The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (review)

How to begin to talk about a book that deals largely with beginnings? Perhaps at the end. The last few pages of The Life of a Style are devoted to a defense of Arthur C. Danto's "End of Art" thesis, which, simply put, is that art history itself has reached a kind of terminus. This is not the "Death of Art" (there is too much money at stake for that) but the conclusion of 600 years of stylistic development. It is the story of a drive towards "naturalism" from Giotto through to the impressionists, and initiated by Vasari, followed by a self-effacing drive towards "aesthetic materialism," epitomized by Greenberg, and ending with pop art. Once art had ostensibly defined itself, and made itself indistinct from everything around it, its internal limit had been reached and no further development could occur. This closing defense confirms, for me, the underlying purpose of Gilmore's book. It is to expound various theoretical strands of Danto's project on the history of art (to which the book and author are deeply indebted) and to distinguish them from those of his rivals such as Gombrich, whose essay "Psychology and the Riddle of Style" in Art and Illusion seems to kick off much of what is tackled here. The questions are inherently interesting: How and why do artistic styles emerge and then decay? Why does art have a history and how might it be explained? Yet the philosophical and art-historical labyrinth into which Gilmore draws us in order to try and answer them is less interesting, certainly to one like myself who has no personal investment in this particular academic maze.

Chapter one offers an overview of recent theorization about notions of beginnings and endings in historical, and particularly art historical, writings. Surveying the problem of narrative in the ordering and interpretation of events, Gilmore identifies two main (and largely contradictory) tendencies. These are between what he terms the "narrative constructionists" and the "narrative realists." Crudely described, the constructionists tend to regard all forms of narrativization as being more or less imposed on selected events in order to make sense of them, whereas the realists tend to accept that narratives are fundamental constituents of human experience and, therefore, cannot be isolated from the events of which they are a part. What this amounts to, for the purposes of the Gilmore's argument, is a conceptual schism between those relativists who regard all histories as essentially falsified appearance and those critical historians who seek explanations of historical change from some intrinsic nature or facts. The book becomes immediately more interesting in the next chapter as Gilmore moves from abstract philosophical argument to an examination of specific cases, particularly introducing Renaissance perspective and Cubism as paradigmatic artistic movements. He argues that in each case there are inherent limitations to the movement that are apparent in its beginnings and ultimately lead to its demise. These "natural limits," as Gilmore calls them, at once make possible the specific character of the style or development while at the same time restricting growth beyond a certain point. To make his case Gilmore here introduces what, for him, is the pivotal concept of the "brief," borrowed from Michael Baxandall, which is essentially the artists' understanding of the problem they face in making work. Much of the following theorization hinges on this concept, which I, as a practicing artist, found bore little relation to my own creative process. Although the tours through Cubism and Renaissance perspective that follow are not without interest, one is left unclear as to the real explanatory value of all the analysis. Chapter three moves again onto (philosophically) abstract ground where Gilmore, in trying to summarize, is occasionally forced to state the obvious: "Or, since each style is internally related to a particular brief, we can say, more simply, it is a...