The History of Art as a term is generally taken to be the name of an academic discipline. Within that discipline Georgio Vasari is widely regarded as the 'first' art historian through his 1550 book, The Lives of the Artists (a shortened title from his longer one). His book was full of gossip about artists and their emergence in the Renaissance (his term). But it was Johann Winkleman who in the mid 18C created the canonical notion of the history of art through a methodology based on style. So it's a recent academic discipline and it's also one undergoing enormous change, mostly due to the 80s and 90s culture wars and the dissolution of a canonical "European" history of artworks.
It might be possible to reimagine the discipline according to the notion of a history of perception but Vasari invented it as a narrative of artist's lives and Winkleman as a narrative of style (or the evolution of style which one might argue as based on perception or at least formal perceptual attributes yet again limited to the "Western" canon). Outside of a disciplinary context the Hisotry of art can be defined in any way at all, by any set of conditions one might choose. The educated trick is to somehow incorporate all the past narratives, the past definitions of the term, into a new, broader or different one that does not toss them aside altogether. My point is that when we use a term, like The History of Art, we need to acknowledge that it has a specific historical function and definition that resists the whims of utter personalisms. It indeed has acquired a stick-on meaning, however limited and 'meaningless' it may be outside of that context. If we want to redefine it then we must balance our new definitions against the older one or lose access to some knowledge. While Cheerskep is right to point out to the choir -- sigh, yet again -- that meanings are ultimately independent of objects or any referents, he should acknowledge customs and habits of usage (as far as they go), or in the case of the term The History of Art, its widely recognized identity as the name of an academic discipline originating in the 18C serving well enough until, say, 1970. The fact that this discipline is undergoing enormous change now and can no longer be limited to a given methodology, does not alter the results of that earlier methodology, which, it is true, provides the parameters for change...and new 'meanings'. Vasari and Winkleman are still great teachers, and lively reads, too. As for the origins of the History of Perception, I offer the huge surge of scholarship on 'visual culture' stemming from game-changers like Aby Warburg, E. Gombrich, and a many others. They, at least moved the study of art away from style itself to the broader and subjective modes of vision rooted in cultural habits and needs. Once their outlooks are adopted as our own, we can look back with them, beyond them, and see the varied routes of visual perception deep into antiquity and perhaps even into the neolithic. Vasari, however, was content to stick mainly with his Italians and Winkleman with the Greeks. William Conger ________________________________ From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 9:49 AM Subject: Re: comment invited On Dec 2, 2013, at 8:53 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Crary > does pose the interesting question:doesn't the history of art coincide with > the history of perception? I think that this is the question Maillet would > like to approach. I imagine Maillet would. Just as "OUR understanding of meaning" assumes the "real" existence of an imaginary totally notional entity, so does "THE history" of art and perception.
