What Do Artists Know?

Series Preface

In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting attention. Concepts like picture, visual art, and realism circulate in newspapers, galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog, cat, and goldfish. Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justifications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools, where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings, words like picture, visual art, and realism are treated like impossibly complicated machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the most difficult subject in visual art. A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in academia, it often feels right just to allude to an concept like picture, and let its flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange because picture is so important to so many people, and it leads to wayward conversations. The books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1 focuses on globalization, translation, governmentality, and hybridity; volume 2 explores image, picture, and icon. Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is research, which produces knowledge. Volume 4 is about the aesthetic, the antiaesthetic , and the political; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies, visual culture, and visuality. This series is like an interminable conversation around a dictionary—or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that the purposes of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgenstein said, begins to fracture and crack. Each book in this series started as a week-long event, held in Chicago. No papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three hour panel discussion among the faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours each day), and SERIES PREFACE 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 9 9/14/12 1:17 PM X 1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006), Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008), Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue (2008), and Re-Enchantment, coedited with David Morgan (2008). All are published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis), New York. 2. Different fields have different kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities of art criticism are discussed in an email exchange at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance is the subject of another exchange at the end of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about the very strange second volume, Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone Listening?” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80. series preface ended with a five hour panel discussion. All thirty-five hours of it was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions are presented here. This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar, which appeared from 2005 to 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Summer Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guiding idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both of the book series are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic, and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far from one another...