AH 510 | Historiography of the Visual Arts, 1750 to 1960
Prof. Blake Stimson | Fall 2013 | Mondays 6-9 | HH 303 | CRN 10246
Quentin Matsys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514
MEANING IN THE VISUAL ARTS
This seminar will take its start by turning away from what Theodor Adorno called the “abominable
resignation of methodology.” We will consider the question of meaning in the visual arts in German
philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno) and German art history
(Winckelmann, Wölfflin, Riegl, Panofsky) in order to evaluate what an unabominable, unresigned form
of aesthetic understanding might be. For a provisional syllabus see: http://tigger.uic.edu/~stimson/.
Introduction
There is no “surer way to kill a piece of research,” Roland Barthes once wrote, “and send it to join the
great waste of abandoned projects than Method.” Similarly, Theodor Adorno routinely decried what he
called the “abominable resignation of methodology.” This seminar will adopt the skepticism of Adorno
and Barthes as its governing method of methods and use it to raise the question of the value of art
history and critical inquiry more broadly. The class, thus, is not designed to provide a menu of
methods to choose from as if they were academic brand names or club identities, nor is it meant to be
a primer in one or several of such choices, nor is it meant to be merely a history of art history. In other
words, what it offers is decidedly not some form of vocational training. Instead, we will consider the
question of method more simply as a means for problem-solving.
Your task for this seminar, thus, will not be to learn new methods or bone up on old ones but instead
to evaluate what the problem is, who it besets and what solution is being proposed; that is, you will
need to raise the questions of method and aim together, as if they were inseparable. Since aim does not
reduce well to methodological categories (what, after all, would one want, need, or demand as an art
historian qua art historian or cultural critic qua cultural critic much less as, say, a formalist qua
formalist or semiotician qua semiotician?) we will thus be forced to consider method according to
larger criteria: What is the value of our undertaking for our public? Or, to state the same question
differently: What is the service that we provide?
To that end, we might take these cautionary words by Guy Debord as our starting point:
But theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must be sent
into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only
be used if they are on hand when they're needed. They have to be replaced because they are
constantly being rendered obsolete—by their decisive victories even more than by their
partial defeats. Moreover, no vital eras were ever engendered by a theory; they began with
a game, or a conflict, or a journey.
Our central task thus will be to take up the question of the fundamental inadequacy of “method” and
“theory” both for any effort to make Art History’s disciplinary aim equal to the humanism that founded
it.
Books ordered
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Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600, ISBN 0801852358
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, ISBN 0631163026
Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, ISBN 0300087365
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ISBN 0521348927
GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, ISBN 0198245971
Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, ISBN 0300032404
Karl Marx, Marx: Selected Writings, ISBN 0872202186
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ISBN 0521779138
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ISBN 0393314030
Other readings are linked to in the syllabus and on reserve at Daley Library. Feel free to use other
versions of any reading for the course.
Requirements
The primary work of this seminar will be reading and discussion of the readings. Towards that end,
you have two primary writing tasks.
The first is to choose one of the readings and prepare a 4-5 page critical analysis to present in class
that draws on at least two additional sources by the same author and two secondary sources but takes
the assigned reading itself as the primary object of analysis. You can sign up for any of the readings but
we do not want to have more than two presentations for any one class.
The second assignment is a 20pp term paper on a topic of your choice related to the class. Your
approach should be historiographical rather than art-historical in character—that is, you should be
studying the work of a writer rather than an artist.
Here is one set of criteria developed by a funding body that you might use to assess your own writerly
engagement with the texts we’ll be reading as a well as that of the authors studied.
(http://www.artswriters.org/guidelines.php) Their goal, the funders say, is to “honor and encourage
writing about art…”
• that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent, and precise;
• in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical;
• that is neither afraid to take a stand, nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but
serves rather to pose questions and to generate new possibilities for thinking about, seeing, and
making art;
• that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within
their broader social and political contexts;
• that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value;
• that creatively challenges the limits of existing conventions, without valorizing novelty as an
end in itself.
Finally, you might also think of the writing assignment as an opportunity to make some headway
working through this experience described by Andrew Ross: “It took me many, many years to find my
own voice, which I think is the most difficult thing for people to do with a standard academic training.”
One is taught to “work with the voice of the disciplinary consensus or to ape some master thinker who
has been influential in the discipline, and that's not unrelated to your choice of research topics.” Put
differently, your task is one that is often more challenging than it would seem—to think for yourself.
Reading schedule
1. REVIEW: Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (http://members.efn.org/~acd/vite/VasariLives.html)
READ: Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600
2. LABOR DAY
3. READ: David Hume, Four Dissertations (http://archive.org/details/fourdissertatio00humegoog)
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapters 1 and 2
4. REVIEW: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art
(http://archive.org/details/historyancienta01lodggoog)
READ: Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History
5. READ: Critique of the Power of Judgment. Review the introduction, the analytic of the beautiful and
the analytic of the sublime and focus your attention for seminar discussion purposes on sections 5,
8, 10, 19-22, 55-60, preface, introduction, particularly the chart at the end, and the concluding
sections on “Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis,” “Representation of the Antinomies of Taste,”
“Beauty as the Symbol of Morality” and “The Methodology of Taste.” Pay special attention to the
rose example on p. 100.
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 3
6. READ: Phenomenology of Spirit. Read the preface and review the sections on consciousness and
self-consciousness (pp. 1-138). For discussion purposes, focus on the preface. Be sure to keep in
mind the section headings for the preface which are only listed on the contents page. Also try to
make sense of the preface title "on scientific cognition” and try to make sense of what he means by
the "notion" rather than other forms of cognition.
READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters II-IV.
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 5.
7. READ: Marx: Selected Writings. Read pp. 27-101, 157-186, 209-212, 214-243. For discussion
purposes focus on the concept of alienated labor (e.g., 58-67, 230-244).
READ: Marx, Capital, on co-operation (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867c1/ch13.htm)
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 8.
8. MA SYMPOSIUM
9. READ: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 9.
10. READ: The Freud Reader. Read pp. 545-660, 685-771, 783-795. For discussion purposes focus on
the question of collective psychology.
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 10.
11. READ: Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later
Art (http://archive.org/details/princarth00wlff)
READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters VI-VII.
12. READ: Alois Riegl, “Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen” (RESERVE)
READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapter V.
13. READ: Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (RESERVE)
READ: Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, chapters IX-X.
14. READ: Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (RESERVE)
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 11.
15. READ: Theodor Adorno, “Draft Introduction” and “Art, Society, Aesthetics” in Aesthetic Theory
(RESERVE)
READ: Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, chapter 13.