Next year's models - evolving theory on art - Money, Power, and the History of Art

While I hope to know something of art, I cannot claim to be familiar with power or money. It's not for a lack of effort. I would love to master the intricate web of relationships that channels money across our societies and often defines power in our world. I wouldn't even mind wielding power (only beneficently, of course). But let's face it, the profession of art history rarely offers these possibilities. It is about as far from power and money as one can get among the supposedly respectable occupations.

In my opinion, marginality is gnawing a hole in our profession, and its steady expansion threatens to obliterate the small presence we retain in the bustling world outside academic conferences and specialized publications. In recent years, art historians have focused great attention on studying art as a part of broad networks that encompass almost every aspect of societies, past and present. I applaud this effort and have tried to make a small contribution to it, although I would dispute the claim made by some that previous generations largely overlooked these questions. This brief essay, however, is not the place to examine the nuts and bolts of historiography, but rather to look at the overall industry and suggest a few changes in the latest models.

Certainly, there has been a great emphasis on models, not the shiny, odd-smelling ones turned out in Detroit, Stuttgart, or Nagoya but those crystalline constructions of the mind - theory. Like cars, theories deserve a high degree of skepticism, yet it seems to me that we rarely kick the tires or diligently look under the hood. No doubt like many art historians, I have been inspired and swept away by an equation that seemed to solve a messy problem or open the door to recognition of a situation I had never realized existed. Whether we proceed by burying ourselves in documents, creating an ideal measure, or more likely, some chaotic muddling through, a viewpoint is necessary, maybe even the ultimate achievement. Yet, as a historian, I often find that theories are like exquisitely beautiful machines that explode the moment they are switched on. The virus of life immediately infects the system and proves far too polymorphous to be contained in its structure.

My goal is not to trash theory but to make a plea for tolerance. To encourage a diversity that will enable us to escape determination by the peculiar characteristics of academia and learn to create histories of art that share the experiences of people in the wider world. Sadly, and ironically, our profession seems to be becoming less open. The sadness of this direction is obvious, but the irony is more depressing. The reach to expand the discipline of art history, to include issues of economics and politics, among many others, appears to be reversing, rebounding to impose censorship, to dismiss approaches that do not suit prevailing theories and narrow the range of concerns that our professional groups deem commendable.

My great fear is that art history is becoming so isolated from other realms of life that it will soon be irrelevant. Particularly when art historians address questions of money and power. Because these issues are at the foundation of so many human activities and fascinate so many people, they would seem to offer ns a chance to break out of the dungeon to which formalism supposedly confined us. Yet, both our language and our thinking are putting people off.

Art historians seem unable to strip away professional jargon, or do not appreciate how obtuse it is to others. But the thinking is a greater problem. As far as I can gather, our conceptions of economic and political systems frequently bear little resemblance to the situations discussed by economists, Wall Streeters, and politicians, or even curators and art dealers. When addressing art's relation to commerce, art historians often appear so unsympathetic to capitalism (and naive about commercial experience) that our analyses are easily dismissed by people who earn a living in business, as most workers do in the increasingly numerous market economies. Perhaps because we have such a small stake in that world and, if we are successful are protected by tenure, we may see things very differently.

A detached perspective can be extremely valuable, but we risk both losing our audiences and botching the history. By attempting to examine markets without prejudice, a number of art historians have made what I believe are important contributions to our understanding of modern art and its place in the broader culture-based on the realization that free enterprise has underpinned modernism by offering the primary alternative to state or church patronage. If we study the working of markets and look frankly at the activities of those who inhabit them, many of the old assumptions about divisions between art and other enterprises melt away. Not only dealers, collectors, critics, and curators but artists as well emerge as participants (willing or not) in the competitive turmoil of commercial markets. In my view, the art market is the essential field on which public reputations and artistic achievements are determined.