"... an artwork is...a communication from a person or group of persons..."

Like a human person, each artwork is singular and only makes sense within its historical context, so that aesthetics requires detailed knowledge not just of the history of art, but of the history of art history and criticism; “far from writing about art as an abstract metaphysician, Hegel had a number of distinguished examples of German scholarship before him when he was working on the historical framework of the Aesthetics.”[1]  Hegel remarks in the introduction to his Lectures on Fine Art that real knowledge of art requires “a precise acquaintance with the immeasurable realm of individual works of art, ancient and modern…Further, every work of art belongs to its own time, its own people, its own environment, and depends on particular historical and other ideas and purposes; consequently, scholarship in the field of art demands a vast wealth of historical, and indeed very detailed, facts” (Hegel, 1998:14).  So this approach to art is evidence-laden than many efforts in philosophical aesthetics today.  It’s simply that to study an artwork is to study a communication from a person or group of persons who embody a particular form of life.  Again, the development of an explanation for the artwork drives the historian simultaneously into the tiniest details of the marble or canvas and into the vast history of an entire period.

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[1]. Michael Moran, “On the Continuing Significance of Hegel’s Aesthetics” in The British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 21, No. 3 Summer, 1981 p. 219

Art History and the Philosophy of Social Sciences 2.: Hegel vs. Analysis Again

What’s the significance of the historical fact that Hegel’s philosophy was essential to the formation of art history?  There are two answers to this question.  First, on this account, Hegel represents a certain intimacy between philosophy and art history, since the latter springs from the former.  Art history is yielded by historicized philosophical reflection on art as an expression of human culture.  Secondly, we should recall that analytic philosophy was originally designed to shut down Hegelian thought; Russell and Moore “were to launch English-language analysis against the prevailing Hegelian currents.”[1]  So, from the viewpoint of the history of philosophy, the Anglo-American tradition is for the most part inimical to the Hegelian (and therefore historicist) core of art history as it’s been traditionally practiced.  Analytic philosophy and art history, on this genealogical reading, are mutually antithetical.  And it’s not art history that should be required to yield.

For example, an especially talented critic notes: “One consequence of Hegel’s approach is to suggest that each culture must have its own independent artistic ideas.  Wölfflin (nd [1908]) develops this idea.  The classical and the baroque are distinct artistic cultures, each with its own values, but neither reducible to the other.  The art historian’s task is to explain how and why the classical evolved into the baroque without making value judgments…‘[they] are like two languages, in which everything can be said, although each has its strength in a different direction.’”[2]   The quoted passage recalls Hegel’s remark on the impossibility of composing an epic from within the context of the modern state;[3] discussing elements of modernism, Schapiro writes an essay on “that art which is fresh and original and could not have been done in a previous age.”[4]

Interestingly, Danto absorbed this concept of historical impossibility, despite its deep conflict with his own philosophical loyalties.  Once we admit that artworks are deeply historical in this sense, we have to give up the attempt to treat art historical knowledge on a model derived from physics or chemistry, disciplines in which historical periods have no place.  We are also required by historicism to try and analyze art using criteria different from our own, and to make judge artworks from within the aesthetic systems of their times.  In the understanding of any particular artwork, are obliged to address an entire culture.  For Hegel, the “task and vocation” of art history

consists in the aesthetic appreciation of individual works of art and in a knowledge of  the historical circumstances which condition the work of art externally; it is only an appreciation, made with sense and spirit, and supported by the historical facts, which can penetrate into the entire individuality of a work of art.[5]

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[1]. Joseph Margolis The Unraveling of Scientism Cornell University Press, 2003 p. 11 

[2]. David Carrier, “Art History” in A Companion to Aesthetics [eds?] Blackwell, 1995 p. 15 Carrier Refers to Wolfflins’ Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art M. D. Hottinger, trans. Dover, 1950

[3]. Brian K. Etter, “Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Possibility of Art Criticism” in Maker, 2000:39

[4]. Meyer Schapiro, “The Value of Modern Art” in Worldview and Painting-Art and Society (Selected Papers Vol. V) George Brazillier, 1999 p. 134

[5]. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Vol. I) T. M. Knox, trans. Oxford University Press, 1998 p. 21

Mechanism vs. Holism: 19th Century Debate

So one thing we learn from Hegel is that closer attention to art history is philosophically necessary, demanding a contradictory move simultaneously into the minute details of painting and sculpture on one hand, and to the widest social and stylistic contexts of the work on the other. This requires the admission that artworks are genuinely historical, shot through with material contingency, and open to numerous interpretations, a realm governed by relativism; and those requirements strain the resources and run against the grain of analytic philosophy as it’s now practiced.  But theories ought to bend to the artworks and the people who produce, interpret, and enjoy them.  And here that means that analytic aesthetics must reconsider the philosophy of history and the philosophy of social sciences.

During the nineteenth century, there was much debate between proponents of mechanism and holism, and those who argued for a holistic (or organicist) approach to the study of biology were joined by philosophers.  The organicist position was connected with “the resurgence of Hegelian philosophy” represented in the English-speaking world by figures like “F. H. Bradley, A. E. Taylor, and J. Mc. Taggart.”[1]  Bradley offered an epistemological account of holism by arguing that relations of similarity and difference are only possible between entities that are within the same whole; “everywhere there must be a whole embracing what is related, or there would be no differences and no relation.”[2]  A biological or cultural entity is what it is within a larger system like a lebenswelt (with predators, food sources, mates, changes in temperature, and an array of behavioral options in response) or an artworld (with traditions, critics, galleries, academies, salons and exhibitions).  It’s within these massively complex and interconnected systems that living and meaningful beings have their forms of life.  Furthermore, it follows from Bradley’s holistic account of relations that a change in the whole implies a change in the entities that are its constituent parts: “There is no identity or likeness possible except in a whole, and every such whole must qualify and be qualified by its terms.  And, where the whole is different, the terms that qualify it and contribute to it must so far be different, and so far therefore by becoming elements in a fresh unity the terms must be altered.”[3] It’s significant here that Bertrand Russell’s approach, which forms the bedrock of traditional analytic philosophy, was in direct opposition to Bradley’s Hegelianism.  But, if analytic philosophy was framed in direct opposition to holism, organicism and so forth, how can it give an adequate account of the epistemology of the historical sciences?

Historicism and Holism in the study of Art

Hegel is an historicist as well as a holist, another aspect of his thought that recommends it to the study of art history over the generally ahistoricist analytic tradition. And Hegel’s historicism and holism are conceptually linked; if art changes over history in a way indicative of, representative of, expressive of, the wider context of change in society as a whole.  It’s because the way a society sees itself changes over time that art has a history; “In works of art the nations have deposited their richest inner intuitions and ideas, and art is often the key, and in many nations the only key, to understanding their philosophy and religion”[1]  It’s not enough to know the history of art itself; Classical mythology, holy scriptures, psychology of perception, the chemistry of color, economics and many, many other considerations impose themselves on the art historian in a variety of ways.  The art historian has to come up with a solution to integrating all of the relevant disciplines on an ad hoc basis; that is, with different bodies of work certain distinct problems arise for which solutions will have to be improvised.  But those problems will be different for artworks of different periods and cultures.

For example, some statues, like those of the Greeks and Egyptians, demand an extensive knowledge of ancient mythology.  Michelangelo’s David (1501-4) belongs within the historical context of Florence’s Republican defiance of political domination by much larger political entities, despite its small size; parvum sed potens.  But that context must also include the narrative of David and Goliath from the Old Testament.  Rodin’s statues instead call up problems of originality and authorship, since there are editions of casts made after his death but authorized by the government.[2]  The seminal modern sculpture Bird in Space (1925) was the subject of “the most famous trial concerning the definition of a work of art [which] took place in 1927, in New York: Brancusi vs. United States.”[3]  In that trial the question of the identity of a work of art was raised in a pointed way that would have been impossible one hundred years earlier. None of these phenomena can be reduced to simple terms of reference or bivalent logic. All are entirely sociocultural, historical phenomena.

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[1]. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Vol. I) T. M. Knox, trans. Oxford University Press,1998 p. 7

[2]. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Reception” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation Brian Wallis, ed. David R. Godine, pub. 1984 and  The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths pp.

[3]. Margit Rowell Brancusi vs. United States: The Historic Trial 1928 p. 7

Holism vs. Analysis in the Philosophy of Art History

There is an obvious sense in which Hegelian synthesis would be more suited to the study of art than philosophical analysis. Take any artwork; it’s a synthetic whole, and requires a holistic approach for proper understanding. A concept is holistic if it’s “used to refer to the forms of organization of a society [that] cannot be reduced without remainder to concepts which only refer to the thoughts and actions of specific individuals.”[1]  A style or milieu is holistic because you can’t make sense of it purely in terms of individual persons, although things like styles can only exist by being distributed among many individuals.  Elkins’ next step is to argue that if “art history is essentially ‘Hegelian,’ its positivist assumptions-that is, the objectivist intention and empiricist ‘position’…will be jeopardized” (Elkins, 1988:361).

It’s strange that Gombrich did not see the contradiction in his attack on “Hegelianism,” but that might be explained again by his theoretical (if not practical) commitment to positivist philosophy within the context of its time.  What Elkin’s treatment reveals is that features like holism, historicism and serial collectivism are essential to art historical practice as we know it, and that attempts to dispense with those theoretical habits, either by refusing theory altogether or by opting for a more empiricist approach, leads to something other than art history.[2]  For example, the attempt to make art history look like the natural sciences fails in just this way:  “Ackerman argued that art history, particularly in America, was becoming a hyperspecialized and increasingly fragmented pursuit of ‘facts’ and value-free ‘objectivity’…he linked the boom in specialization and the bust in speculation to a failure to communicate with the general public.”[3]  Of course, Ackerman’s comments could just as well be directed against analytic philosophy as it’s usually practiced.  For the attempt not to engage in theory inevitably leads to being unaware and uncritical of one’s own implicit theory.

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[1]. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Societal Facts” in Theories of History Patrick Gardiner, ed. 1957 pp. 478-9; quoted in D. C. Phillips Holistic Thought in Social Science Stanford University Press, 1976 p. 40

[2]. The same could be said of sociology; see

[3]. Irving Lavin, “The Crisis of ‘Art History’” in The Art Bulletin Vol. 78, #1 March, 1996 p. 14  Lavin is quoting James Ackerman, “On American Scholarship in the Arts” in College Art Journal No. 17 1958 pp. 357-62

Resisting the Grandfather of Art History: G. W. F. Hegel

In a 1977 essay, E. H. Gombrich called Hegel “the father of art history,” arguing that Hegel was the first to see art in terms of its development as a reflection of a periodized human history.[1]  Nevertheless, Gombrich also attacked Hegelianism, exposing “a number of Hegel’s critics who, in his view, unwittingly remained Hegelians”[2] including Wölfflin and Panofsky.  To compound the irony, James Elkins and others have deftly read Gombrich himself as a Hegelian malgre lui.  Gombrich could not reconcile his attraction to positivism with the deeply Hegelian foundations of his own discipline, despite his explicit acknowledgement of those foundations.  The larger point of these ironies is that Gombrich’s conflict is paradigmatic of much of the analytic philosophy of art.

During the 1980’s there was a kind of backlash in the academic world against theory and specifically against Hegel.  In retrospect it revealed an unexpected consonance between postmodernism and analytic philosophy, as did the parallel desire within both traditions to eliminate or reduce subjectivity and the shared focus on language.  In response to this general tendency to reduce the role of theory and the specific project of exorcizing Hegelian holism, James Elkins argued that art history is inescapably Hegelian in a broad sense.  In fact he proposed that “by looking at the points of similarity between the ‘Hegelian’ theories which infest art history and certain concepts fundamental to the discipline itself,” we will find that “to remove one is to remove the other and dismantle conventional art history altogether” (Elkins, 1988:361):

Periods-and by extension styles, the Zeitgeist, and other holistic concepts-are self-justifying and not in need of positivist verification or falsification…an art history organized by holistically defined periods is independent of positivism…what would the practice of art history look like without stylistic analysis or periods organized by Hegelian historicized collectivism? (Elkins, 1988:374)

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[1]. E. H. Gombrich, “‘The Father of Art History:’ A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831” in Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition Angela Wilkes, trans. Ithaca, N. Y. 1985 [find pubs]

[2]. James Elkins, “Art History Without Theory” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 2 Winter, 1988 p. 361

Reforming Analytic Philosophy: Art and Society

With regard to developing a philosophy of art history and clarifying the role of art history in aesthetics, then, analytic philosophers are in a difficult position, since generally speaking they cannot or will not accommodate historicism.  But if there’s one thing that’s subject to historical drift and transformation it’s the artworld.  Just as linguistic theories of meaning should engage the historicity of language, so should philosophical aesthetics embrace the dense variety of artworks in the fullness of their sociohistorical contexts.  Instead, artworks have been made to serve theory.  For example, the problem of defining art has often been addressed in purely deductive and conceptual terms, with examples of a few actual or imagined artworks (or hypothetical warehouses filled with items that may or may not be artworks) that are selected in order to make a philosophical point.  In many cases, highly atypical examples (like Duchamp’s Fountain or Warhol’s Brillo Box or pieces of driftwood) have been used to generate theories of art in general.  Aesthetic theories have been built around artworks with little or no attention paid to either problems of interpretation generated from within the discipline of art history or the immediate facture of the medium; for example, Nelson Goodman’s approach to aesthetics suffered from “an insufficient modulation of theory to do justice to the material reality of art [caused by] a wish to explain all of the mechanisms of meaning in terms of a relatively small set of concepts.”[1]  Artworks have been interpreted along lines suggested by a favorite theory in philosophical aesthetics without introducing the specific social and technical aspects of its production and reception, and so on.  So a closer encounter with art history is essential to the development of philosophical aesthetics, but will require a paradigm shift in the direction both of a strong historicism and also simultaneously toward the immediate, sensuous materiality of the artwork   For all artworks, what is essential is what is being said and how what is said becomes a physically real and culturally effective communication in an object or performance, and this requires minute attention to detail, always within the context of a background or milieu, and always within the multiple frameworks of its relationships to other artworks.

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[1]. Paul Mattick, “Form and Theory: Meyer Schapiro’s Theory and Philosophy of Art,”  The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 55, #1 Winter, 1997 p. 18

Art History and Analytic Philosophy

One of the most important tasks in philosophical aesthetics today is to develop a philosophy of art history and to redefine the relationship between art history and philosophy. But this task, local to aesthetics, is part of a wider problem of the strained relationship between philosophy and history. I mean that generally speaking, the analytic tradition has either ignored history altogether, favoring instead a model of knowledge based on the physical sciences, or subsumed the historical world under the covering laws of the physical sciences, or reduced history to the referential relationships between written truth-claims and actual events.

History was thought by some analytic philosophers to be valid only on condition that all statements making up the narrative be ultimately capable of translation into externalist or psychological terms. These ahistorical positions have had the effect of blocking the development of a viable epistemology of the social sciences from arising from within traditional analysis. But a strong philosophy of the social sciences, all of which are based upon history to a greater or lesser degree, is exactly what’s needed for a fruitful relationship between art history and philosophical aesthetics. This requires nothing less than a wholesale reform of analytic philosophy.[1]






[1]. See Joseph Margolis, “The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics,” in Analytic Aesthetics Richard Schusterman ed. Basil Blackwell, 1989 pp. 161-189

Note on the meanings of the word "history:" event, study, reflection

The word “history” is compounded of three distinct meanings; one, the course of human events, History itself, knowledge of which is only accessible through two; the study of those events by historians using documents and three, the combination of these two; that is, the human process of learning, or failing to learn from, History as mediated through that knowledge. These meanings, although dialectically intertwined, are distinct, and much confusion may be avoided if their distinctions are attended to.

Art History and the Philosophy of Social Sciences 1.: What is history?

What kind of knowledge is art history?  Is it a science, a branch of the humanities, or some combination? What is its relationship to the social sciences and the physical sciences?  These questions are interesting and important in themselves.  But they also shed light on contemporary debates in the philosophy of the social sciences.  For the art historian must constantly draw on the resources of sociology, anthropology, economics and so on, all themselves based on history to varying degrees.  So if we look at art history from the viewpoint of epistemology, we will naturally have to address the key issues in the philosophy of the social sciences: differences between and among the physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities; contrasts between causes and reasons; questions of reductionism and holism; issues of description, explanation and prediction; debates surrounding the nature of objectivity, interpretation, and understanding (verstehen), and so forth.  And of course, the absolutely central issue of historicism is particularly important here because art history is, after all, an historical discipline.  To study the epistemology of art history is to engage all of these issues.