ABSTRACT
In my brief comment, I wish to follow a thread offered by Thierry de Duve in his first sentences in this volume, where he insists that we should be asking what comprises the social ground of art history. He suggests that the raison d’être of art historians is that they are the guardians of tradition, which means that tradition is no longer transmitted without their help. But is it really being transmitted? And how so? My feeling is that tradition (that part of it which is embodied by works of art) is transmitted in an increasingly impoverished way. I am concerned about the tremendous gap that obtains between what works of art (or, rather, encounters with them) have to offer in terms of emotional, cognitive, and intellectual responses—and in terms of enrichment for their viewers—and what people are actually obtaining. And I do not think that art historians (as well as art critics and aestheticians) are, by and large, particularly bothered about it. What could loosely be called traditional art history was usually very keen to beat a retreat from a shaky ground of sensory aesthetics (as Otto Pächt nicely put it forty years ago). Similarly, all strands of “new” or “revisionist” art history or “visual studies,” for all their critical vocabulary and focus on vision and subjectivity, have been ignoring viewers and their experiences, engulfed as those disciplines are in their narcissistic preoccupation with the subject of the interpreter—that is, with the interpreter who is also a practitioner of “new” art history. (Notwithstanding some remarkable examples which cannot be neatly placed in either camp.) Meanwhile, the concept of experience has been usurped with good intention by people in consumer research, museum marketing, and education, and it has mostly been subjected to simplified and trivialized systematization. In any mainstream museological literature one quickly learns that the duty of the contemporary museum is to “improve,” “design,” or “deliver” experience—a better art experience, much like ads that promise stronger muscles, improved memory, or longer orgasms. In between this kind of rhetoric and tradition of aesthetic discourse, most art historians (perhaps understandably) prefer to stick with the hard facts of their objects and their histories, rather than the soft matter of how they are perceived and responded to.
