ABSTRACT
Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, art history was largely the study of objects arranged in groups, each of which had a person attached. e objects stood in for the person, but also for a broader intellectual and artistic continuum. Knowledge of an artist’s world and inner life supplied a narrative setting in which to place the objects and could, perhaps, inform an understanding of them. In some cases – those of Artemisia Gentileschi and Vincent van Gogh being extreme examples – the painted objects are now dened, in part, by public awareness of particular aspects of the artist’s personal life. Conversely, the personal reputation of some artists is largely dened by an interpretation of objects with which they are credited. While one artist will attempt to manage the development of her own reputation, another may leave it to chance and risk being redened, in unpredictable ways, by third parties. By neglecting to sign her paintings, for example, a female painter opens the way for her best work to be reattributed to male contemporaries. Twentieth-century artists’ tendency to reject ‘made’ objects and the art market has, in the twenty-rst century, necessitated the development of new art historical strategies for interpreting and evaluating works that may be comprised of performance, light, sound or nothingness. As a result, some contemporary installations are accompanied by written statements in which the artists, or their intermediaries, reect on or explain their work. Paradoxically, these new textual objects take on material, autobiographical and perhaps even monetary values of their own and, who knows, could one day stand in for, or even become, the work.
