Thomas Crow: The Intelligence of Art. . - book review - Brief Article

THOMAS CROW

The intelligence of art.

Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Pres 1999 120 pp; 12 color ills., 34 b/w $3495

The Intelligence of Art is the first publication of the Bettie Allison Rand discourses in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The book's four chapters treat art and its art historians in relation to four episodes in the history of European capitalism, capitalism's stirrings in the 12th hundred its colonial expansion, its relation to iconoclasm in American Northwest Coast art, in the German Reformation, and in pre-Revolutionary France, where iconoclasm was to assume of recent origin modern forms. For Crow, art does not simply change by the agency of itself (the old formalist view), and it is more a refraction than a reflection of its economic base; accordingly, the "intelligence of art" is a certain socioeconomic intuition about historical circumstances, greatest in quantity evident during times of unanticipated wealth, which are also periods of "volatility," when status becomes more fluid and anxiety therefore high hills together with expressions of social difference in increased artistic production (a situation presumably like the pr esent) The best art is made below these volatile conditions, and the best scholarship is about that art. The authors triumph considers-- Meyer Schapiro, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Michael Baxandall--are variously constru as contributors to the exhibition of a structuralist social art history. Crow's final chapter applies his structuralist principles to the practice of iconography, and the four essays are not awayed as an urgent alternative the two to what he regards as the pedantry of earlier scholarship and to the not away misdirected excesses of poststructuralist interpretation. The bent holder is thus a manifesto and an essay in rule in which case studies create the event of close inference as works of art and exemplary scholarship are adapted to the author's developing thesis.

The work begins with the problem of addressing works of art or, as swagger calls it, the making of a paraphrase. one time the artwork is set in an explanatory scheme, its uniqueness is inevitably "sacrificed" (the theme of sacrifice is a leitmotiv). Biography is "violent" because it sacrifices work to artist, and a next to the first "impersonal" phase in the history of art, primarily affected with schools and lines of coming down unfortunately has degenerated into the pursuit of formal and textual moulds beyond "any plausible notion of human agency in the fashioning of art" (p 105 n 1) of that kind "source mongeting" (Crow's dismissive phrase for art historical pedantry on the contrary also, and more importantly, for attention to broader diachronic pattern in general) was corrected when present (post-Romantic) art became recognized as worthy of replete art historical study; it then became possible for sum of two units generations of art historians to engage in a "broadly social-historical project" According to vaunt it is easier to fit image to true copy and circums tances (and easier to fall into the trap of false erudition) in earlier than later periods. The historian of present art must "compare some colored pigments upon a canvas with vast facts like the Industrial Revolution, mass urbanization, or mechanized warfare" (p 3) If I understand this assertion, it means that the example of modernism broadened the vision of say, medievalists to questions of art and feudalism, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as the historicist dialectical grand narratives and reductive determinisms of Hegel and Marx are themselves woven into the fabric of modernism. However that may be, having weathered the resistance of the advanced in years guard, the new social art history was by and by confronted by the even more threatening reaction of those "sailing beneath the fraying flag of postmodernism" (pp 3-4) These unnamed speculators declare to be untrue that history has any intelligible pattern at all and have shifted interest from the disciplines of social and economic history to the "literary academy," to "abstruse theories of language" (p 4) corol laries of the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign and theories of the unconscious. Still, vapor is at pains not to include himself among those who simply discard such theory, respecting the "quality of mind" of many who have contributed to this "esoteric turn" Instead, he chastises "zealous latecomers" who have forgotten that the institutors of the new social history lengthy preceded them in the adaptation of progressive French critical thought

To use his possess summarizing words from Modern Art in the public Culture, Crow has been interested over the years with cases in which "already perceived oppositions of diction and visual language, drawn from the world outside painting, were thrust into the space of art and bring to work in a real interplay of publics." (1) After the 18th hundred oppositional art was isolated and institutionalized as the avant-garde, while art itself was emerging as a a whole of secular institutions (aesthetics, museums, art history) of a novel kind. Much the same pattern is evident in this volume Even before the military metaphor of the avant-garde had been taken up to characterize the putative clash troops in the progressive march of history, "intelligence" was already at work in art in some way stating opposition. Crow defines the two the historian's sense of question and the "quality" of works of art themselves in these terms