intended Georgian context. That telescoping of pre-war modernist painting is compatible with the curiously inflated role played by Georgia’s first naïve painter, Niko Pirosmani (ნიკო ფიროსმანი,

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1862–1918). In European museums, naïve painters like Henri Rousseau take up limited wall space, but in Tbilisi a substantial fraction of the ground floor of the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts is given over to Pirosmani, and the reason is that he is both Georgia’s essential naïve painter—as Ignacio Núñez Soler is Paraguay’s, as I mentioned in chapter 8—but Pirosmani is also Georgia’s indispensable modernist. He is both the Rousseau-figure and the Picasso-figure, a conjunction inconceivable in the narratives of western European modernism. The result is that the internal Georgian discourse on Pirosmani and modernist painting is largely incompatible with other understandings of concepts like “naïve,” “modernist,” and “avant-garde.” At the same time, Georgia has produced internationally viable art historians who are seamlessly integrated into the worldwide conversation of North Atlantic art history. The Georgian art scene, too, has the same wide range as countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Syria, or Moldova: a minority of artists are internationally active, while others retain an interest in other modernisms such as the School of Paris. In 2012 Georgia hosted the first Tbilisi Triennial, and I gather it was a successful encounter between some local traditions and an internationalist curatorial initiative. But such interventions make contact with only a small fraction of the art produced in settings like Tbilisi, and the art theory involved is often outside local pedagogical practice. (Henk Slager, the co-curator of the first Tbilisi Triennial, is a theorist of art research in Utrecht; his ideas are radical in relation to most practices in the Apollon Kutateladze Tbilisi State Academy of Arts or the Tbilisi Center of Contemporary Art.) The historiography of Georgian modern art remains very different from other countries’ sense of their histories, and Georgian art history sometimes also reflects that difference. An exchange program like the Clark’s might find it difficult to locate enough art historians in Tbilisi who are already part of the current conversations in North Atlantic art history. Some art historians associated with the Institute do conventional architectural history, which is not of direct interest in contemporary forms of the discipline. Others are specialized in aspects of national Georgian history in ways that do not require international coordination. At first sight, then, Georgia might not appear suitable for a project like the Clark’s. But—unfortunately, from my perspective—there are enough art historians who travel, are engaged with French theory, and who publish in western Europe and North America, to attract the attention of an exchange program or conference. I say “unfortunately” because a Tbilisi conference on global art history, for example, is entirely possible, but that kind of conversation, like the brief appearance of the Biennale, would miss the preponderance of Georgian art historical practices. The interest, and the challenge is to be open to entirely new ways of writing and thinking about art history that will appear, at first—and possibly even on long reflection—to be deficient, misinformed, local, unscholarly, or lacking in points of contact with North Atlantic concerns. When I visited, Georgia had an identifiably different way of doing art history, which was mingled with more international models. I would

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not want to participate in any initiative that did not begin by looking seriously at the non-internationalist practices that are still in the majority.

4. Writing that might potentially be of interest as art history By “might potentially” I mean that the writing appears as an example of art history, but not quite up to whatever standards may be applied. In 2011 there was a conference on religion and art in Tbilisi, organized by Anna Mgaloblishvili, with papers by scholars and graduate students. The general issue was whether or not certain mid-20th century Georgian artists, who worked during a period when religious themes were proscribed, could be considered to have been covertly covertly religious, therefore authentically Georgian. A paper on the modernist Georgian artist David Kakabadze (დავით კაკაბაძე, 1889–1952) for example, argued that spirituality is inherent in the unusual field-patterns that recur in his paintings. The student, Ketevan Tsetskhladze, argued that Kakabadze’s complex, geometric patterns—which are definitely striking, and sometimes nearly abstract—encoded a sense of the land and its deeper meaning. One of Kakabadze’s most often-reproduced paintings, Imeretia (My Mother, 1918), is, in Tsetskhladze’s reading, a “self-sufficient artistic image,” almost “free” of narrative, in which the figure is an “image-symbol of ‘motherhood.’” (Unpublished paper, 2012.) If she had submitted that essay to a journal in Europe or North America, the editor might well have recommended that she look into the possibility of strengthening her argument by interviewing people who had known Kakabadze, or by searching for any criticism of his work, or perhaps by looking for the representation of field patterns in 20th century Georgian literature or poetry. That kind of advice is the same that would be given to art history students in Europe or North America. But I wonder if it would be appropriate: her approach was considered reasonably appropriate and sufficient at the time, and to that extent it might not be apposite to correct or enlarge on it. I doubt there’s a recognizably Georgian way of doing art history in her paper, but I wouldn’t want to assume there isn’t. As Mgaloblishvili’s exhibition demonstrated, the repression of Georgian identity under Stalin took many subtle forms, and the contemporary scholarship that responded to it required other, equally subtle narratives. I will give one last example to indicate how delicate these sorts of questions can become. In this case, I won’t name the author, for reasons that will become clear, but I take it this is an example of a widespread possibility. An art history student in Beijing in fall 2012, was considering applying to North American PhD programs. Her essay was on Chinese photographers in the 1980s; shed used Barthes’s Camera Lucida, in one of the Chinese translations, as a theory source. Her argument was that the work of certain Chinese photographers of that decade can best be understood by applying Barthes’s concept of the punctum. In this case, I do not know if she finally decided to send that

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essay as a writing sample, but for this argument let me suppose she sent it to the editor of a journal like History of Photography for potential publication. The journal’s editor might find the material interesting—in the typical case, the editor wouldn’t know the photographers in question—but she might want Barthes’s concept to be used more critically. In North Atlantic scholarship, Barthes’s book, and especially the punctum, have accumulated a very large literature, and the punctum is no longer used as a straightforward interpretive tool except in beginning students’ essays. So the editor might propose she include a critical reading of the punctum, perhaps citing some particular passage in Camera Lucida. That sort of advice would be unproblematic in a typical university setting, but in this case it is conceivable that it might be at odds with the custom, common in several east Asian countries, of not openly or directly critiquing authors who are taken as authorities or guides. This is a delicate question, because the preponderance of European and American historians who cite authority figures like Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, and others do not include critiques of their work; and it is delicate because there are many counter-examples of work by east Asian scholars that is directly critical of such sources. But it is not implausible that this student’s attitude to Barthes and Camera Lucida was more a product of its cultural context than a professional deficiency. The editor might also ask that the student consider the secondary literature on Barthes. When I wrote my own book on Barthes’s book, I counted over two hundred essays directly on his Camera Lucida, and I lost count of the number of pertinent shorter citations. The secondary literature has reached the point where it has its own history: it took place in waves, first in the 1990s, and then, in with more historiographic awareness, in the past two decades. So it would be entirely reasonable to ask a student born in Europe or the Americas, or studying there, to look at some of that literature and see what might be useful for her interpretation. It would also be normal for a PhD advisor, or a PhD admitting committee, to want the student to situate her own project in relation to that literature, and to say which interpretations seem most cogent to her. However this kind of critique, applied to the student from Beijing, might also run into difficulty. Virtually all of the reception of Barthes is in English and French, with less in German, and smaller amounts in other European languages. As far as I am aware, none of it exists in Chinese. There are some texts on Barthes in Chinese, but the ones I have seen do not engage the secondary literature produced in the West. In effect, Barthes’s book exists by itself in China, without its subsequent history. So to ask the student to take that literature into account is to ask her to bypass the reception of Barthes in her own country, and adopt a reception that has developed elsewhere. That would be possible, and perhaps even advisable—if only for practical reasons, since she wanted to study in North America—but it should probably not be done without acknowledging the problematic nature of the advice to adopt a European and North

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American secondary literature as if it were integral to any full contemporary understanding of Barthes. And finally, the editor might propose that the student do more research, to find out how Barthes was received by artists. Did her photographers read Camera Lucida? What theory texts did they read? What is the history of the several translations of Camera Lucida? Which might have been taught in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, or in the other major art universities? Here the questions are analogous to the ones I put to Tsetskhladze in Tbilisi. To some degree, in Chinese art historical practice these sorts of questions are common, but to some degree it is acceptable for scholars and critics to propose their own readings without consulting other sources of evidence. In China education in art history is mingled with education in art criticism and aesthetics: this is, I think, an enormously interesting and difficult problem, which I mentioned in chapter 6. It means, among other things, that an art historical essay might always also be partly an essay in aesthetic appreciation or criticism, and so the lack of research in this student’s essay might also be a result of her instruction in Beijing, and not a deficiency. I can’t imagine more sensitive issues than these, but I also can’t image issues that are more important for global art history. My proposal here is that working art histo­ rians who encounter texts that appear deficient in references or research, lacking in subtlety or cogency, or insufficiently connected to familiar concepts, concerns, narratives, or modes of argument, might reconsider those judgments. Often a deficiency is just that—an absence, the sort a teacher can correct—but sometimes an absence is an instance of institutional, national, or regional norms, habits, requirements, or expectations. It can be difficult to know when a given characteristic of a text is due to lack of experience or knowledge, and when it reflects a local practice; and it can be even harder to know when to suggest to a student or applicant that some characteristic of their text may be the reflection of a national practice. But if we do not attend so such possibilities we may miss one of the few remaining sources of diversity in the impending single history of art. I will close with a parallel. In international literary fiction, which I considered in chapter 3, novels and short stories are read in part for signs of the country or place in which they were written. In 2012 the freelance writer Ann Morgan read a novel from each of the 195 nations recognized by the UN. The result was a blog and a book Reading the Globe: The World Between Two Covers (2015). At several points Morgan’s choices were books whose authors hoped to they’d be translated and disseminated in the international Anglophone publishing world—in other words the novels were written with the global market in mind. Some of those novels were generic in style and only “exotic” in content: they were the kind of internationalist fiction that the writer Tim Parks has criticized. But other books Morgan read were genuinely quirky—odd in unpredictable, partly unassimilable ways—and that was precisely their interest. Such differences

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were read by Morgan as signs of their countries of origin: she could “read the globe” by attending to unexpected new meanings, the kind that fiction may be ideally suited to convey—apparent novelties that are not just matters of unfamiliar surnames, places, or customs, but signal unpredictable differences from modern and contemporary English-language European and North American novels. Publishers of international literary fiction value such departures from the familiar norms of writing. Translators try to be faithful to idioms, strange ways of writing dialogue, unusual uses of grammar, peculiar narrative arcs, and unexpected choices of words or phrases; editors of international literary fiction will not often help their authors to turn their books into internationally standard novels. In this sense literary fiction is a challenging model for art history: can we also learn to appreciate local differences? I hope so: otherwise I think that within a generation the world will have only one academically acceptable way of writing the histories of all the world’s art.

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Writing Itself

As I wrote in the Introduction, this will be my last book on art history. I still believe, as I did in 2004, that the worldwide spread of art history is the most important problem facing the field. It’s a nearly impossible subject to comprehend or conceptualize adequately, and therefore it is also one of the most interesting problems the discipline faces. Realistically, I don’t think the three principal arguments I make in this book will have much purchase. Naturally, I hope that readers will find different things in this book useful, but overall, when I consider the shape and directions of art history worldwide, I don’t anticipate that what I have to say here will have much effect. Overwhelmingly, the literature is optimistic about its theories and its future freedoms. Experiments in curation, new biennales, residencies, collaborations, and new theoretical interests preoccupy the art world and make it seem as if North Atlantic art history’s narratives, values, and forms of argument will naturally diminish or recede. (Among many examples, see the Australian voices in Three Reflections on Contemporary Art His­ tory, edited by Nicholas Croggon and Helen Hughes, 2014.) As I said at the end of chapter 8, it is certainly the case that in the long run—over the span of a century, say—the discipline will change so much that the problems I have been considering in this book will seem empty. I think that change is happening faster than some scholars imagine, and that is why I can’t easily engage conservative, discipline-bound histories of art history. But we are not free of the past of our discipline: North Atlantic art history is very much at the center of what gets written under the name of art history. Saying that multiple modernisms won’t let us escape from the master narratives, or that theorizations of the local or glocal aren’t stable alternatives to wider or older narratives, or that studying the geography or socioeconomics of art isn’t an effective way to reimagine art’s other histories—saying those things won’t deflect the great majority of writers whose work is framed by more optimistic theorizations. Even decoloniality, postnationalism, the posthuman, and object-oriented ontology—to name four

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of the discipline’s recent concerns—are conceived as de facto solutions to problems that concerned older forms of the discipline. The organic, unpredictable growth of scholarship is taken to be enough to free the next generation from the ideologies and assumptions of the past. I don’t think so. The same optimism swept visual studies when it was first instituted in the late 1980s, as Michael Holly recounted in 2015, but visual studies remains dependent on forms of argument, critical values, and even the principal narratives of an older art history. (See her comments in Farewell to Visual Studies, 2015.) Thinking about the forms of art historical argument has led me away from an interest in speaking about art itself (in contributing to the history of any particular art), and it has also led me away from an interest in theorizing on art (in producing a new theory that would account for any particular art). Hal Foster once remarked, speaking of my contribution to the fall 2009 October questionnaire on “the contemporary,” that I had become a “meta-theorist.” For me, it’s more a matter of attending to the writing of art history, theory, and criticism, instead of practicing any one of those three. Since 2013 I’ve been teaching seminars with titles like “Experimental Writing on Art,” involving close readings of texts by art historians, from Leo Steinberg to Alexander Nemerov. In these seminars we read art historians’, critics’, and theorists’ texts as if they were serious writing—as if they were intended to be read for expressive value as well as reference, or for language as well as content. This exercise produces a strange vertigo. The people who write art history, theory, and criticism are all schooled in Barthes and Derrida, by which I mean we acknowledge that writing is not just a tool of communication—that it is immensely complex, intricate beyond the best of us, capable of engulfing the our intentions and undermining whatever we intend to say. We know this, and we teach the texts in which Derrida, Lyotard, Cixous, and Barthes write on visual art (see chapter 3 for this). And yet we continue to write as if we control our writing, as if our writing is best when it is plain, clear, and persuasive. We adhere to the discoveries of poststructuralism, but we write as if the only guides to writing were written by Cicero and Quintilian (the codifiers of qualities like “plain,” “clear,” and “persuasive”). There is a disconnect between our awareness of 21st century literary criticism and our simple classroom pedagogy—repeated when we come to edit essays and collections—which asks only that art historical writing be plain, clear, and per­ suasive. There is another disconnect between our discipline’s ongoing fascination with figures like Derrida, Barthes, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, and Aby Warburg, and the distance between their experiments and our generally safe and conventional writing. Our methodology and historiography seminars hold up an ideal of inventive, idiosyncratic writing. Dissertations are written on Warburg and other figures, and graduate students are expected to cite their work, but no one thinks of being anywhere near as adventurous as they were.

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Young art historians write what they hope are viable academic papers, with abstracts, introductions, and signposted arguments, supported by archival research, trailed by footnotes, presented at conferences, revised for edited volumes, and published by university presses. We confine the “newness” of our scholarly practice to the art we describe and the theories that help us describe it. A more radical engagement with the new would involve more than just the pouring of new art and theory into narrative vessels that are now not only quite old but deeply stained by the very Euramerican, postcolonial interests that we often wish to question. There is a tremendous amount waiting to be written by historians who find alternatives to the forms of argument that art history prefers (chapter 4). Not the claims themselves: the logical forms of praise or devaluation, the strategies for including or excluding particular art practices. Even more is waiting to be explored by art historians who use theories taken from outside the usual French poststructuralist mine (chapters 3 and 7). Local and regional ways of writing, and especially the apparent deficiencies or inadequacies in some practices of art history, need to be carefully attended to, preserved, and nourished. Art history’s principal overconfidence is that it will naturally ramify and transform with the influx of new theories, inventive acts of curation, and “unfamiliar” artworks and artists. Those are the discipline’s branches and limbs, the flowers, of art history, but they do not affect its trunk or roots. Diminishingly small regional and national differences in writing are, I believe, the incremental remaining diversity in our discipline.

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It’s a common convention in German-language conferences to have one person take notes and summarize the lectures at the end. The idea isn’t to produce a consumable list of “learning outcomes” or a logical reduction of the entire proceedings, but to facilitate discussion. I put this list here at the end of the book, instead of in the Introduction, because it isn’t an outline of the book but a set of ideas that might hopefully lead on to new conversations. In that spirit, here are some of the positions I take in this book. 1. It is useful to distinguish the study of writing about art from the study of art. (Chapter 1, §2) 2. More than some other specialties, the study of art historical writing is dependent on the sort of privilege associated with larger first-world institutions, so it has an inherent bias. (Chapter 1, §§1, 3) 3. One thing that is slowing the impending uniformity of art historical writing is ­uneven access to the internet and to paid databases. Uneven access is far more prevalent than the international art world sometimes imagines. (Chapter 1, §4) 4. Open-access art history is generally something I support, but as it becomes more prevalent it will contribute to the homogenization of art historical writing. (Chapter 1, §5) 5. There is no consensus on just how similar, or how incommensurate, art historical practices are. This hampers discussions of the state of art historical writing worldwide. (Chapter 1, §6). 6. The lingua franca of art history is English, and that is sometimes presented as primarily a geopolitical problem, or as a problem that has to do with literacy. In prac-

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 Main Points

tical terms, its main effect is something different: scholars who can read and speak English well enough to participate internationally often cannot write well enough to advance their careers by publishing. (Chapter 1, §7) 7. The terms Western and non-Western are problematic, but the nature of the difficulty they pose is different than it is often imagined to be. They are overdetermined and often unhelpful, but the deeper problem is that each is valued differently in the “West” and in the “East,” and that prevents some conversations about them from even getting started. (Chapter 2, §2) 8. The coinage “North Atlantic” is a compromise: it is a way of naming a kind of art historical writing without reducing it to individual institutions, publications, or scholars, and also without implying it is uniformly distributed worldwide. It’s a flawed expression, but something like it is needed: otherwise the writing I am trying to address is unrealistically assigned to just a small number of people, or else it is unhelpfully assumed to be everywhere. (Chapter 2, §3) 9. In considering whether art historical writing is becoming more uniform worldwide, it can help to study comparative cases such as art criticism, art theory, art practice, and other genres such as the novel. (Chapter 3) 10. Art criticism is very much understudied, in part because its international organization does not study it, and in part because it is not often translated—so it exists in scores of languages. (Chapter 3, §1) 11. Art theory is strongly homogeneous around the world. It depends nearly exclusively on a definable group of French poststructural thinkers. Theorists from other parts of the world (for example, Chinese theorists) are virtually unknown outside their countries. It is weird this doesn’t bother anybody. (Chapter 3, §2) 12. Studio art instruction is generally not uniform around the world. Even the practice-­ led PhD programs for artists are developing regional variants. (Chapter 3, §3) 13. Art Since 1900 needs to be taken seriously in relation to worldwide practices of art historical writing. In North America and Europe, it is sometimes said to be a flawed product of a certain group of art historians; but it is the most reflective and critical history of the last 100 years, and in that sense it has no competitors worldwide. (Chapter 4) 14. Art Since 1900 is an example of a kind of art historical practice that imagines itself as defined by methodologies, which however do not need to be enumerated, arranged, or otherwise conceptualized. (Chapter 4, §2A)

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Main Points

15. I propose Art Since 1900 should not be read for information—it shouldn’t be used as a textbook. Instead it should be studied for the forms of its arguments, and for the concepts it privileges, because those forms and concepts are repeated throughout “North Atlantic” art history, not just to the art included in Art Since 1900. I propose reading strategies of Art Since 1900 as a kind of field guide to North Atlantic writing. (Chapter 4, §2) 16. One of the commonest forms of argument in Art Since 1900, and in “North Atlantic” practice more generally, is the equation of negative judgments and positive valuations, for example when a sculpture of Matisse’s is praised because of its “necessary incompleteness.” (Chapter 4, §2D) 17. Another common form of argument collects opposing qualities of works (binaries) and proposes that interesting work holds them in “suspension” or in a “structure of ambivalence,” rather than resolving them. This is also used in essays on cultural practices very different from the ones in Art Since 1900. (Chapter 4, §2D) 18. The idea of central and peripheral art practices is crucial for writing on art practices worldwide. It is often assumed that the margins will eventually expand and overwrite the center, or that the distinction should not be entertained at all. I find both assumptions Eurocentric in the specific sense that they are both written by scholars who work and speak from centers. (Chapter 2, §4) 19. Part of the difficulty in theorizing center and periphery is that they are understood in various ways. That has led to discourses that are unresolved because they use competing and conflated ideas of both terms. Global Conceptualism is an example. (Chapter 2, §4) 20. Regional, provincial, and parochial can be helpful terms because they can name levels of awareness of global practices. A regionalist artist, in this sense, knows about art beyond her region; a provincial artist may know, but her practice may depend on not engaging art outside her region. (Chapter 2, §5) 21. There are at least six strategies currently used to try to meliorate the distinction between center and periphery. One is to consider the movement of art and ideas as circulations rather than as radial movements to and from a center. I do not think that an emphasis on circulation resolves the presence of the center and periphery. (Chapter 5, §1, and Chapter 6, §2) 22. Partly this is because it is difficult to form an adequate notion of the transnational perspective necessary for comprehending circulations rather than centers and peripheries. Some scholars are skeptical of the possibility of transnational comparisons altogether. (Chapter 5, §1; see the list (A) through (I))

211

 Main Points

23. There have been many efforts (at least thirteen, in my count) to rethink belatedness as a way of leveling the imbalance of center and periphery. Some scholars substitute nonhierarchical concepts such as affinity, resonance, or Deleuze’s rhizome; others emphasize the self-reflective nature of marginal practices, or work to “provincialize” the center. I do not think any of these have succeeded in producing narratives that are free of the magnetic pull of the center. (Chapter 5, §2) 24. There have also been attempts to avoid problems of center and periphery by changing the subject of art historical interest from the visual art object to its socioeconomic context: its conditions of production and reception, its place in the market, its position in institutions. These approaches can be fruitful but I think they become counter-intuitive when they bypass visual appearances in the name of avoiding aesthetic value—because then it’s not clear why the scholar is studying visual objects and not, say, products of commerce. (Chapter 5, §3, and Chapter 8, §5) 25. Another way to avoid the inequalities of center and periphery is to focus only on the local: write about your specialty, and not about its connections to wider themes. A source of difficulty here is the range of meanings that have been assigned to the concept of the local. It has been imagined as a phenomenological category, outside history; as something that is unique in the way an individual is unique; and as something that has its own logic, different from the logics of wider regions, of capitalism, or of the global (the “glocal” is one such formulation). (Chapter 5, §4, and Chapter 7, §1) 26. Theories of multiple modernities attempt to reframe the biases endemic to center and periphery by proposing modernities happened in overlapping and multiple contexts. I am not convinced by these mainly because the logic of modernism tends to be repeated in each new context, and because modernism’s logic was always universal, there is a mismatch between the hope that modernisms can be multiplied and the artists’ own self-descriptions. (Chapter 5, §5) 27. Art historians have experimented with different ways of writing about modernist art outside western Europe and North America. The most common is to “discover” “new” avant-garde moments in peripheral locations, like Tristan Tzara’s dad practice in Romania. The problem with that particular strategy is that the “discovery” is actually only the recognition of something that is already known. A genuinely avant-garde practice would not appear as such. (Chapter 8, §1) 28. It can be tempting, in writing about a modernist artist outside western Europe or North America, to use the formula “the x of y,” as in “the Cézanne of Hungary.” In order to avoid this, some art historical account rely on the local understanding of

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Main Points

the artist’s practice (which might not include Cézanne as an influence). The problem with this approach is that the local narrative can be difficult to connect to wider narratives, and the account can become an ethnographic or biographic description rather than an historical explanation. (Chapter 8, §3) 29. There have also been attempts to look outside the art world for models to replace center and periphery. A few art historians have looked at evolutionary theory, neurobiology, linguistics, and other fields. Those are all promising, I think, but inchoate. (Chapter 5, §5) 30. My own attempt to find a different way of writing about center and periphery was to compare the ways the past appears to people in different times and places. That seemed especially even-handed, but I no longer think of it as neutral at all: it is more like one of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s hidden sources of Eurocentrism. (Chapter 6, §1) 31. There have been interesting debates in art history over the use of “unfamiliar” indigenous concepts. Specialized terms are necessary to capture the grain of the art practice that’s being studied, but the larger concepts (space, time, texture, material) are invariably words that come from Greek and Latin roots. So far it has seemed inadvisable, unnecessary, or impractical to use “unfamiliar” concepts in place of the fundamental vocabulary for talking about art—but diversity, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism all suggest art historians should consider “unfamiliar” indigenous concepts as a foundational critical vocabulary. (Chapter 7, §1) 32. The glossary concept is a way of navigating across cultural divides. The idea is to redefine basic terms, such as “cubism” or “surrealism,” for each new nation or region. (Chapter 7, §2) 33. If we are going to be sensitive to cultural differences, we should try not only to adopt unfamiliar concepts, and to be open to redefining our most basic concepts, but also to employing theories that are not European or American. French poststructuralist theory is used, anomalously, to interpret art of any and all periods (see point 11, above). We could consider art theories from 16th c. Persia, or 12th c. India, for example, not just to interpret art of those times and places, but to interpret any art. This hasn’t been done yet, but our own rhetoric of diversity implies it should be. (Chapter 7, §2) 34. One way of imagining the diversity of art historical writing is to think of it as a partly unexplored territory. The undiscovered parts are different ways of writing art history, not yet recognized as art history. In my experience, there are no undiscovered continents of art historical writing. There is interesting and compelling writing done in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Uganda, Indonesia, and elsewhere,

213

 Main Points

but I find that “eccentric” or relatively isolated texts tend to appear as material for art historical scholarship (sources, texts that can be used to help write art historical accounts), rather than as art history. (Chapter 9) 35. I think the actual remaining source of diversity in art historical writing is not “un­ discovered” discourses and traditions, but something much more familiar. Diversity, I think, is to be found in all the many ordinary inadequacies of writing that are submitted to journals, to conferences, and to admissions and hiring committees— problems with style, argument, evidence, and citation, the sort that can either cause a committee to reject an applicant, or prompt an editor to ask the author to revise their text. The world is full of art historical writing that isn’t appropriate for The Art Bulletin or the PhD program at Yale or the next CIHA meeting. These apparent inadequacies can reflect simple absences that can be rectified. But they are often reflections of regional and national differences in what counts as good art historical writing. They are, I think, are the only remaining source of actual diversity left in our discipline. (Chapter 9)

214

Index

Abrams Books  46 academia.edu  28, 72 Academia Sinica  28 Adorno, Theodor W.  169–70 affinities 123 Ahmad ibn Mir–Munshi, Qadi  156 AICA  64–73, 196 AIT, see Art in Translation Akcan, Esra  21 Algerian art  160 Alloa, Emmanuel  156 ambulatio 156 Amherst College  46 Ando, Mina  14 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation  33 Anglo-American 47 Antonova, Clemena  173 Appadurai, Arjun  41, 127 Araeen, Rasheed  127 Argentina 172 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki  28 Art and Architecture Thesaurus 26 Art and Globalization  20–21, 49, 120–22, 127–28, 132, 137, 150 Art & Language  55 Art Bulletin, The  9, 35, 46–47, 166; - theorists in a sample issue  72 - art criticism  63–71 art education, see art instruction Arte & Ensaios 35 Artforum 70 Art history, crowd sourcing  15 - diversity in  9–10, 207, 214 §35

- global 17–20 - social 127–31 - texts useful as and for  193, 213–14 §34 - world 19 see also North Atlantic art history; writing Art History (journal)  9, 35, 46–47, 166 - questionnaire on decolonizing art history  59–62 Artibus et historiae 46 art informel 161 art instruction  77–82 Art in Translation  34, 197 art journalism  93 Artl@s  35, 54, 114 art market  19 Art Since 1900  10, 44, 95–111, 141, 210–11 §§13–17; - escape from  145 Artsjournal 26 art theory  71–77, 210 §11 see also theories as/ for distinction, see Art history, texts useful as and for Ashgate Publishing  46 Auerbach, Erich  83 Australian art, see Yolŋu Matha avant-garde  120–27, 134, 167–70 - Westernness of  170–72 Badiou, Alain  50, 59, 71 Bakoš, Ján  14, 19–20 Bal, Mieke  23 Bann, Stephen  30, 56

215

 Index

Barker, Heather  58 Barthes, Roland  71–76 passim, 201–203, 206 Baxandall, Michael  66, 154 Beke, László  65 Belarus  33, 65 belatedness 120–27 Belting, Hans  22, 35, 66, 72, 118 Benson, Madalen  78 Berkeley, University of California  9, 46 Betancourt, Diana  71 Bhabha, Homi  50, 66, 76, 125 Białostocki, Jan  22 bijutsu 155 Bildvetenskap 35 Bildwissenschaft  32, 34 biological account of art  125–26, 142–43 Blinder, Olga  14, 193 Boehm, Gottfried  76 Boğaziçi University  28 Bois, Yve-Alain  102–108 passim books, access to  25 Boubnova, Iaroslava  14 boundaries 134–35 Bourriaud, Nicolas  71, 114–15 - radicant 185 Bredekamp, Horst  31 Brejc, Tomaž  182–84 Brzyski, Anna  40, 90 Buchloh, Benjamin  56, 97, 99, 102–109 passim, 116 Buck-Morss, Susan  20, 23, 71, 128 Buddensieg, Andrea  22 Bürger, Peter  44 Bulgaria 173 Butler, Judith  34, 71, 125 Bydler, Charlotte  14, 63 Bydzovská, Lenka  14 Cahill, Jim  118 Cambridge University  23 Cameroon  25, 53 Camnitzer, Luis  55–57, 71, 75 canons 39–40; - hyper-canon, counter canon, shadow canon 89–90 Cao, Yiqiang  47 Cape Town, University of  32 capitalism 10

216

Carmen Ramirez, Maria  56 Čarný, Juraj  64 Carrier, David  21–22 Casanova, Pascale  88 centers of art  48–57, 69–70, 113–20, 161, 211 §§18, 21 Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing  48, 81, 159 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  41, 50, 118, 123–24, 139 Chang, Ningsheng  75 Chicago, University of  9, 23 Chile  158, 166 China National Academy, Hangzhou  48, 81, 159 Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History 42 China  201–202; language  37, 154, 157; painting  146–49, 159 Circulations  15, 54–57, 135–36, 157, 211 §§21–22 - critique of  113–27, 149–51 Clark Art Institute  196–200 Clark, John  19, 47, 122, 124–25, 127, 131 - Asian Modernities 142–43 - Modern Asian Art  178–82, 187 Clark, T. J.  43 Clifford, James  125 College Art Association  26, 198 Collier, Delinda  56 Collings, Matthew  99 Columbia University  46 complexity 125 concepts of art  153–62 conceptual art  44, 54–57 Congo, Democratic Republic of the  24 Contemporary Aesthetics 26 Cordero Reiman, Karen  14 Cornell University  9 Courtauld Institute of Art  9, 25, 46 craft 171 Crainic, Adriana and Liviu  14 Cras, Sophie  54–55 Critical Terms for Art History  154, 157 critique 107–110 Croatia  36, 51 Crowther, Paul  173 cubism  40, 43, 49, 103, 106, 168, 213 - in Chile  158, 166 - in Czechoslovakia  158–59

Index

Cunha Leal, Joana  13 curation 70–71 Curtius, Ernst  83 Dadi, Iftikhar  21, 66, 124, 126, 128–34 passim - on the avant-garde  122 Damrosch, David  85–91 passim Danto, Arthur  44 Darboven, Hanne  162–63 dars·an 155 Davidson, Donald  122 Davis, Oliver  73 Davis, Whitney  22–23, 113, 119, 160, 191 decolonial theory  59–62 Deleuze, Gilles  48, 50, 67, 73–75, 114, 125, 184–85, 194, 212 Demos, T. J.  19 Dempsey, Amy  104 Denmark  28, 36 Derrida, Jacques  50, 59, 71–75, 96, 164, 206 - considered for art history  194 Desai, Jigna  47 developing countries  24–25 Didi-Huberman, Georges  50, 71, 196 Ding, Ning  75 discursive fields  27–28 distant reading  88 diversity, see art history, diversity in Dossin, Cathérine  15, 54–57, 114–17 Duara, Prasenjit  60 Duggan, Joseph  26 Duncan, Alisdair  76 Dundee, University of  46 East Anglia, University of  19, 41 Eco, Umberto  25 Eikones 34 Elk, Ger van  55 English language  31–37, 209 §6 Eötvös Loránd University  28 Eritrea 24 Escobar, Ticio  64, 75 Espinosa, Lina  13 Estonia  24, 36, 196–97 Euramerican  44, 47, 182 Eurocentrism  9, 44, 47, 49, 82, 128, 140, 145, 196, 211 n.18, 211 §18, 213 §30 European Humanities University  33 European University of Moldova  28

Evans, Siân  26 Eysteinsson, Astradur  128 Facebook  15, 24, 27 Farago, Claire  40–41, 57, 114 Farver, Jane  56 Feld, Steven  156 Feldman, Hannah  160 Feng, Youlan  73 fiction 82–93 Finland  13, 24, 36 Fiorentini, Erna  157 for/as distinction, see Art history, texts useful as and for Fordham University Press  46 Foster, Hal  9, 33, 44, 75, 99–109 passim, 116, 171, 196, 206 Foucault, Michel  27, 50 - prevalence of  71 free indirect discourse  87 Fried, Michael  9, 43 Frost, Charlotte  26 Furió, Vicenç  32, 48, 76 Galison, Peter  142–43 Gao, Minglu  75 Gaonkar, Dilip  66, 76, 141 Gardner, Belinda Grace  66 Gass, William  7 Gazi, Xenia  41 gender theory  34 Geng, Youzhuang  75 Georgia (country)  200–201 German art history, ignored in Anglophone scholarship 32 Getty Research Institute  26, 33 Ghana 32 Gilroy, Paul  47 Giunta, Andrea  20 Global Conceptualism  54–57, 123, 211 §19 Global South  26 globalization, aesthetic of  29 - of art criticism  63–71 see also art history, global glocal  48, 137 glossary concept  158–63 Godzich, Vlad  96 Gombrich, E. H.  7, 33, 42, 47, 59 Goodman, Nelson  122

217

 Index

Gould, Stephen Jay  125 Grafton, Anthony  36 Grant, Catherine  59 Green, Charles  58, 120, 127–28, 131, 138, 140–41 Greet, Michelle  115 Gregor, Richard  14–15, 64–65, 158–63 passim Grey Room  45, 74 Groys, Boris  160 Gruzinski, Serge  135 guai 154 Guilbaut, Serge  48 Gutai 8 Hacking, Ian  130 Harris, Claire  159 Harvard University  9, 23 - Open Access Project  26 Haskell, Francis  47 Heidegger, Martin  73, 155 Heidelberg, University of  26 Hlavácek, Ludvik  14 Hofstadter, Douglas  143 Holly, Michael Ann  20–22, 27, 72, 118–19, 121, 149, 167, 206 homonymic curtain  158–60 hua 154 Hughes, Henry Meyric  69 Huyssen, Andreas  22 hybridity 8 Iliad of X 126 Inaga, Shigemi  14, 20, 66, 154, 191 - reaction to Le Japon des Avant-­ gardes 170–72 incommensurability  30, 118–19, 121–22, 149, 157, 209 §5 institutional critique  127–31, 178–82 International Association of Art Critics, see AICA internet, access to  15, 23–29 InVisible Culture 26 Iowa, University of  46 Iran  22, 33, 78 Ireland 52 Is Art History Global?  20–21, 156 Italy 52 Jain, Jyotindra  13 Jarzombek, Mark  21

218

Japanese art  8, 155, 161, 169–72, 178–82, 187 Johnson, Samuel  162 Jones, Caroline  19, 22, 63, 137 journals, see individual titles Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice  15, 54–57, 114–17 JSTOR 24 Juan Seiller, Adelaida de  64 Jullien, François  72, 75 Juneja, Monica  134–36, 156–57 Kant, Immanuel  71–76 passim, 119, 173, 190 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta  21, 23, 54, 57, 66, 113–23 passim, 149 Kazakhstan  33, 53 Kelly, Joan  14 Kesner, Ladislav  35, 118 kotoba 155 Krauss, Rosalind  9, 44, 67, 72, 97, 99, 102–105 passim, 108 Kritische Berichte 134–35 Kubišta, Bohumil  159 Kunstgeschichte 19 Kunstwissenschaft 45 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi  81 Kyrgyzstan 33 Lacan, Jacques  71–72, 75–76, 197 Lahoda, Vojtech  14 Lal, Vinay  164 languages 31–37 Laruelle, François  72 Lassalle, Hélène  66–67 Latour, Bruno  72 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude  72 Leeds, University of  9 Lee, Pamela  30, 97 Lee, Yil  64 Leiden, University of  41 Leopold Museum, Vienna  187–89 LeWitt, Sol  162 Lezra, Jacques  83, 93 Linapp, Peeter  14 Ling, Min  74 Lippard, Lucy  55 local, the  131–38, 172–75 Louvre Abu Dhabi  123 Luis Brea, José  76, 97 Lund University  46

Index

ma  155, 157 Macció Romulo  172 Macedonia 24 Makerere University  21, 81 Malabou, Catherine  72 Mansbach, Steven  42, 58, 120 margins 48–57 Margolin, Victor  21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology  26 Massumi, Brian  72–73 master narratives  39–40, 61 Mazlish, Bruce  18–19, 82 McEvilley, Thomas  123 McLean, Ian  61 Medina, Cuauhtémoc  76 Meillassoux, Quentin  72 Mersmann, Birgit  34 methodologies, see theories; art theory métissage 135 MFA programs  77–82 Mgalobeli, Anna  14 Mgaloblishvili, Anna  201 Michaelis School of Art  32, 80–81 Michaux, Henri  75 Mignolo, Walter  59–60 minor literatures  48, 67 Mirzoeff, Nicholas  160 Mitchell, W.J.T.  71–72 - reception in Germany  34 Mitter, Partha  121, 130 modernism, self-descriptions of  122–23, 129, 139–41 - Westernness of  170–72 modernities, multiple  138–41, 165 monad 74 Monteil, Annemarie  64 Moretti, Franco  87–91 passim Morgan, Ann  203–204 Morocco 41 Mostaganem, Université de  28 Moxey, Keith  15, 20, 22, 118–21 passim, 149, 166 - on multiple modernisms  139–41 Mukherjee, Parul  22 multilingualism 36–37 Muñoz, José  72 Musvic, Victoria  14 n+1  74, 91–92 narratives, see master narratives

National University of Singapore  46 Nelson, Robert  154 Netherlands 36 New Guinea  156 New York University  25 Niger 24 Nigeria 25 nomad 74 Nonsite  46, 74 non-Western  40–44, 134, 154, 210 §7 - concepts  157; narrative definition of 42–43 North Atlantic art history  8–9; 40–44, 210 §8 - definition of  44–48 - escaping from  145–46, 182 - norms of  25 Norway  14, 34, 36, 80 novels 82–93 Núñez Soler, Ignacio  165 O’Brien, Elaine  21 Obrist, Hans Ulrich  71 October  9–10, 44–48, 95–105 passim, 206 Onians, John  15, 19, 22, 113–14 On Kawara  55 online resources, see internet, access to open-access, see internet, access to Orfila, Jorgelina  14 Orientalism  72, 178, 180–81 originality 120–27 Owuor, Yvonne  86 Oxford Art Journal 45 Oxford Art Online 24 Oxford University  23 Oxford University Press  45 Pakistan 122 Palavandishvili, Nini  66 Panofsky, Erwin  22, 33, 118, 138 Paraguay 165–66 Parks, Tim  83–87, 203 parochialism 58–59 Partisan Canons 32 Patel, Sujata  93, 138, 140 Pavlíčková, Katerina  14 Peng, Feng  75 Penn State Press  46 periphery  48–57, 69–70, 113–20, 161, 211 §§18, 21

219

 Index

Perspective (INHA) 46 Peru 164 Pfisterer, Ulrich  41 PhDs in studio art  79–82 Philosophy East and West 73 Picasso, Pablo  102–103, 123 Pichler, Wolfram  14 pingdan 154 Pinto dos Santos, Mariana  13 Piotrowski, Piotr  41, 44, 55–56, 65–66, 116, 131, 160–61 Planas, Esther  76 Poland  14, 44, 51, 56, 65, 161, 167 Pollock, Griselda  9 postcolonial turn  29 postmodernism 44 Power Institute  45 Powers, Martin  113, 121 Prestel Publishing  46 Preziosi, Donald  57, 71, 114 Price, Dorothy  59 primitivism 123 Princeton University  9, 23, 45–46 Princeton University Press  46 provincialism 58–59 Purdue University  57 Purtle, Jennifer  15 Qigu, Jiang  13 Quiles, Daniel  56–57, 172 radicant 185 Ragnarsson, Hjálmar  14 Rampley, Matthew  19–20, 22, 35, 66, 198 Rancière, Jacques  59, 71–75, 125, 190, 194–96 passim Randeria, Shalini  141 Redfield, Marc  96 regionalism 58–59 Renmin University, Beijing  78 research resources, access to  23–25 Revista de História da Arte 26 rhizomes 184–85 Ricoeur, Paul  163 Riegl, Alois  19 Robertson, Roland  137 Rogoff, Irit  69 Russia 25

220

Saad Dhalab, Université  29 sabbatical 52 Sage Publications  46 Schneider, Alexandra  34 science, see biological account of art Scott, Victoria H.F.  26–27 Seachange 26 Serbia 24 Shabout, Nada  70, 167 Shen, Yubing  75 Shields, David  83–84 Shiff, Richard  30, 154 Shin’yaku Kegonkyō Ongi Shiki 164 Si, Han  75 Singapore 122 Siskind, Mariano  90–91 Skotnes, Pippa  14 Slager, Henk  80 Slovakia 168 Slovenia  24, 173–77, 182–84 socio-economic analyses, see art history, social Smith, Terry  21–22, 29–30, 58–59, 66, 70, 97, 113, 117 Smrekar, Andrei  176 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail  70 South Africa  32, 52–53, 59–60 Soviet Social Realism  160 space  155, 158 Spain 24 Spivak, Gayatri  76 - use of French poststructural theory  164 Sprung, Joachim  76 Stallabrass, Julian  19, 88 Stanford University  23 Storr, Robert  97, 99–100 Strauss, Thomas  64 studio art, see art instruction subaltern 48 Summers, David  19–20, 23, 119, 156 Sundaram, Vivan  13 Šušnik, Tugo  14 Sussex, University of  9 Swales, John  27 Sweden  14, 34, 36, 80 Szczerski, Andrzej  14, 66 Szipőcs, Krisztina  14 Taiwan 65 Taruskin, Richard  95–96

Index

Tate Modern bookstore  76 Teja Bach, Friedrich  14 Terra Foundation  196–97 Texte zur Kunst  9, 45 theories  102–103, 163–64 see also art theory Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts 30 Therborn, Göran  76 Third Text 128–29 Tiampo, Ming  126–28, 133, 161, 170 Tibet 159 time 158 Togo 53 Tokyo Geidai  78 Tomii, Reiko  56, 123, 126 Törmä, Minna  13 transcultural  123, 127, 135–36, 165, 180 transnational perspective  117–18, 211 §22 Treier, Heie  14, 36–37, 76 Trinity College Dublin  46 Tsai, Raylin  74 Tsinghua University, Beijing  81 Turkey 41 Twitter 27 Umění  35, 46 United Arab Emirates  70 Universitatea Naţională de Arte  77 universities, inequalities among  23–25 see also individual universities University of Minnesota Press  46 Uruguay  14, 44, 56, 60 Valiavicharska, Zhivka  13–15 van Damme, Wilfried  18, 21 Veiga, Leonor  73, 76 Vella, Raphael  14 Vermeulen, Timotheus  23 Vlček, Tomaš  14 Visual Culture and Gender 26 Walkowitz, Rebecca  85 Wang, Nanming  75

Warburg, Aby  33 Wark, McKenzie  77 Warren, Austin  83 Watkins, Alex  26 Wee, C.J. Wan–Ling  121–22 Weiss, Rachel  56–57 Wellek, René  83 Werckmeister, Karl  116 Western  40–44, 49, 210 §7 - narrative definition of  42–43, 212–13 §28 Wilson, Sarah  64 Woermann, Karl  19 Wollens, Peter  54 Wood, Christopher  191 Woodfield, Richard  19–20 world art history, see art history, world “World Lite”  91–92 world literature, see novels writing 205–207 - not taught in art history  11–12 - study of  19–21 Xheka, Anja  67 “x of y” formula, see Western, narrative ­definition of Yale University  9, 23, 45 Yale University Press  46–47 Yang, Huiling  75 Yanyuan, Zhang  193–94 Ybysheva, Gulzhan  14 Yirrkala 61–62 Yolŋu Matha  62, 155–56 Zagazig University  28 Zalamea Fajardo, Patricia  13 Zhang, Eager  73 Zhou, Yan  75 Zhu, Qingsheng  75 Zijlmans, Kitty  15, 21–22, 113 Žižek, Slavoj  75 Zrzavý, Jan  168–70 Zwickl, András  14

221