Failed conceptual revolutions: three case studies

Photo by Diane Picchiottino.

Our culture depends on regular, reliable innovation. We expect the technologies of our everyday lives to be updated quickly. And we expect our art and intellectual tools to be significantly changed on a regular basis. But of course such innovations are not always successful. As a practicing art critic, I am well aware of this. We generally discuss the relatively few successes, but not usually the many failures. So it is worth looking at three case studies that might be instructive. These are relative failures. In fact, as we will see here, failure is a relative matter. It certainly does not have to be permanent. And it can be an important learning experience. As I will argue, there is a lot to be learned from these relative failures. I am looking at examples from my personal experience. Other people certainly have many other examples.

Principles of art historical writing

Trained as a philosopher, I switched to art history in the 1980s when I had a permanent academic position. Art history had its origins in late 19th century Germany and grew out of philosophy. But in the late 20th century, this background lost importance. As Erwin Panofsky noted, when the discipline moved to America (thanks to Nazism), these philosophical concerns tended to be marginalized. But eventually, American art historians felt that their discipline needed a philosophical foundation. The question then was who would provide that foundation.

This analysis might explain why, as a young scholar and outsider to art history, I found it natural to identify the philosophical concerns I had developed in a number of my early essays and then in my first book. Principles of art historical writing (1991). I was interested in the truth of interpretation, that is, a faithful correspondence between interpretation and image. And I wanted to understand how interpretations change over time. I asked, for example, why the early interpretations of Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, and Poussin were so different from typical newer representations. In general, the earlier representations were simple and brief, while the new interpretations were often detailed. Did this indicate progress in art history, I wondered? I would stress that these were natural questions for a young American analytical philosopher to ask.

There was some interest in my book, but it is fair to say that the prevailing academic preoccupation with the methods of art history took a completely different direction. Inspired by reading French structuralism and post-structuralism, these art writers offered a suggestive perspective. Here I would like to mention the meteoric career of Norman Bryson, an English literary scholar who became a professor of art history at Harvard. And the power of the various figures associated with the academic journal October. Although I was critical, I too found their thinking stimulating and had much to say about Bryson's writing, which I found instructive. And Bryson and I wrote an essay together. But the story of October and Bryson, that's another story for another occasion.

Adrian Stokes

In art literature there is an important distinction between the canonical older authors that everyone in the field should read and the many marginal figures known only to specialists. Thus in art criticism Diderot, John Ruskin and Roger Fry are canonical but Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) is not. And in America Clement Greenberg is canonical but his rivals from the 1950s are not. Stokes was encouraged by my teacher, the English philosopher Richard Wollheim, and so I wrote repeatedly about Stokes and devoted great attention to his books. And I was generously supported by his family, both in London and at their home in Italy.

Stokes came of age when art history was not a subject at Oxford; he was a self-taught, self-employed artist who spent a few years in Italy researching a relatively marginal subject, namely 15th-century relief sculpture. And then he published two books, The Quattro Cento (1932) and Stones of Rimini (1934), which attracted the positive attention of experts, including Kenneth Clark; and later his writings were greatly admired by the most important modern Italian art writer, Roberto Longhi. Later in his life, Stokes published a number of books on the visual arts, including a highly original analysis of modern urban culture, based on his experiences in psychoanalysis. He was a very versatile, highly original scholar.

Stokes was greatly admired in his homeland and supported by good publishers and a prominent English scholar, Stephen Bane, who organized a major conference that I attended. But although there is now a literature devoted to him and reprints of his writings, I think his place in the canon is still very uncertain. I am not sure that many younger scholars will be really interested in his work. Perhaps this is because his thinking is too distant. But perhaps this critical judgment is simply premature.

Wild Art

In my late middle years, when I felt my intellectual formation was solid, I had an amazing, life-changing experience: I met the art historian Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of the impressionist Camille Pissarro. Inspired by my reading of his doctoral thesis, we had a long conversation and then wrote two books together in the following years. Joachim had trained as a philosopher in Paris and was studying art history in London. I found him extremely stimulating, not least because we came from quite different intellectual backgrounds.

The next part of our story, which I have already presented elsewhere, needs only to be told very briefly here. In our books, Pissarro and I argued that the history of art was based on an untenable distinction between art that belongs to the world of galleries and museums and what we called “wild art,” which encompassed everything. Thus, commercial art in restaurants, tattoos, and most graffiti are wild art. We argued that this distinction is untenable and discussed the consequences of this claim. One of our books was devoted to more than four hundred pages of examples, all illustrated. And the other book offered a philosophical and historical account of the history of wild art. Both books, I should add, were published by major publishers.

Looking back, I realize that the history of contemporary art would have had to be conducted very differently if our analysis had been widely accepted. The usual belief in a canon was simply untenable. So far, however, our arguments, which, as I said, were supported by extensive documentation and well-organized philosophical discussions, have not yet been taken up by the professional world. But perhaps they will!

The future

What can we learn from these three examples? As I mentioned, conceptual innovation is difficult and success is often hard to achieve. Is this a reason to doubt the importance of debate? Certainly it shows that change is often difficult. And it shows that good rational arguments alone are not enough to change entrenched ways of thinking.

I will address these questions in more detail in another essay to be published soon.