> The base of the artworld pyramid is broad indeed... you're the one that talk about a pyramidal shape. For an historian, this assertion can be absolutely irrelevant (even though I admitt, that most of them think it is relevant), and you can find incredibly deep and exhaustive scholar works about people you'd never thought they had even exist one day...which is not the case with most of the other fields interested with art literature. You know, artist such as Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Boucher, Fragonard, Watteau, or Gericault, have been, at some moment of their posthume "career"absolutely forgotten and misunderstood, and it's thanks to art historians if they came back in the course of history, and, more important, in the course of the esthetical background. It's quite hard to understand the shape of Romantic painting, without the re-discover of Rembrandt and Hals in the beginning of the XIXth Century in Europe.
> The marxist historian would radical because for once, the > political bias would be stated upfront. Well, as you know, History is a matter of Storytelling, and in fact, there have been, and there are still, marxist historians. However, I don't think that marxism, and dialectical materialism, is so much relevant to history, because marxist's comprehension of history is a pattern, which is one of the founding pattern of the marxist theory, based on cycles and resolutions of conflicts that lead towards the establishment of a communist society. Marx always tried to settle his political theory on a theory of history mainly derived from Hegel, which means that the marxist historian has to fit the pattern, which is not so much a revolutionary way of doing things. However, marxism has inspired some of the very fruitful evolutions of history methodological tools (for example l'Ecole des Annales in France, with Marc Bloch -who, BTW, died in deportation under the three major guilts of that time: he was communist, resistant and jewish), because it has allowed historians to leave the event as the only valuable source, and the only possible target for history-writings. Social history derives directly from these attempts to build another type of history, and this have happened also in the art history field. > They all fail to prevent centrist institutions from > divesting their art -- Do you really think it was their aim? >what's worse, they encourage the abuse. Why worse? do you prefer when art is only to be seen in private collections by happy fews? Remember that the museum is an invention of the Revolution of 1789 to allow people to face artworks, to take it out of the castles and to bring it to the people...It doesn't sound so much as a bad idea to me. > This isn't very satisfying of course. Sorry, at least it's an attempt to be honnest. Besides, history is not a very satisfying matter, unless you invent and write as if you were present when things happenned, which is something good for "unauthorized biographies" of Marylin Monroe, or Lady Di, but no so much for actual historical scholarship. > Perhaps some 'fields of study' (Anthropology, Sociology, > even Art), have become moribund: mere bureaucratic enclaves > that unwittingly perpetuate their host's imperialistic > mis-directives. It's partially the opinion of Hans Belting who thinks that history of art is over, because the history of art is over, because of course art is over (which is once again, the old seducing hegelian scheme of the way owned by mankind to reach the Ideal: first step, religion by the way of faith, second step, art, by the intuition, last, philosophy, by the reason, the derision being the clue that shows each step is over). Why not after all, but if it was to be true, artists would be the first ones to suffer from that... (I guess that's why, apart of Maciunas, none of the Fluxs artists, considered that art was over!) Bertrand
