Humanities, Culture, and Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy

5. REFIGURING THE VISUAL

Chapter 5 REFIGURING THE VISUAL The other disciplines in this set of case studies—art and music—have several features in common. They inherited a humanistic identity vested in creativity and the values of liberal education. They occupy a presence beyond the academy in performance venues, museums, and other cultural institutions . They are nonverbal media whose data are more resistant to verbal explication than the data of other humanities (R. Parker 10). And, during the latter half of the twentieth century, they underwent a number of changes. The changes occurred in music later than in art history, but the canons of both disciplines expanded, interdisciplinary interests broadened, and new critical, theoretical, and sociohistorical approaches influenced the ways that both art and music are understood. This chapter addresses a series of continuing questions about disciplines with particular regard to art history. What were the early warrants for interdisciplinarity in the discipline? What changes promoted a new art history , and what were its interdisciplinary dynamics? What similarities and differences appear in theory and in practice? How has the identity of the discipline changed? What are the key points of debate on interdisciplinarity , and how do they figure in discussions of the discipline’s current status and future prospects? From the Old to the New Art did not enter the halls of higher learning until visual arts moved from the manual arts to the liberal arts. This shift was aided by a new system of education in the sixteenth century, when academies of art began to rival the traditional apprenticeship system. Giorgio Vasari’s evolutionary approach to style history influenced the general outlines of art history in Europe for several centuries to come. In Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Vasari extolled the High Renaissance as the pinnacle of excellence. Vasari’s method was a series of aesthetic and moral value judgments interwoven with anecdotes and references to purported facts (Kraft 58–59, 61). Barbara Stafford dates the origin of art history to the eighteenth century. It was a borrower from the start, taking attitudes and vocabularies from prior or canonical disciplines and constructing a hybrid identity from mathematics, rhetoric and poetics, and philosophy (especially Neo-Platonism). The discipline’s founders were mindful of an intellectual deficit. Artists were inclined to offer inductive and “artisanal” conjectures about visual and aesthetic matters, not deductive or exact knowledge about a fixed or stable mental territory with objects of intellection (7). In a familiar historical pattern, the study of art as an empirical science began in the late nineteenth century. The founders of the modern discipline extended the canon to include post-Renaissance art and channeled the concept of style to formal characteristics such as the design elements of color, shape, line, texture, and space. Works, artists, styles, and national or ethnic groups could be compared and classified, explicated, and interpreted in a systematic fashion, making the critic an intermediary between the artist and the public (Kraft 59–60). Facts also became the basis for assessing contested philosophies of art using comparative methods adapted from philology . Art historical research could be separated ontologically from other fields, including aesthetics and attitudes and feelings. Interpretations could be legitimated with the status of eternal truths parallel to scientific laws, and the problematics of production and reception were placed beyond formalist science (Preziosi, “Question” 365–70). The conventional story of the discipline’s origin in this country begins in elite universities. The first regular professor of art history in the United States, Charles Eliot Norton, began lecturing at Harvard in 1874 on the “History of the Fine Arts as Connected with Literature” (Roberts and Turner 78). Even though art history was a latecomer, Thomas Reese recounts, a 1912 report revealed that ninety-five universities were teaching the subject and sixty-eight were offering courses by someone with a chair in the subject. Fewer than four-fifths of one percent of the teaching body, however, specialized in art and archaeology. The rest taught in departments of classics, Semitic languages, biblical literature, French and Romance languages, and history . Before 1920, art history was usually seated in the liberal arts college. It took on expanded and competing functions in the growing network of 108 Inter/Disciplining Humanities departments, although professional identity continued to be associated with a generalized notion of art education. Practical teaching of fine arts also had a strong legacy...