Speaker
Description
Academic science and the university in general are neither in a crisis of principle, nor are they seriously threatened in their position – at the center of a free society determined by the characteristics of liberal democracy. For at least 50 years, however, art history seems to have been in a permanent crisis: As early as 1974, T. J. Clark stated that the discipline was in a "state of gentle dissolution" (Clark 1974). Over the years, there seems to have been little change in this regard. In 1982, an influential special issue of Art Journal was explicitly dedicated to the "crisis of discipline". A year later, Hans Belting asked whether the "end of art history" had come, and ten years later he published a new edition of his passionate work (Belting 1983). Belting accused the discipline of a deep-seated ignorance of modernism, an incessant "conservative fixation" on the canon of high art, and an inability to broaden the discipline. In the eyes of progressive experts such as Donald Preziosi, art history appeared as a "shy science", anxiously clinging to old knowledge in order to preserve the educated middle-class status quo. His challenge to the discipline was therefore to "redefine itself" (Preziosi 1989).
| Keywords | Art History, Disciplinary Crisis, Modernism, Visual Culture, Ethics and Aesthetics |
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