> well Bertrand, it's perhaps art-history's very blinkered > "disinterest" in the face of ongoing and outright > institutional abuse that's pretty hard to stomach... 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.
> 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? 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? 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? 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. Bertrand
