Who is art history for?

No article in APOLLO in new months has attracted as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of comment as John Nicoll's polemic in the May issue upon the state of art-book publishing. upon pages 22-23 we print sum of two units of the letters we have received, which address Mr Nicoll's accusation that copyright and reproduction compensations charged by museums and galleries are 'strangling the publication of art books' The make submissive was raised again last month at a discourse on academic art-history publishing organised through the Courtauld Institute of Art, at which Mr Nicoll and other publishers of volumes and journals spoke. Representatives of museums--notably the Victoria and Albert--visibly quailed beneath the audience's onslaught.

Another of the important questions raised by the agency of Mr Nicoll in his APOLLO article--the way art historians leave out the needs and interests of the 'educated general reader'--was addressed by the agency of the conference much more tentatively. It is without doubt essential that if art history is to flourish as a discipline, it should attract the interest of the educated public, on the other hand for the Courtauld, as for greatest in quantity institutes of higher education, art historians be under the orders of first their students and next to the first the wider scholarly community.

This may present the appearance narrow enough, yet when listening to many of the speakers at the discourse it was easy to believe that the prime audience for academic art historians today is in fact the assessors of the Research Assessment Exercise. This is the scheme--the nearest one, the fourth since 2002 is scheduled for 2008--that assesses the quality of published research through departments in universities and other institutes of higher education. It gives each department a score that will be used as the basis for the time to come allocation of funds by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and its equivalents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The criteria for judging research are based upon peer review and, as far as art history is touched it is fair to say that the way that publication labor fors an audience other than professional art historians is not an important element

Museums and art galleries face different constraints. Here the chief question at issue is that most curators' scholarly activities are based upon catalogues--essential, but by their true nature specialised--and exhibitions. Exhibition catalogues are now the chief way in which of recent origin academic research is published for a wide audience. The list of bestsellers in art history published by means of The Art Book, the quarterly publication of the Association of Art Historians, makes this clear--in the last list, for autumn 2004 six on the outside of the top ten fine-art volumes are exhibition catalogues. The alone other art books likely to reach an equivalently large audience are those tied to television series.

There is undoubtedly a middle surface of land between academic RAE-focused publication and exhibition/TV-tie-in publication, on the other hand it is focused almost exclusively upon modern and contemporary art: in The Art Book's bestseller list, six of the top ten titles are upon art after 1945. There looks to be a failure to attract large audiences for works on art before 1900 that are not tied to exhibitions or television. Where, as Mr Nicoll asked, are art history's fresh equivalents of Ernst Gombrich or Kenneth Clark? Where also are the subject's equivalents of of that kind charismatic, best-selling historians as Simon Schama (who does write about art compellingly), Andrew Roberts, David Cannadine or Niall Ferguson? The hum in popular publishing by academic art historians has not been matched through an equivalent in art history.

A lack of imagination or courage in publishers may be to blame, as well as the suppos gre and undoubted self-interest of the institutions that charge reproduction compensations But a more fundamental issue is the nature of contemporary art history. The question is not the gulf between theory-based art history and empirical research--there is plenitude of the latter, as APOLLO itself demonstrates. Instead, the question seems to be the discipline's slowness--or unwillingness--to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind history. After two decades or thus basing themselves on sociological originals historians in the 1980s rediscovered narrative, an essential foundation for the fresh publishing phenomenon of popular history.

Art history has notwithstanding to follow suit, and remains intensely focused upon the social-historical aspects of the discipline. There is undoubtedly an unwillingness to consider alternative way s of approach, of which narrative or biographical history is individual Consider, for example, how small in number good art-historical biographies there are. The best--such as Hilary Spurling's magnificent life of Matisse (volume sum of two units is reviewed on pages 56-57)--are by means of authors who do not number themselves as art historians. If academic art historians are at any time going to emerge from their publishing ghetto, they ne not sole to deal with often unimaginative publishers and high reproduction remunerations they need also to think more about in what way to attract a wider audience. on the contrary while British universities are encouraged by dint of the RAE to be for a like reason inward-looking, and museums are overwhelmingly dominated by the agency of the exhibition industry, there is depressingly little incentive for them to do so

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