Letters - Letter to the Editor

Of course, I agree with Duskova that Elkins does not work as an art historian in making his intervention, but he seems at least to hobble Bal's claim to have solved the issue of resolving the relation of marks to semiotic meanings, and to have stimulated me (or others) to ponder how to take seriously the graphic quality of drawings without worrying about the accusation of connoisseurship or the fact that we have not gotten to meaningfulness quickly enough.

Second, the degradation of our images in teaching and learning. Related to the foregoing discussion about the difficulty of writing about marks in painting and drawing are Elkins's interventions concerning the nature of the images that we deploy in teaching and learning. Elkins's contributions on this topic include one to this magazine ("What Are We Seeing Exactly?" Art Bulletin '79 [1997]: 191- 98). (4) His point is not what might be the case ("theoretically, it is possible to capture every visible detail and hue of an image [on a computer]") but what happens in practice, given the limitations of an ordinary computer screen. Elkins's conclusion is that "the average resolution of our images is plummeting."

This seems borne out by my own observation of actual practice in teaching and learning. Paintings are analyzed on the basis of images downloaded from the Internet. Of course, there are financial issues at stake, but it is valid to ask how far "the new art history" recognizes this situation as an issue, and what it might tell us about "the new art history" if it does not. In England issues of institutional financial problems also play a considerable role. Some of my institution's colleagues have foregone the use of slides in favor of overhead transparencies, and nearly all students use these in seminars, as well as some researchers at conferences. If we are using images that are worse than 19th-century photoetchings, as Elkins suggests, how come it does not matter?

Third, rethinking the delirium of interpretation. A number of recent books by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, David Carrier, and Michael Ann Holly have drawn our attention to the language and rhetorical patterns of art history writing. Duskova rightly recognizes that a certain sort of "art history itself is threatened by the notion that art historical writing might be the most important element in the discipline." She tries to keep this anxiety at bay by reversing the accusation and claiming that Elkins is "too concerned with his own writing."

It is a shame that Elkins's 1999 text Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? was not included in Duskova's review, though (unlike her own criticisms of what Elkins fails to do), I do not propose to criticize Duskova for not mentioning what she was not reviewing. This book, however, seems to me important in the way that it raises the uncomfortable question of why certain sorts of art have been written about more than others and why some artworks have accumulated a monstrously large literature on them, with a general tendency recently to write at ever greater length on certain sorts of art than was the case a century ago. We "prefer ambiguities, complexities, puzzles" to "less verbal, less systematic, less stringently conceptualized responses" (248). Art history "purposively searches out pictures. . . so dense with signs that they are already half inside language," ignoring simpler pictures (256). Elkins is tentative in his conclusion as to why this is, but is clearly drawn to the idea that we feel anxious to convert im ages into texts and thereby reduce their "alien" quality. Cumulative attempts to "solve" images thicken the plot, but the murder-mystery metaphor tells us about our cultural psychology rather than the object under consideration.