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.
[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
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