The future of art history and the undoing of the survey

5. Teach the conflicts. Our students are seldom exposed to the actual debate and disagreement that constitute the scholarly process. Still less frequently are topics actually designed around a fundamental disagreement. For example, the popular view that Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis was the creator of the Gothic style has been trenchantly criticized by Peter Kidson among others.(17) The ancient Maya offer another example: how "truthful" is the dynastic history contained in Classic Maya elite art and texts? Some "dirt" archaeologists remain skeptical about political claims in Maya texts.(18) Thus, we might prepare students to understand that many issues, art historical or not, are nol easily resolved.(19)

A Last Look Around

Art history in America today may be more intellectually robust and inventive than at any time since it began the assimilation of the emigres from Europe in the 1930s. The health of the teaching profession may be another matter. If one judges the course from the texts available, the art history survey in American colleges and universities is evidently one or two generations behind the advanced sectors of the discipline. Stylistic analysis (description, really) remains the paradigm, and the discourse of choice remains a teleological narrative of celebration. Surveys are marked by an obsessive adherence to fossil notions like cultural period and cultural style. As exemplars of a genre, survey texts may be impressive monuments of synthesis, authoritative versions of a modernist canon in art history. Some recent additions to the genre, notably Larry Silver's History in Art (1993), might suggest that the hegemony of the older, established texts is not so secure any more. But we have to see the older texts for what they are: the individualized, quirky summations of distinguished careers, tiow more suitable as records of art history's past than as maps lbr art history's future.

Eventually, we will have to decide whether the art history survey and its texts do not all belong to a waning paradigm of art history. The art history survey is at an impasse and may perhaps have reached the end of its own history. The paradigm is waning. I, for one, say, let it wane.

Notes

This essay began as a paper read al the Southeastern College Art Conference held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1992, in a session chaired by Howard Risatti. The litle acknowledges the inspiration of Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

1. The classic locus is Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

2. In 1963 James Ackerman said of the "survey mentality" that "courses are organized almost invariably in terms of established epochal styles presented frequently in such rapid succession that time does not permit the instructor lo represent his examples in any terms but the conventional." James Ackerman and Rhys Carpenter, Art and Archaeology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), 200. The only survey text that has tried to break up Ackerman's "epochal styles" is that by Honour and Fleming, whose efforts have received mixed reviews (see below, n. 3).