The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

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There may have been a worse time in US history to be in higher education, but I’m not sure when. Working in art history, a field that faces constant skepticism even among those who claim to love learning, I feel this acutely. Because deep study increasingly feels like insurrection, I wonder what might happen if we stopped defending our institutional patches and started flooding other fields with critical visual analysis.

Technology companies mine and sell our attention like coal. They have turned looking into a form of labor that enriches them while exhausting us. Yet people hunger for the opposite: sustained, careful attention that belongs to them. When the New York Times offers readers the chance to stare at a painting for ten minutes in its wildly popular “10-Minute Challenge,” thousands respond. Most flee within seconds, but those who stay the full ten minutes report something like revelation, with one reader describing it as a process of “an undoing as compared to doing.”

I like this phrase, for it points to how art-historical approaches can actively reshape public understanding and experience. This capacity for productive disruption requires what the Moroccan polymath Abdelkebir Khatibi called being a “professional stranger,” or a restless mind forever exposing itself to unfamiliar, even uncomfortable discursive situations, deliberately seeking moments when disciplinary assumptions break down and treating those failures as data rather than problems to solve. Professional estrangement also leads to uncomfortable recognitions. I direct one of the country’s oldest art history programs. I am deeply uncertain of any defense of art history as a discipline. A prospective graduate student recently told me he thinks art history is irrelevant—and chose to pursue a Ph.D. anyway. (We accepted him.) His contradiction suggests that people recognize the value of these methods even as institutional structures feel depleted. This is partly what leads me to think about an applied art history.

Much has been made of this year’s New York Federal Reserve data showing recent art history graduates facing less unemployment than computer engineering majors—3 percent versus 7.5 percent.¹ I find myself asking what we are celebrating when underemployment rates—jobs that don’t require their degree or fully utilize their skills—affect almost 50 percent of all recent graduates holding any art history degree. The real issue isn’t the students’ qualifications but our emphasis on narrow career outcomes rather than on what students actually know and where it might prove valuable. There is much to learn from the belief that an encounter between artwork and viewer can reshape the desires and uncertainties that determine what counts as human or not, necessary or dispensable, and public or private. Indeed, the real question is not whether art history deserves its tiny corner of the university, but why every field has not yet learned to think visually. Rather than defending what we have, we should be asking why we settled for so little in the first place.

An applied art history strategically extends art-historical training and epistemological frameworks beyond traditional disciplinary uses to engage with broader social, political, and ethical questions. But this isn’t just about borrowing art-historical techniques, like close-looking, for other fields. An effective application of art-historical methods challenges blindnesses underwriting how institutions legitimate value and how non-art domains construct knowledge. I think it’s possible because of how art history operates as a “moderate abstraction” that’s specific enough to generate precise insights, yet abstract enough to translate across fields and contexts. Whereas applied sciences minimize uncertainty, applied art history thrives in it, transforming ambiguity from obstacle to method.

I see applied art history operating across three scales: tactical (solving specific problems in other fields), institutional (transforming how organizations construct knowledge), and civic (strengthening civil society’s capacity for critical thinking). All three scales build on each other, as we can see in the case of a portrait of Jamaican scholar Francis Williams. Once described by Victoria and Albert Museum curator Harold Clifford Smith as a “curious, satirical portrait recording a failed experiment in Negro education,” the painting of Jamaican scholar Francis Williams was examined by a team of conservation scientists hoping to shed more light on who painted it and where. Using imaging technology, they identified the books behind Williams as texts authored by Robert Boyle, heralded as the first modern chemist, and by Isaac Newton. Further examination led historian Fara Dabhoiwala to infer that what was once dismissed casually as a “small furry, white blob” was nothing less than the return of Halley’s comet in 1759. Together with the books and Williams’s hand so decisively placed on the page where Newton describes how to calculate the trajectory of a comet, the portrait offers the possibility of applied art history when the analysis moves beyond correcting art-historical knowledge to actively restructuring institutional narratives. Dabhoiwala wasn’t just reinterpreting a painting; he was also challenging embedded assumptions about the scope and nature of Black intellectual contributions to science. Such a case has me asking what new abundances might be realized if we treat imaging technology and material analysis as tools for historical justice rather than as mere instruments for technical investigation.

Applied art history requires not just new applications but new forms of training that work outside traditional graduate programs, making critical visual analysis accessible beyond the very limited number of spaces where art history has traditionally been taught. More than twenty years ago, dermatologist Irwin Braverman tried to improve the ability of medical students to observe and describe symptoms by getting them to look closely at eighteenth and nineteenth-century British figurative paintings of human bodies, sometimes alone but also in groups. The goal was to wean students and practitioners from what was previously standard medical education—to look only for preexisting or known patterns, such as particular shadow formations on an x-ray. Students stand before artworks for an extended period of time. They may not speak initially. They may not name diseases. The paintings force them to slow down. In hospitals, doctors spend four minutes with patients. They scan for patterns they already know—shadows on x-rays, clusters of symptoms that match textbook diseases. The paintings offer no such shortcuts. Students must notice everything: how light falls across a face, where the body shows tension, which eye droops slightly lower than the other. Then they discuss these details in a group which consequently reveals a different story beyond disease: resignation, grief, resilience and even hope can factor into the assessments. The results are promising; studies vary, but some estimate that students who train this way spot thirty percent more symptoms than those who do not.

But this remains art history performing a service, instances where our practices are deployed within medicine’s existing frameworks. More promising is how medical students work with art historians in looking exercises that double as opportunities to discuss bias and inequities in healthcare. For instance, art-historical analysis reveals how pose, lighting, framing, and compositional choices encode assumptions about class, gender, and race that medical training treats as neutral documentation. A number of medical schools recognize how art-historical methods can help illuminate how certain bodies become visual defaults while others are coded as pathological variations. Instead of improving diagnostic accuracy within established systems, applied art history explores how medical authority constitutes itself through ways of looking that serve particular interests. Whatever its limitations, art-historical close-looking tends to challenge organized forms of blindness, or not-seeing that renders invisible certain social relations and ideological commitments. Art historians develop comfort with interpretive uncertainty, with the additional benefit of being trained to articulate how that uncertainty becomes productive rather than paralyzing. Such methodological humility becomes politically urgent when expertise itself is under siege. The question is whether this training will be deployed beyond the safety of canonical objects toward a fundamental reconsideration of how medical knowledge that sorts bodies into hierarchies of worth is visually constructed and institutionally maintained.

Art history demands stillness. It insists we allow ourselves time, perhaps even freedom, to wrestle with what cannot be easily resolved, in ways that might teach us to ask better questions of each other. To apply art history is to make other thinkers squirm deliberately. For only by forcing ourselves and others out of established patterns of thought can new possibilities emerge. Applied art history refuses to feed the information beast. Instead, it asks how we transform data into knowledge, and at what cost—with what values guiding the alchemy of that transformation.

Another principle of applied art history might be put thus: if art-historical analysis can translate art’s intuitive grasp of emerging social problems into frameworks that can inform legal and policy discourse, can it also help develop systematic methods for adjudicating visual claims other fields struggle to address? Consider some examples of copyright law, where visual similarity determines legal outcomes but lacks adequate tools for assessment. The so-called “substantial similarity” test in copyright disputes focuses on whether an ordinary observer would recognize that the alleged copy was appropriated from the copyrighted work, even if it is not exactly the same. Suffice it to say, it’s a problematic standard—it lacks clear criteria and is vulnerable to all manner of cultural biases and strategic manipulation.

About twenty years ago I proposed to legal colleagues a possible model extrapolated from the thinking of Otto Pächt, an exponent of the “Vienna School” of art history in the middle of the last century. Old school as Pächt sounds, his approach to analysis through the identification of distinctions and part-whole relationships grafts surprisingly well onto existing legal structures. Pächt broke with older models of connoisseurship: where others trusted intuitive recognition, he built what amounted to diagnostic procedures that different viewers could use. Adapting Pächt’s method, I sketched a four-part test. Begin with function—not just what a work does, but how it organizes the viewer’s encounters with space, time, and materials. In the second step, consider the totality of the work, its overall bearing, how it appears from different distances, and the ways in which it commands (or deflects) attention. Next, consider the specific parts of the work, and then how those parts relate to the whole.

I was after something more concrete than the existing legal standard of “comprehensive nonliteral similarity” which too often settles for quick general impressions. As jurists face a barrage of visual evidence accelerated by the growth of machine learning, the need for iterable systems of assessing such evidence has expanded dramatically. But perhaps what’s needed are criteria that acknowledge artistic production as the irreducibly complex process it has always been. The four-part test, for all its systematic rigor, accepts copyright law’s dubious premise that originality can be quantified like commodity prices. Legal thinking remains trapped in nineteenth-century connoisseurship—precisely the framework art history has spent half a century dismantling. This is different from Andy Warhol or Marcel Duchamp, who would blow up the whole system. We must offer both: tools that work today and questions that challenge tomorrow. By cultivating comfort with ambiguity, art history works in the gray areas that legal systems are designed to eliminate.

Conventional legal remedies flounder because they demand the sort of clarity that culture inherently resists. Art historians, by contrast, work with knowledge that cannot be codified: we learn to distinguish authentic formal innovation from clever pastiche, genuine engagement with materials from superficial appropriation, though we might struggle to explain our reasoning. Such discrimination proves essential as AI-generated content multiplies. There are meaningful differences between artists using AI as one tool among others, creators directing algorithms towards particular aesthetic ends, and pure machine generation, but these distinctions require exactly the contextual judgement that legal frameworks find so troublesome.

Art-historical analysis already does work politics and law cannot yet do. Take the problem of identifying emerging social issues by reading how they are being worked through visually and culturally before they become explicit policy problems. In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon directed a film that laid out in visceral terms the act and devastating consequences of stalking, decades before either UK or US law recognized it as such. Film No. 5, better known as Rape, depicts a young woman relentlessly followed by cameramen across London, allegedly without her consent. Her face is a map of escalating terror born of helplessness: politeness curdles into fear, resignation hardens into rage. But recognizing this work’s prescient analysis requires art-historical methods to decode what Ono and Lennon were actually doing. Without frameworks for reading how the film’s formal strategies of relentless camera movement and the refusal of editing cuts reproduce the psychology of stalking, the work might be dismissed as mere provocation. What changes when framing certain phenomena or behaviors as problems for art history, rather than, say, only politics or law? We cannot trace a line from this work to stalking laws. But art history can show what artists know before lawyers can speak it. Our job is to lay forth what they saw coming.

But the work of applied art history isn’t just about reading the future through artworks made in the past. It can also analyze how aesthetic agency operates in real time to shift institutional and legal understanding. Take Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza, or more precisely, what happened to him in the Musée du quai Branly in 2020. He might call his attempted unauthorized removal of a wooden funeral pole in the museum’s collection “activist diplomacy,” but watch his hands as he grips that pole. Watch the strain in his shoulders as he wrenches what the institution calls a sculpture but what he would regard as a living thing from its base. When a guard tells him to “wait,” Diyabanza replies: “Wait for whom?! You defend the thieves. Between the owners and the thieves, which side are you on?” This is performance, yes, but it is also the body refusing to accept what institutions claim about ownership, history, and access.

I cannot prove his performance changed the judicial mind. Though charged with attempted aggravated theft—an offence carrying a potential decade in prison and 150,000 euro fine—Diyabanza received a 1,000 euro fine, suggesting the court grasped that something other than ordinary criminality was at stake. It suggests how applied art history might work by breaking down large-scale abstractions like “cultural heritage” through specific examples of what form does. It makes us consider what form can do to achieve what traditional legal or political approaches cannot.

An objection presents itself: why trust art-historical expertise when the whole project of critical application sets itself against expert authority? Someone will point out that I am doing exactly what I claim to oppose—drawing lines around what counts as proper art history. They are right. I write this as someone who has benefited from exactly the institutional concentration I now question. You cannot escape a system by pure thought. You can only use what you have to build something different. The contradiction is real. It is also necessary. The formation of art history as a discipline has compelled so many of its practitioners to confront how exhortations of objectivity and neutrality are precisely where outside interests most easily take hold. The competence of art historians, such as it is, resides in trained recognition of vision’s limits, including the limits of that very training. Methodological reflexivity doesn’t prevent co-optation, but it creates conditions where that co-optation becomes visible and therefore contestable, inviting input from the very voices that technocratic expertise systematically excludes.

Extending art history outside its conventional disciplinary fora involves risks. But art history is already at risk, for its traditional institutional bastions are crumbling. More than disciplinary survival is at issue. What threatens all that art history enables is not so much the disappearance of departments or the decline of museums, painful as these are. Far more insidious is the co-optation of our hard-won ability to see through and beyond appearances used to reinforce the systems we critique. At issue is not whether applied art history proves useful, but whether it preserves the democratic infrastructure of critical attention that both market logic and authoritarian politics depend on dismantling.

Examples like these matter in light of all that is unfolding now and which Kim Seong-hwan brilliantly encapsulated in his comic strip Mr. Gobau, or Old Man Gobau. The longest-running newspaper comic in South Korea since its debut in 1950 during the Korean War, he drew this particular strip at the height of martial law in South Korea, when the press was muzzled, when public assemblies were banned, and when universities were shuttered. Mr. Gobau plods joylessly through the streets of a desolate Seoul, passing by boarded-up gates of colleges. Rows of hatching descend over each panel like endless sheets of rain. Finally reaching home, he cocoons himself under a duvet that looks more like a makeshift bunker. Only then does he ask “whether after this winter, will spring come again.” Kim’s visual grammar of isolation, repeated across panels, made something tangible about what it meant to live when thinking had become suspect. Applied art history attunes us to consider these languages that emerge when textual analysis carries real professional and personal risk. We learn to see how form carries what cannot be verbalized and when visual choices become political acts—especially when they don’t announce themselves as such.

Now we are in our own winter. Applied art history asks us to preserve something basic: the habit of slowing down with forms, of paying sustained attention to how things look and maintaining belief that such attention can still change how we see and act. When bastions crumble, we face a simple choice. We can patch the cracks, make small repairs, spend our days explaining ourselves to those whose minds have already been made.

Or we can walk away. Ask what might grow where old structures once held court. Walk instead towards somewhere we cannot yet see, towards forms of engagement we haven’t yet imagined. When explicit critique becomes perilous, the capacity of sustained questioning becomes essential. It helps build connections across different ways of thinking without surrendering to either market interests or state control. In this way, applied art history runs counter to a nihilistic world—a world that declares the sole worthy aim is the destruction of one’s enemies. This is not optimism. This is the hard work of keeping alive what others want dead. It is the tactical repositioning we need not merely to survive the winter, but to hope for spring’s return.