On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Bertrand Clavez wrote: > Reducing art historians to the few world famous curators is to reduce art > world to the few international artists that earns several millions of $ a > year. > Luckly enough, both are much wider than that.
The base of the artworld pyramid is broad indeed... > > has there ever been a "radical art historian?" [Are they all > > essentially failed artists?] Pick a card, any card. > Do you mean a "radical art" historian or a radical "art historian"? And what > could that mean? In what term could an art historian be radical? > Politically? methodologically?Would a marxist art history be radical for > example? Or would it be radical only by choosing radical art movements to > study? The marxist historian would radical because for once, the political bias would be stated upfront. > Besides, what do we do with all these radical artists who writes > historical texts (i.e. Dick Higgins, Emmett Williams, and the like)? Are > they failed artists? Is Duchamp, when building his own collection for the > museum, considering that collectors are in fact painters, is a failed artist > or a radical art historian? They all fail to prevent centrist institutions from divesting their art -- what's worse, they encourage the abuse. > Can Aby Warburg, when leaving his european comfort to travel in the navajo > tribes in the begining of the XXth Century, be considered radical? Or is he > radical beacause of his very particuliar way of making art history through > his Mnemosyne device? The Photo-Album. > Honnestly, I don't have the answers to these questions, but they might help > to explain what I wanted to say: beyond humor and parody, things are not so > clear and simple, first of all because behind the theories, the texts, and > the works, there are human beings acting, thinking and living, in history of > art as in any human activity. This isn't very satisfying of course. Perhaps some 'fields of study' (Anthropology, Sociology, even Art), have become moribund: mere bureaucratic enclaves that unwittingly perpetuate their host's imperialistic mis-directives. /:b
