ABSTRACT
In recent years, new concerns have emerged regarding how canons in the visual arts are made. Rather than attending to questions of artistic judgment, to the historical genesis of masterpieces, or to variations in taste, we have come to think of canons as embodying values. And far from treating those values as neutral or impartial, we hold them to incorporate interests. To cite the case of French art of the late nineteenth century, new attention has fallen to the social instruments of canonicity – specifically, to the converging network of collecting, exhibition, and promotional forces that propelled and sustained the rise of Modernism. New attention, similarly, has fallen to our continuing complicity in that canon, specifically to the ideological, institutional, and gendered interests that seemingly nourished on the cultural capital Modernism supplies. For all the rewards of those new perspectives, we know rather less about the inverse condition – about how canons disappear. We have paid relatively little attention to the crumbling of reputations, to the process by which once famous works failed to compel conviction, to the gradual dismantling of institutional, economic, and other forms of support.1
