Jeremy Tanner

Art's agency and art history

Arts Agency and Art History re-articulates the relationship of the anthropology of art to key methodological and theoretical approaches in art history, sociology, and linguistics. • Explores important concepts and perspectives in the anthropology of art • Includes nine groundbreaking case studies by an internationally renowned group of art historians and art theorists • Covers a wide range of periods, including Bronze-Age China, Classical Greece, Rome, and Mayan, as well as the modern Western world • Features an introductory essay by leading experts, which helps clarify issues in the field • Includes numerous illustrations.

Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences

Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art

Art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings have played a key role in defining the major paradigms in the sociology of art: the production of culture perspective, Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art, Hennion and DeNora’s ‘new sociology of art’. Although making fruitful use of Baxandall’s focus on markets, material visual practices and the concept of the period eye, these appropriations have overlooked the centrality to Baxandall’s work of the concept of art as an institution. This institutional focus permits Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in a way which shows not only how visual art is socially constructed, but also how it plays an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels of emergence, from the interaction order to larger social structures.

Ancient Greece, early China: Sino-Hellenic studies and comparative approaches to the classical world. A review article

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the (non)-reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernants originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’.

Portraits and politics in classical Greece and early imperial China: an institutional approach to comparative art

This article develops a comparative approach to the history of portraiture in classical Greece and early imperial China, with a particular focus on institutions of state honorific portraiture. It argues that a key role in the development of portraiture in classical Greece and early imperial China was played by the formation of differentiated political organisation in the two societies, and the need to develop new forms of reward symbolism to engage emergent elites in the project of state building entailed by the new forms of political organisation. The distinctive forms and formats of portraiture in the two traditions were shaped by the specific character of the political organisation of the two states, democratic and monarchic respectively, and by the correspondingly distinctive social values which informed elite bodily comportment in each case.