The Brooklyn Rail

I enjoyed David Carrier’s perceptive musings on art criticism and art history. Surely, he is correct in distinguishing art criticism from art history. He is also correct when he states that the distinction between these two modes of writing has become increasingly difficult to discern in recent years as art historians pay more attention than previously to contemporary art. This is scarcely surprising. Art criticism and art history are not two entirely different kinds of endeavor for they are both critical undertakings. They both seek to evaluate the critical worth of items their practitioners—and others—present as artworks. Art critics do this explicitly. Art historians frequently do this implicitly by means of their initial choice of items to discuss. Both either state openly or imply that these specific items—whether a new work in a commercial gallery or an acknowledged artwork in a museum or a private collection—are worthy of critical attention. Art criticism and art history exist in relation to each other on a spectrum.

One confusion that has crept into Carrier’s text is an elision of the distinction between art history and history. In the penultimate paragraph, when referring to art historians he repeatedly uses the term historians. Art historians are not historians, they are art historians. Art history and history, as disciplines, differ fundamentally from one another in a way that art criticism and art history do not. The distinction is not spectral but in kind. Art history is a critical discipline that concerns the explication of predominantly material items from among a fluctuating, but limited selection of those material items deemed artworks. Establishing the significance or meaning of an artwork is the critical goal of the art historian. Meaning is the opium of the art historian. History, on the other hand, is a descriptive discipline that concerns not material items and their meanings but human behavior, whether of individuals or in various aggregations, from small numbers to entire peoples. Art history and history are different in kind. This does not mean that art historians and historians cannot share concerns. After all, artworks are made, designated and used by humans, individually and in communities.

This state of affairs can lead to sometimes ironic confusion. For instance, Carrier mentions Ernst Gombrich as a historian. On the contrary, he is usually described as a great art historian. However, when I was his very junior colleague, Gombrich, greatly stressing the last word in his inimitable Viennese accent, once said to me, “I am not an art historian—I am a historian!” His leading student, Michael Baxandall, ever the contrarian, told me that he was not an art historian but rather an antiquary. Confusion indeed! Yet we need not be confused if we acknowledge the fundamental difference between the aims and responsibilities of art history and history as entirely distinct disciplines.

Many practices other than art criticism and art history can incorporate artwriting. History is one example, though historians rarely discuss artworks other than illustratively. Historians are generally not educated to use traces of the past, other than written words, as sources. I addressed this matter with my historian collaborator, Sarah Anne Carter in the Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020). Artworks are extremely difficult to use as historical sources, as I argued in Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (2019).

History is far from alone in occasionally incorporating artwriting. Other forms of artwriting can be found in a wide variety of disciplines. These include anthropology (Franz Boas, Philippe Descola, Clifford Geertz, Alfred Gell, Howard Morphy, Sally Price, Nicholas Thomas); archaeology (writers too numerous to mention, from Johann Joachim Winckelmann onward); conservation and conservation science (Cesare Brandi, Miriam Clavir, Alessandro Conti, Salvador Muñoz Viñas); economics (Martin Feldstein, Bruno S. Frey and Werner W. Pommerehne, John Michael Montias); and sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Hanna Deinhard, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Vera L. Zolberg). Most particularly—and perhaps strange to have been omitted by Carrier, a student of Arthur C. Danto—is philosophy. A huge philosophical literature in the European and European diasporic tradition exists on aesthetics and philosophy of art to which both Carrier and I have contributed.

These observations do not invalidate the greater part of Carrier’s claims. Art criticism and art history, although on a spectrum, are different undertakings. Art criticism offers reasons why a viewer should respond in the present either favorably or unfavorably to a body of work based on inherent perceptual qualities. In contrast, art history suggests reasons why a viewer should respond either favorably or unfavorably to a body of work as a matter of historical understanding (hence art history). Both are principally critical rather than descriptive endeavors. As the temporal origin of material for scrutiny approaches the present day, the spectral distinction between art criticism and art history becomes less evident. The observation that few art critics become art historians whereas some art historians engage in art criticism derives as much from academic guild regulations as from inherent differences, as Carrier points out. Both forms of artwriting can be valuable in their own way. Like Carrier, I happen to enjoy producing both. But I enjoy writing history and philosophy more.