Who is art history for?

Apollo, July, 2005 by Michael Hall

No article in APOLLO in recent months has attracted as much comment as John Nicoll's polemic in the May issue on the state of art-book publishing. On pages 22-23 we print two of the letters we have received, which address Mr Nicoll's accusation that copyright and reproduction fees charged by museums and galleries are 'strangling the publication of art books'. The subject was raised again last month at a conference on academic art-history publishing organised by the Courtauld Institute of Art, at which Mr Nicoll and other publishers of books and journals spoke. Representatives of museums--notably the Victoria and Albert--visibly quailed under the audience's onslaught.

Another of the important questions raised by Mr Nicoll in his APOLLO article--the way art historians neglect the needs and interests of the 'educated general reader'--was addressed by the conference much more tentatively. It is surely essential that if art history is to flourish as a discipline, it should attract the interest of the educated public, but for the Courtauld, as for most institutes of higher education, art historians serve first their students and second the wider scholarly community.

This may seem narrow enough, yet when listening to many of the speakers at the conference it was easy to believe that the prime audience for academic art historians today is in fact the assessors of the Research Assessment Exercise. This is the scheme--the next one, the fourth since 2002, is scheduled for 2008--that assesses the quality of published research by departments in universities and other institutes of higher education. It gives each department a score that will be used as the basis for the future allocation of funds by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and its equivalents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The criteria for judging research are based on peer review and, as far as art history is concerned, it is fair to say that the way that publication serves an audience other than professional art historians is not an important element.

Museums and art galleries face different constraints. Here the chief problem is that most curators' scholarly activities are based on catalogues--essential, but by their very nature specialised--and exhibitions. Exhibition catalogues are now the chief way in which new academic research is published for a wide audience. The list of bestsellers in art history published by The Art Book, the quarterly publication of the Association of Art Historians, makes this clear--in the last list, for autumn 2004, six out of the top ten fine-art books are exhibition catalogues. The only other art books likely to reach an equivalently large audience are those tied to television series.

There is undoubtedly a middle ground between academic RAE-focused publication and exhibition/TV-tie-in publication, but it is focused almost exclusively on modern and contemporary art: in The Art Book's bestseller list, six of the top ten titles are on art after 1945. There seems to be a failure to attract large audiences for books on art before 1900 that are not tied to exhibitions or television. Where, as Mr Nicoll asked, are art history's modern equivalents of Ernst Gombrich or Kenneth Clark? Where also are the subject's equivalents of such charismatic, best-selling historians as Simon Schama (who does write about art compellingly), Andrew Roberts, David Cannadine or Niall Ferguson? The boom in popular publishing by academic art historians has not been matched by an equivalent in art history.

A lack of imagination or courage in publishers may be to blame, as well as the supposed greed and undoubted self-interest of the institutions that charge reproduction fees. But a more fundamental issue is the nature of contemporary art history. The problem is not the gulf between theory-based art history and empirical research--there is plenty of the latter, as APOLLO itself demonstrates. Instead, the problem seems to be the discipline's slowness--or unwillingness--to follow history. After two decades or so basing themselves on sociological models, historians in the 1980s rediscovered narrative, an essential foundation for the modern publishing phenomenon of popular history.

Art history has yet to follow suit, and remains intensely focused on the social-historical aspects of the discipline. There is undoubtedly an unwillingness to consider alternative modes of approach, of which narrative or biographical history is one. Consider, for example, how few good art-historical biographies there are. The best--such as Hilary Spurling's magnificent life of Matisse (volume two is reviewed on pages 56-57)--are by authors who do not count themselves as art historians. If academic art historians are ever going to emerge from their publishing ghetto, they need not only to deal with often unimaginative publishers and high reproduction fees, they need also to think more about how to attract a wider audience. But while British universities are encouraged by the RAE to be so inward-looking, and museums are overwhelmingly dominated by the exhibition industry, there is depressingly little incentive for them to do so.