Jan Lieven, Allegory of the
Five Senses (c. 1622)
Oil on
panel, 78.2 x 124.4 cm.
As an example of the primacy of historicism in art history, 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 [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.’”[1] The quoted passage recalls Hegel’s remark on the impossibility of composing an epic from within the context of the modern state;[2] 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.”[3] (To his credit, Danto has partly 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.
[1]. David Carrier, “Art History” in A Companion to Aesthetics [eds?] Blackwell, 1995 p. 15 Carrier
Refers to Wölfflin's Principles of Art
History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art M. D.
Hottinger, trans. Dover, 1950
[2]. Brian K. Etter, “Hegel’s Aesthetics and the
Possibility of Art Criticism” in Maker, 2000:39
[3]. Meyer Schapiro, “The Value of Modern Art” in Worldview and Painting-Art and Society
(Selected Papers Vol. V) George Brazillier, 1999 p. 134
No comments:
Post a Comment