Alice Neel, Meyer Schapiro 1983
Oil on Canvas, 106.7
x 81.3 cm
The
Jewish Museum, New York
Schapiro, then, acknowledges the relative and
shifting nature of art’s history, and also the contingencies under which the
discipline of art history operates: “The interpretation of the social contexts
of art is conditioned by the aesthetic theory and social context of the
interpreter.”[1] So we are perhaps justified in calling
Schapiro a “methodological holist” because he holds that the “explanation of
individual actions…may often have to be given partly in societal terms…that
link individual behavior with types of social conditions.”[2] Again, we see here that methodological holism
does not posit any agencies besides those embodied in actual persons, and so
does not reduce the autonomy or minimize the uniqueness of the artist. After all, we see that Schapiro rejects a
strictly causal account of changes in style, which would reduce something as complex
as the development of abstraction to an instance under covering laws, as well
as ontologically supervenient wholes like race or spirit (Schapiro,
1937:189). Schapiro, like Hegel and
Margolis, seeks instead to locate the choices of individual persons within the
matrix of the larger social and historical context, neither reducing nor
reifying the greater whole. The whole is
an emergent property.
[1] Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Social Change” in 1999:113
[2]. W. H. Dray, “Holism and Individualism in History and
Social Science” in The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy Vol. IV Paul Edwards, ed. Macmillain, 1967 p. 54
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