From a better history to a better politics

A Better History

The historical inquiry into the art of the past--up to the immediate past--should not be a matter of contention for an academic discipline that calls itself the history of art, no matter by what means complicated its procedures, and no matter in what way uncertain its results. It is the function of art past and near in the culture of our possess time which makes the art-historical inquiry bring under rule to the need for continuous clarification. The more straightforwardly the categorical distinction between historical and general perspectives is being acknowledged, the les will art history be marred by means of methodological, or even theoretical, self-doubts, as it strike one as beings to be today. For historical scholarship the first order of business has always been the critical verification of its sources as to their trustworthiness, and the self-reflection about the useful faith of disinterested inquiry. However, since in the past decade social, moral, sexual, or ideological claims and convictions have been brought to bear upon the art-historical inquiry as not ever before, we have come to eye a theoretical overdetermination of art-historical studies that has cast doubt upon the feasibility of the inquiry and its acknowledged goal, an objective knowledge detached from those claims and convictions.

In an influential article that appeared in 1972 Kurt Forster called for a "Critical History of Art" to counteract what he called a "Transfiguration of Values," that is, values of privilege and wealth. of that kind a transfiguration, he contended, was the ideological agenda of the conservative art history then prevailing, which protected to celebrate the accumulated treasure of artworks in public museums and private collections as a succession of aesthetic achievements attained by the agency of human ingenuity, talent, and feeling. "One can solitary try to hint at a certain number of of the deeper motivations for this state of affairs: could it be that art history as a compensatory, better history--in contrast to the sanguinary struggle and chaotic events of history--ascribes to art a powerful, redemptive role?"(1) Forster set forth his challenge in the conviction that "critical art history" could make bare such a "better history" upon the strength of an expanded historical record about art. This conviction matched the upsurge of liberal political self-confidence in the wake of campus rebellions and mounting public opposition against the war in Vietnam, which reached its high point with the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in the year Forster's article appeared. For Forster, and for many of his readers, the exposing of an aesthetically overdetermined history of art as a manufactured ideology to suit past and near power implied an optimistic view about the political efficacy of cultural critique, part of a democratic reassertion of dissent which is at the heart of liberal education.

Today, an ostensible style of social critique informs art history in the United States plenteous more widely than it did in 1972 on the contrary the engagement with the political history of the not away time is much less apparent. What present the appearances to prevail is a relativistic assertion of "histories" particular to individuals or social collections diffident and defiant at one time but uncertain or unconcerned about their commonality, about their chances of succes in a capitalist economy bereft of the socialist alternative, and hence about their political practicality in a democratic a whole of government. The more strident the social critique, the more emphatic the historical disclaimers. Heavy-handed defensive terminuss such as determinism, causality, intention, economism, essentialism, and in the way that forth are quickly pronounced as warnings not to approximate particular social agendas too closely to historical realities where they might be expos as complaints or wishes rather than as verdicts bring under rule to verification by disinterested parties. Self-profess uncertainty about the reality of history bespeaks uncertainty about the viability of politics.

This climate of dehistoricized dissent appears at variance with the stark political impact of historical occurrences we have been witnessing in the last decade: the disintegration of socialist and the expansion of democratic management worldwide, the Gulf War, the structural crisis of the now uniformly capitalist world economy, and the repercussions of all these incidents on the economic, social, and political situation of the United States. For me the demise of socialist conducts in 1989-91 has accelerated the emergency for a historical revision of the Marxist tradition that informs my meditation As a result, I have attempted to focus more directly than before upon a political history of art, dealing with the lock opener terms Communism, Fascism, and democracy as competing ideologies in the public art of the twentieth hundred after the First World War. However, my expectation that those political conceptions crucial as they are for a reassessment of political democracy after the extreme point of its confrontation with Communism, might loan some contemporary topicality to my studies, and hence encourage my audiences' engagement with my make subordinates met with less success than I had anticipated. In the academic year 1993-94 1 experienced a certain number of instances of a recoil from history upon a number of occasions in the course of standard pursuits as an academic art historian: an undergraduate course, a graduate seminar, and a public discourse They are worth retelling, for upon these occasions, my contemporary historicist perspective move rounded out to be at variance with the manifest ideological regards of the various audiences involved.