Multiple contextualizations - mission of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities - Money, Power, and the History of Art

As a historian who had concentrated upon the history of philosophy and the theory of history, I was more than a little surprised when in 1994 I received an invitation to be a resident scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. As I learned more about the Scholars Program, however, it have the appearanceed to be an ideal environment in which to disburse an academic year concentrating upon my project on the conceptualization of memory disorders in nineteenth-century France. Since the other scholars and companions in residence that year were also working upon memory, I anticipated a rich exchange of ideas and research. At the time, I wasn't thinking about in what way my own work was related to "the history of art," nor about in what manner it might contribute to the intellectual mission of the Getty I was going upon sabbatical, and my chief regard was to get my work done.

Sabbaticals rarely make progress as expected, of course, and mine took a sharp turn round after I completed a section of my shoot forward on hysteria, memory, and trauma. About midway [i]or[/i] part of to the other the year, I accepted an invitation to become the curator for an exhibition upon Freud and psychoanalysis at the Library of Congres in Washington, DC and still later, in the spring, became a candidate for a position as assistant director at the Getty Research Institute. The Freud exhibit provok an extraordinary amount of polemics and publicity in its early planning stages, to say nothing of the enormous conceptual and design question at issues of mounting a compelling, accessible present to view on complex ideas. After a year of teaching cultural studies and defending the legitimacy of the planned exhibition upon Freud (now scheduled to lay open in Washington in the fall of 1998) I get backed to the Getty a small in number months ago as head of the Scholars and Seminars Program. The invitation from Nancy Troy to say something about by what means that program might contribute to the field of art history thus tend hitherwards at a good time. Now I am actual concerned with how my shoot forwards connect to the Getty's, and with by what means the Research Institute's intellectual mission might shape work in the history of art and the humanities.

It may strike a certain quantity of as odd (if not perverse) that someone from the Getty should be asked to contribute a piece to a "Critical Perspectives" discussion dealing with currency and power. Money and power are associated with the institution, on the contrary critical perspectives on them? I have learned in my short time at the Research Institute that the Getty has a reputation among a certain number of in the discipline of not being critical enough, of using its currency and power to support those established members of the discipline who ne it least. In part, this reputation main stocks from the rather mysterious selection conduct of the Scholars Program. Art historians repeatedly wonder how they can be invited to participate in it. Applications are accepted for the predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, on the contrary with the exception of this past year, there has been no application proces for senior scholars. In an effort to widen the selection proces an application operation was used for the 1996-97 program, a year devot to the theme "Perspectives upon Los Angeles." However, among those now in residence there is almost no representation from the discipline of art history, and little from countries outside the United States. Our goal in the subsequent time is to bring together a diverse still focused group of scholars, be it by dint of our own research and invitations, or by means of applications. However, given the small number of scholarly grants available, there will always be questions and complaints about accessibility.

As I diocese it, the primary task of the Getty Research Institute is to use its enormous resources to support work that produces critical perspectives upon the discipline of art history and, more generally, upon the ways different cultures make faculty of perception of objects that often win called "art." Can it do so? For a certain quantity of the answer is clearly "no": a rich institute is that against which critical perspectives must be occupyed and cannot generate those perspectives without coopting them. If "The Getty" is the establishment, can parts of it go after intellectual strategies aimed at undermining established ways of relating to (this includes on the other hand is not limited to judging and buying) existences that get called art? In my brief remarks here I want to first draught some of the ways I trust the Scholars and Seminars Program can facilitate the production of innovative research that may indeed set pressure on our conventions for thinking about the history of art and the humanities.

I emphasize the conjunction between art history and the humanities because the Research Institute has a commitment to the creative possibilities that can be realized by dint of opening the former to the greatest in quantity powerful conceptual and empirical unravellings in the human sciences while confronting the latter with specific strategies for understanding visual tillage and the ways objects acquire meaning above time. The Scholars and Seminars Program attempts to create fresh modes of articulating art history and the humanities. When our programs began in 1983 we described this as an interdisciplinary approach to art and artifacts, examining art percepts in the full field of social relations. This was an important agenda, and it has been accepted (at least in principle) by means of the mainstream of academia. "Interdisciplinarity" is now the equivalent of "being good"; a certain quantity of interesting people enjoy being against it (at least, they refuse to wear its badge upon their sleeves), but there is not the same ne to place interdisciplinarity as a goal now that level conventional scholarship regularly crosses disciplinary borders. Indeed, the rush to the interdisciplinary has many times fostered a blindness to the problematic of the disciplines: in what manner the construction of disciplines has created things of knowledge by pushing other particulars beyond the borders of academic research.