Thomas E. Crow

The practice of art history in America

As the name for a discipline, ‘art history’ enacts a syntactical clash every time it is uttered or written. Which is the principal term, which its modi1⁄2er? The two elements in their coupling confront one another in an undecided hierarchy. The more decorous substitute, ‘history of art,’ puts the weight on the object that history is called upon to serve, but its currency is less–and in the shorthand of everyday speech, virtually nil. There is, of course, a large measure of convention, common to most European languages, in the particular use of the term ‘art’ to designate painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, and (more distantly) architecture. In any event, it primarily denotes a range of physical objects. Its true, much wider application to any creative practice or product generally requires some explicit indication –an odd reversal of the general and the particular. Is this anomaly a mere accident of usage? Or does it point to some actual eccentricities in the term’s historical formation that bear on the position of art history in the American constellation of humanistic disciplines? The fact that the visual arts successfully lay claim to a general, honori1⁄2c designation as Art may lie–and this is speculative–in the physically enduring nature of the artifacts that fall under such a description. Literature can manifest itself in any legible transcription, and the performing arts of music and theater can conjure physical actuality from a score or script, but 1⁄2delity to any original enactment can never be secured–dance is even less traceable beyond living routine and memory. By contrast, the intricate physical remains on which art history concentrates its Thomas Crow

Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

Describes how eighteenth century open Salon exhibitions by the French Academy encouraged the public view and evaluate art, and explains the influence of this public opinion on the painters of the day.