End of diversity in art historical writing is art theory becoming uniform around the world

James Elkins The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives Picture Credits: Chapter 8, Fig 1, 2, 3, 4, 7: James Elkins: Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America, in: Transcultural Studies, Nr 1, (2010) (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-ts-19283): Fig 4, 6, 8, 10, 11 Fig 5: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rihard_Jakopi%C4%8D_-_Pri_svetilki.jpg; Fig 6: https://www.bellasartes.gob.ar/en/collection/work/2694/, © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2021 ISBN 978-3-11-068110-9 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072247-5 Library of Congress Control Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: ### Layout and typesetting: ### Printing and binding: ### www.degruyter.com Table of Contents This excerpt includes only the introduc2on and the pages on art theory Introduction   7 Acknowledgments   13 The Conditions Under Which Global Art History Is Studied  17 Leading Terms: Master Narrative, Western, Central, Peripheral, North Atlantic   39 Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena?  63 The Example of Art Since 1900  95 State of the Field: Six Current Strategies   113 Reasons Why Escape is Not Possible   145 Finding Terms and Methods for Art History   153 Writing about Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America   165 The Most Difficult Problem for Global Art History   193 Envoi: Writing Itself   205 Main Points   209 Index   215 Introduction This is a book about the ways people write about the history of modern and contemporary art in different parts of the world From the vast art world and art market, I want to look just at the writing about art; and within art writing I want to consider only texts that are concerned with modern and contemporary art history; and within those texts, I am mainly interested not in what is said about art but how it is said This may appear to be a specialized topic, but to adapt William Gass’s phrase, I think it is the heart of the heart of the matter for understanding the impending globalization of art The subject variously called “global art history” or “world art history” has become a concern in art history departments worldwide Sometimes global art history focuses on the practices of art around the world: how they differ from one region or nation to the next, whether they are becoming more uniform in the age of international curation, how cultural practices disseminate and produce new combinations But my title phrase does not refer to what is studied—the “master narratives” of art history, freshman survey courses, and introductory textbooks—but how it is studied The dissolution of the introductory “story of art,” as E. H. Gombrich called it, is impelled by interests in decolonization and identity, and by the ongoing introduction of unfamiliar art practices into the art world But as the art world is becoming more diverse and inclusive, writing about art is becoming less diverse and more uniform There is, I think, a single model for how art history and theory should be written, and it is spreading, largely unremarked, around the world: that is my subject in this book The question of how to write art history is at a crucial point: it is recognized as a central part of the discipline of art history, but discussions of how art history is written around the world still rely on incomplete, local, and even anecdotal evidence The study of the writing of world art history—again, in distinction to the study of how art has been practiced around the world—seems at once indispensable in an age of increasing globalization, and also optional, something that might be added to a student’s curriculum or a scholar’s itinerary Introduction I think that the increasing worldwide uniformity of scholarly and critical writing on art is the single most important problem in the field of art history, and I think we need to consider it first, even before we write on our various specializations Paying attention to the how of writing—our theories, narratives, and points of reference—is crucial for judging whether or not our thinking about the history, theory, and criticism of modern and postmodern art are becoming uniform worldwide There is a great deal of attention paid to global and national art, to competing accounts of modernism, and to the contemporary All that can obscure the fact that the talk itself—the way we use theories, the theories we choose, the ways we discuss modern and contemporary art, in short the how of art history—is widely taken as given, as an unproblematic lingua franca For example there is a fair amount of scholarship on Gutai and other postwar practices in Japan, and in that scholarship there is ongoing discussion of which moments in Japanese postmodernism are most important, which have been misrepresented, and which have yet to be adequately described But the literature that debates those questions is itself written in a very uniform manner: the style of the writing, the theorists who are brought to bear, the scholarly apparatus, the forms of argument, the values accorded to what is taken as historical significance, and the places the work is published, are all in what I will be calling a standard North Atlantic idiom Cultural difference, hybridity, translation, misrecognition, and the circulation of ideas are very much at issue, but the manner of the writing is remarkably uniform Talk about modern and contemporary art is at risk of being flattened into a homogeneous world discourse, despite the fact that scholars continue to emphasize the importance of the local and the diversity provided by mixtures of national, transnational, and regional practices It is a paradox that just as attention to identity becomes more intensive, and as the subjects art historians study become increasingly diverse, the writing that articulates those identities and subjects is itself losing the relatively small degree of variety that it still has The impending single history of art will be very sensitive to difference, but unless it also reflects on its own lack of diversity, national and regional variations in art historical writing may become extinct This book is an attempt to slow that unfortunate tendency I have three purposes in mind with this book: first, to set out what I think are the principal conceptual issues in the worldwide practices of the writing of art history, theory, and criticism; second, to describe the dominant practice, which I will be calling North Atlantic art history; and third, to propose a new source of diversity in art writing, one I have not yet seen in the literature (Here as everywhere in this book, “diversity” applies to the forms of writing, not its subjects, which are multiplying exponentially.) The field of writing on worldwide practices of art history, theory, and criticism is chaotic, full of incommensurable viewpoints Chapters and set out a dozen or so of the most pressing issues I begin with a practical look at the study of global art history, including questions of funding, access to books and artworks, and the crucial fact that Introduction English is the de facto language of art history Global art history depends on unstable terms, including “Western” “non-Western,” “Euramerican,” “North American,” “Eurocentric,” “global,” “local,” “glocal,” “international,” “central,” “marginal,” “peripheral,” “regional,” “provincial,” and “parochial”; these are introduced in chapter Issues like these cannot be definitively resolved; the purpose of chapter is to acknowledge the institutional, economic, and political limitations of the study itself, and my aim in chapter is to sketch usable meanings of some of the principal concepts for the purposes of the arguments in this book I will present a case that certain habits and expectations of scholarship have effectively captured the world’s major academic institutions, so that there are few alternatives to the canonical readings of artists and artworks, the expected forms of explanation, narrative, and scholarship The sum total of those habits, theories, valuations, and narratives comprise the norm in art history departments in places like Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Harvard, the Courtauld, Leeds, Sussex, Berkeley, or the University of Chicago I call that set of practices, with many qualifications, North Atlantic art history I so because the usual ways of specifying the kind of art history I have in mind are either too biographical (this kind of art history could for example be associated with Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Griselda Pollock, and several dozen others), too institutionally specific (it could be associated with The Art Bulletin, Art History, October, Texte zur Kunst, and a dozen major US and EU university presses), or too vague (it could just be called “Eurocentric” or “Western” art history) Of those unhelpful or treacherous definitions, the commonest is the identification of this kind of art history with the journal October Among the many difficulties of that identification is the fact that, in my experience at least, it’s common among art historians to deny the influence, the coherence, or the relevance of “the October model.” Still, if the reductive identifications with October, the other journals and presses, the individual scholars, or the individual universities are unhelpful, it’s not much better to think of art history as a single discipline, or to divide it into “Eurocentric” and “other.” We are left with the choice of multiplying art historical practices to the point where each art historian would embody their own scholarly practice, or gathering practices to the point where regional or national differences can no longer be discerned That is why I have opted, somewhat reluctantly, for the expression “North Atlantic art history,” which I will develop in chapter It is intended to be historically, politically, and geographically delimited, so that it can intervene between the October model, which is both overly precise and elusive, and the notion of a “Eurocentric” or “Western” art history, which is vague and not analytically useful The principal reason to risk a neologism like “North Atlantic art history” is to show that there is, in fact, an uncodified consensus about the way art history should be written There is dwindling diversity in the writing of art history and related fields, because the North Atlantic model attracts concerted emulation in virtually every center of art Introduction history in the world Like global capitalism, it is spreading everywhere, and attempts to keep minor practices alive have not usually been viable Chapter explores analogous trends toward global homogeneity in the cases of art criticism, art theory, and art instruction: my sense of those fields is that they, too, are becoming less diverse I also want to be able to argue that there is no undiscovered continent of art historical writing that is outside this paradigm It is often assumed that art history, theory, and criticism worldwide comprise a set of diverse, mutually intelligible languages I not think that is the case There are no “non-Western,” “undiscovered,” local, national, or regional ways of writing art history that can join their voices to North Atlantic practices and form a diverse community of ways of writing In other words, it isn’t likely that North Atlantic art history will be saved from homogeneity by the voices of other traditions There is an idea, held by some scholars in Europe and the Americas who specialize in the art of those regions, that there are traditions or styles of art historical writing elsewhere in the world, and that Euramerican scholars need only acknowledge them in order to ensure art history’s diversity I not think this is so: the age of discovery is over, and scholars who identify themselves as art historians look—whether critically or in emulation—to a small number of institutions and scholars in western Europe and the US I don’t know any art historians who identify themselves with October I know some who deny that the circle around October was ever coherent, others who think the “model” is long superseded, and many who not recognize or acknowledge their indebtedness to October In my experience most art historians and theorists in the major institutions in western Europe and North America say they are independent of the influence of October and the various scholars and concerns that were associated with it in its first two decades I will be arguing that isn’t the case Even the most experimental contemporary art history, which appears least concerned with the interests of the previous generations of art historians, remains dependent on the model it ostensibly rejects This dependence is ongoing and commonly unacknowledged, largely because the dependence is deeper and more general than it seems if October is associated only with a couple of scholars and a small number of generative papers What follows from this is that a relatively small number of scholars, universities, journals, publishers, and books continue to provide the model for the world’s art history The most important agent in the international spread of North Atlantic art history is not any individual person or institution but a textbook: Art Since 1900, the subject of chapter Even in its expanded edition, this book has virtually no time for modernisms outside the North Atlantic, and even though its subtitle proclaims that its scope includes Modernism, Antimodernism, and Postmodernism, it gives little space to Soviet and National Socialist antimodernisms, and none to the many belated and provincial practices that are tacitly antimodern, and which comprise the majority of art produced worldwide 10 Introduction It’s likely that in the next couple of decades the number of art historians, theorists, and critics who engage world art writing practices will increase, and the subject of global art history (under various names) will become more common in departments worldwide At the same time I think the practices of art writing will become more homogeneous As this happens it may be particularly tempting to identify local or national art practices with differences in art history, theory, or criticism Yet as different as local and national practices can be, they not produce or represent differences in the ways art history is written That brings me to this book’s third contribution, a problem I think has so far gone unnoticed Some scholars hope that there are undiscovered or lesser-known practices of art writing that comprise art history’s real diversity Others emphasize the necessity of being attentive to individual practices of art, to local languages and forms of production Still others focus on hybrid and transnational art, or on postcolonial or decolonial contexts There are a number of such strategies to increase art history’s attention to the fine grain of individual practices I not think any of them have succeeded in working against art history’s impending uniformity From my point of view, art history’s real diversity is hiding in an unexpected place: it can be found in the many small inequalities between art historical practices of writing in different places By “small inequalities” I mean discrepancies between different authors’ engagement with the literature, their uses of theory, their knowledge of translations, their differing styles of argument, their senses of proper reference, their writing tone, or their use of archives Each place art history is practiced varies slightly, in these “small” ways What counts as a proper conversational opening to an essay in one place may seem too informal in another What counts as a useful review of the critical literature in one place will seem overly contentious in another What counts as an adequate engagement with the secondary literature in one country may seem insufficient in another What seems to be an interesting use of a theorist in one institution may seem misinformed in another These differences are the sorts of things that instructors correct in their students’ papers, and that editors notice when they read submissions to journals Correction of such differences comprise the everyday business of teaching and publishing art history everywhere These small discrepancies, I believe, actually are the remaining diversity in worldwide practices of art history They are the forms of cultural distance that we have left to us My last claim in this book is that we need to start paying attention to these apparently practical, minor, contextual deficiencies, absences, infelicities, solecisms, and awkwardnesses, because they are the precious remnants of cultural variety when it comes to art history, theory, and criticism This argument is made in the final chapter This book is also my last contribution to the field of art history Partly that is because this book says everything I want to say, and partly it is because I am moving into the wider study of writing itself, apart from its function in the description of art 11 Introduction I started as an art historian, but I found myself less engaged in producing new interpretations or making new discoveries than in understanding what has counted as persuasive or compelling interpretation At some point my practice moved from art history (the study of artworks) into the study of art history (historiography, or art theory) It became clear to me that art history is limited unless it considers its own medium of writing, because writing creates the conditions for sense and meaning And although it took me a long time to realize it, I am hardly the first to conclude that disciplines in the humanities are only tenuously aware of the writing that supposedly serves them so efficiently The book’s Envoi sets out the reasons why it might be fruitful for art history, theory, and criticism to turn their attention inward, to the writing itself Without an entirely rethought sense of writing, there are limits to what an analysis of globalization in art writing can accomplish At the end I have appended a list of the principal positions I take in this book 12 Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena? the art scene Something analogous happens in biennales: in 2020 the Beijing X Museum triennial employed a jury comprised of Diana Betancourt; Kate Fowle, director of MoMA PS1; Zhang Zikang, director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Thanks to Jacob Zhicheng Zhang and Aishan Zhang for these examples.) (7) It may not be, if essays written in different countries and regions have different vocabularies, styles, manners, interpretive methods, and narratives, as I think they in art history If art criticism amounts to a series of languages, then translating one into another may result in what Luis Camnitzer calls “codes” or “dialects”— that is, texts that appear similar but lack the richness and specificity of their original places of origin (This is from Camnitzer’s essay “Esperanto,” where he uses these words to describe art practices, but the same might be said of art criticism.) The difficulty with this last point is that it hasn’t been studied The general tendency of conversations about art criticism, in AICA and elsewhere, is toward internationalism, which can obscure or minimize such differences A study is needed of the differences between art critical practices in selected regions of the world, with attention not to concepts such as central or marginal, or to subject matter, such as biennales or commercial galleries, but to style, interpretive strategies, and forms of narrative and argument In the absence of such studies, it can come to seem as if art criticism is in fact a global enterprise, with little prospect of maintaining its dwindling diversity Is art theory global? Waves of art theory wash through the artworld It can seem that art theory, unlike art history or art criticism, really is a worldwide phenomenon, something shared by people in a very wide variety of academic and commercial art contexts Just as art history has a more-or-less familiar canon of preferred theorists (Art and Globalization; also see Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 1998, second edition 2009) and visual studies has a fairly definable list of expected or acceptable theorists (a hundred or so are listed in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, 2003, pp 32–33), so fields like anthropology, sociology, and others have reasonably well-defined senses of what counts as pertinent or viable theory (For anthropology, see Rex Golub, “Is There an Anthropological Canon?,” April 2014, savageminds.org.) Throughout the artworld, modern and contemporary art are theorized using Kant, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Barthes Nicolas Bourriaud has been a central figure since the late 1990s, and so have Judith Butler, W. J. T Mitchell, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Rancière At the centers of theorization—mainly universities, art schools, and 71 CHAPTER academies in the North Atlantic—scholars and artists are talking about Alain Badiou, Brian Massumi, and José Muñoz, or “unknown” philosophers like Franỗois Laruelle, Quentin Meillassoux, or Catherine Malabou Theory, as everyone likes to say, is about fashion, and these waves spread unevenly and are often short-lived On the other hand it may be comforting that in 2017 on academia.edu, Kant had more subscribers than all the others I’ve named put together In general, this would be a way to argue that art theory is a more or less worldwide phenomenon: the overwhelming majority of citations are to French postwar philosophers, and in art history, visual studies, and some art criticism, those citations can be fairly predictable As an experiment I counted all the footnotes to theoretical sources (meaning writers cited as authorities on interpretation, rather than authorities on the specific subject matter of the essay in question) in a single issue of The Art Bulletin, March 2017 They are: Bruno Latour, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Derrida, Claude Gandelman, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting (cited as a theorist, not an authority on Renaissance art, which was the subject of the essay containing the citation), Alfred Gell, Edward Said, Foucault, Barthes, Agamben, Althusser, Louis Marin, Lacan, Heidegger, Adorno, Michael Holly (again cited for a general interpretation), Rosalind Krauss, W. J. T Mitchell, Judith Butler, Ernst Bloch, and José Muñoz The articles citing these authors ranged from Renaissance painting to the photographer Katharina Sieverding Similar lists, with a fair consistency, could be compiled for other journals Another way to argue that art theory has a global uniformity would be to note that Western philosophy continues to encounter other traditions as “thought” and not philosophy The French scholar Franỗois Jullien, for example, speaks of Chinese thought and its “choice” not to become a philosophy (Jullien, “Chinesisches Werkzeug: Eine fernöstliche Denkposition zur Archäologie des Abendlands,” Lettre internationale 64, 2004, p 91.) As Marie-Julie Frainais-Mtre has pointed out, Alain Badiou has praised Jullien “for providing structures to Chinese thought, because when he read Chinese thought without preparation and conceptual work, he dismissed it as ‘small talk,’ as did Hegel many years earlier.” (Frainais-Mtre, “The Coloniality of Western Philosophy: Chinese Philosophy as Viewed in France,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 19, 2014, p 10, citing Badiou, Oser construire: Pour Franỗois Jullien, 2007, p.140.) This leads her to ask why, in France, Chinese philosophy is “isolated from philosophy”: “Is it perhaps only the Western world that has the right and the ability to think? Does China not think?” The form of Frainais-Maitre’s argument can also be found beyond France, and beyond China Samer Frangie has written about a critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism by the Lebanese philosopher Mahdi ‘Amil (1936–1987); the terms (“philosophy” and “thought”) are strikingly similar According to ‘Amil, Said constructs a polarity between the West and the Orient, and so he has to “reject reason in toto, opposing it to emotion in a quasi-Romantic gesture.” In Orientalism, ‘Amil argues, the Orient “appears to be only accessible through spiritual means or bouts of individual genius.” 72 Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena? (Samer Frangie, “On the Broken Conversation Between Postcolonialism and Intellectuals in the Periphery,” 2011.) (I’ve been exact about my quotations in the preceding paragraph, because there is also sense in which “thought,” penser, in postwar Continental philosophy denotes a general condition of experience This wider “thought,” which comes from Heidegger, can appear more capacious than “philosophy,” understood as “Western philosophy” or simply “metaphysics.” But “thought” is often also imagined as an untheorized form of cognition, one for which Western philosophy or metaphysics provides a crucial opportunity It is also the case that the project of looking at Chinese philosophy in order to see if it is “systematic” enough to rise above the level of “thought” is itself fraught, as is shown by Feng Youlan’s History of Chinese Philosophy, 1934, English translation 1952, which is strongly influenced by European ways of studying the history of philosophy, and begins with the assertion that Chinese philosophy is more than “thought.” I thank Eager Zhang for introducing me to Feng Youlan.) In everyday pedagogy, students in various parts of the world encounter theorists including the ones I have named above, and it is rare to find a young artist, critic, philosopher, or historian who follows a theorist no one knows There are always unexpected choices—in the past year or so, I have read essays and artists’ statements that cite Agamben, Broch, Harman, Meillassoux, Brecht, Luhmann, Guattari, Massumi, Clough, and a couple dozen others—but the list is not infinite, and genuinely independent or idiosyncratic choices are very rare So it may seem the only reason art theory isn’t a global phenomenon is that students and artists find theorists (or resist them) at different rates Not all young artists influenced by Rancière know much about him, or have read assessments such as Oliver Davis’s “Jacques Rancière and Contemporary Art: Swapping Stories of Love and Tyrannicide,” which is—strangely enough— the lead article in the spring 2013 volume of Critique d’art, even though the essay is not criticism as much as art theory As the Portuguese scholar Leonor Veiga pointed out reading a draft of this chapter, there are many parts of the world where theory is effectively absent because of a lack of funding, institutional structure, or ideological support—but I’d like to leave those many issues temporarily to one side, because what concerns me here is more the general tendency or direction of art theory (See chapter for problems of funding and access.) Just as much of the discourse of world philosophies depends on fundamental concepts and forms of argument derived from European philosophy from Plato to Kant and beyond, so much of the discourse of art theory depends on concepts and arguments developed by French poststructuralists from Barthes and Deleuze to the present Philosophy grapples with this issue in journals such as The Journal of World Philosophies and Philosophy East and West, but so far art theory has no forum for such problems The impending uniformity of art theory worldwide seems especially clear, and yet there are difficult problems lurking here The theorists’ names are usually unsurprising, 73 CHAPTER but they are put to work in different ways, producing unexpected forms of diversity Here are two reasons why art theory might be considered a national or regional practice, rather than an international one (A) Theory may not be global, because it is used differently in different parts of the world Theory does not look especially global when a critic like Tsai Raylin can say, at the 2013 AICA conference in Bratislava, that there is a connection between Leibniz’s monad, Deleuze’s nomad, and the post-human body, without justifying his assertion Raylin’s paper did not engage Patricia Clough, Katherine Hayles, Deborah Christie, Serge Venturini, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, or other theorists of the biomediated, cyborg, or posthuman; and he did not elaborate, explain, or defend his slant rhyme “monad / nomad.” His paper was presented flamboyantly and enthusiastically, like a performative piece by an artist, and his use of theory was palimpsestic and impressionistic I don’t mean this as a criticism, because I enjoyed the paper and its wild connections, but I don’t think it could be read as art theory in some other contexts (It probably wouldn’t work, for example, in publications like Grey Room, n+1, or Nonsite, to name three theory-oriented online sites.) At the same conference the Chinese critic Ling Min proposed a new theory of contemporary Chinese “ink art” and its relation to inkbrush painting In part her claim was that Chinese ink painting be understood in terms such “poetic” feeling and “plasticity But she did not engage other work on the contemporary conceptualization of ink painting by Wu Hung, Mike Hearn, Zhu Qingsheng, Gucheng Feng, and others, leaving the impression that no one else has been working on the subject.” Theorization of contemporary ink painting is contentious, both politically and conceptually, but Ling Min’s paper made it seem as if there is no pertinent literature—so again it sounded like a contribution to something other than a global conversation Broadly speaking, there are two possible approaches to idiosyncratic uses of theory On the one hand, idiosyncratic essays might be expanded and brought to the level where they address the full range of literature on their subjects, so that they join the international conversations on their respective topics On the other hand, it would be possible to see such essays as artist’s statements or personal texts that have purposes other than the wider discourse on their respective topics In the last chapter of this book I will suggest a third possibility I will return to this choice, in the case of art history, in the final chapter of this book An eccentric, personal, or uninformed art theory can be effectively unanswerable, because it takes place outside existing conversations In this sense art theory is not a worldwide phenomenon, because it exists in versions as different as creoles, pidgins, or entirely new languages The challenge for forums like the Journal of World Philosophies would be to accept essays that appear to misuse or misunderstand philosophic positions, on the assumption that their misprisions were the effect of regional or 74 Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena? national differences in reception rather than deficits of education or understanding The analogous challenge for art theory would be to accept essays that seem not to be participating in ongoing conversations about Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, or other art theorists, on the assumption that they were creating new forms of reception that fit their local or regional contexts (B) Theory may not be global, because different regions read different theorists Even though French poststructural thinkers provide the majority of theoretical sources in art history, theory, criticism, and art world conversations, there are some exceptions—places where there are distinct regional or national habits of art theory There is an especially strong disconnect between Chinese theorists and theorists outside China In my experience many Chinese historians, critics, and theorists read non-Chinese (mainly English, American, and French) philosophers and art theorists, but the reverse is not the case Europeans and North Americans who are not specialists in China tend to get their information about Chinese art theory from Franỗois Jullien, in books like In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (2004) Yet Jullien’s books are problematic as representations of China, and they not attempt to represent contemporary Chinese theory at all (References are in my Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, 2010.) An older generation of Western scholars got their East Asian theory from French theorists who did not even make China or Japan their specialty, such as Henri Michaux and Roland Barthes The opposite situation is hard to imagine A number of Western art theorists have been translated into Chinese, including not only Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, but also Roger Fry, Herbert Read, John Berger, E. H. Gombrich, Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Amelia Jones, Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp, and Thierry de Duve Every non-Chinese art historian, critic, and theorist should be embarrassed if they cannot write down an equivalently long list of Chinese art theorists Here are a few: Ƭǩ‫ ‮‬Gao Minglu, ѣࢦ Si Han, ໻Ά᯹ Jiang Jiehong, ̡ᢒ Zhou Yan, ˩‫ݶ‬ŀ Chang Ningsheng, ࣼ‫ ݶ‬Ding Ning, ᙗʅ Feng Yuan, ᗦਿ੻ Geng Youzhuang, ֆ‫ޖ‬ʓ Huang He Qing, ֆʗ Huang Zhuan, ᅓȔ࿡ Pan Gong Kai, ᒡ૒ Peng Feng, ‫ۮ‬Гܳ Shen Yubing, ‫׉‬ԛጄ Wang Chun Chen, ‫ ڄ׉‬Wang Ling, ‫׉‬ϓ⒘ Wang Nanming, ѽ‫ ڄޏ‬Wen Pulin, ᧶઱ȵ Yin Jinan, ᕁˊǛ Yin Shuangxi, ଡ଼஑‫ ڄ‬Yang Huiling, ଡ଼Ňᢒ Yang Xiaoyan, and ᆶнŀ Zhu Qingsheng This isn’t an exhaustive list; it is just the participants at a conference in Beijing in 2009 A number of Western scholars met Chinese scholars there for the first time Most Chinese historians, critics, and theorists recognized at least some of the Western participants; no Western participants except China specialists knew any of the Chinese participants This sort of disconnect also happens between non-Spanish speakers and Latin America, which has a number of regionally famous critics and theorists Some are known internationally, such as Nestor Canclini or Luis Camnitzer; some are becoming known, such as the Paraguayan critic Ticio Escobar; and others remain known only to 75 CHAPTER people who read in Spanish, such as the very subtle José Luis Brea or Cuauhtémoc Medina There are many untranslated Spanish-language art theorists Here are some names that were mentioned when I posted a draft of this text online: Ana Letícia Fialho, Virginia Perez-Ratton, Beatriz Cortez, Kency Cornejo, Eugenio Trias, Simon Marchan, and Xavier Rubert de Ventos (Many thanks to Leonor Veiga, Esther Planas, Mayra Barraza, and Vicenỗ Furió for these.) Another such cultural divide is between China and India There is relatively little awareness of Indian subaltern and postcolonial theory in China In Europe, theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha are known, and a few art historians read Geeta Kapur (in my experience she is more widely read by Westerners interested in postcolonial theory), but others such as Ranajit Guha, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gyanendra Pandey, Rajeev Bhargava, Göran Therborn, Gyan Prakash, and Arif Dirlik are not read except by specialists In China, in my experience, only Homi Bhabha is read with any frequency These large-scale bibliographies (Spanish, Chinese, Indian) are more dramatic, but rarer, than relatively isolated bibliographies specific to regions or languages Germanlanguage art theory is significantly different from English-language art theory I know only two or three North American art theorists who read Gottfried Boehm, and Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann are significantly less read than in German-speaking countries, despite the fact that both have been translated Scandinavia, as a region, also has its specific literature Joacim Sprung at Lund University suggested these theorists as people still mainly known only to readers of Danish or Swedish: in Danish, Carsten Juhl, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Camilla Jalving, Mikkel Bogh, and Simon Sheikh; and in Swedish, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Tom Sandqvist, Maria Lind, and Daniel Birnbaum Where languages are confined to single nations, the literature can be even more restricted, but in smaller nations it might also be the case that the theoretical literature specific to the nation is not central to artists and historians in the country But as far as I know this question is entirely unstudied The Estonian scholar Heie Treier suggests Tõnis Vint, whose impact on Estonian artists was less written than personal It would be interesting to convene a conference on smaller nations and their “unknown” theorists But it is perhaps in cases like these that the lists I opened with are most nearly correct: everyone reads some Kant, some Foucault, some Lacan, some Barthes, so it can seem that art theory is everywhere Alisdair Duncan tells me that sometime shortly before 2013, the Tate Modern bookstore changed their label “Art History” to “Art Histories,” but kept “Art Theory” in the singular If they had adopted the label “Art Theories,” it might have sounded like they meant that every theorist has her own perspective, rather than that various nations and regions have their own art theories To me this goes to show how much work needs to be done on the subject of the worldwide dissemination of art theory As in the case of art criticism, the impending uniformity of art theory remains largely unstudied 76 Are Art Criticism, Art Theory, Art Instruction, and the Novel Global Phenomena? Art history follows suit, citing art theorists largely from the French poststructuralist tradition, and not asking how those choices might be limiting the questions that are being asked of the world’s art Is art instruction global? If art history, theory, and criticism may be tending toward a global uniformity then visual art instruction might also be A more or less uniform set of practices around art instruction would not be problematic for many people, because training in art should be responsive to the globalization of visual art and the art market Yet there are presumably sources of diversity in art instruction that might be threatened by the increasing attention to the global art market The homogeneity of studio art instruction is especially evident at the MFA level in larger institutions As Dave Hickey, McKenzie Wark, Jerry Saltz, and others have said, the programs can seem like mills, turning out a uniform MFA product That uniformity decreases sharply in smaller institutions, smaller countries, and outside the first world: more on that below Art instruction is also surprisingly uniform at the first-year (foundation year) level, despite the now conventional disagreement about how the first year should be taught (There is more on this in the book What Artists Know?, co-edited with Frances Whitehead, 2012.) Elements of Bauhaus instruction, for example, are common around the world, and so are leftovers of French Academy training Bauhaus exercises in abstraction, colors, or textures, and French-Academy style exercises in drawing from the model can be found in academies from Paraguay to Kyrgyzstan Yet it’s clear that the flavor of art instruction varies from place to place Assessment, for example, seems to vary widely: some institutions have strongly critical learning environments, and others have almost no critique culture Some institutions have no budget to buy even basic darkroom equipment, while others can afford the latest 3D printers, computer looms, and laser routers At larger institutions from Germany to Japan, some instruction is in English; but there are many smaller art institutions with few or no instructors who can read the principal European languages This sort of list could be continued, but I don’t think these contingent features capture the really important differences Here are three ways—aside from assessment, economics, and language—that art instruction is not a homogeneous enterprise around the world (A) Local, regional, and national techniques It might be said that techniques and skills in studio art aren’t essentially parts of a global conversation The Bucharest National University of Arts (Universitatea Naţională de Arte), for instance, teaches stu- 77 ... of maintaining its dwindling diversity Is art theory global? Waves of art theory wash through the artworld It can seem that art theory, unlike art history or art criticism, really is a worldwide... evidence The study of the writing of world art history—again, in distinction to the study of how art has been practiced around the world? ??seems at once indispensable in an age of increasing globalization,... unfamiliar art practices into the art world But as the art world is becoming more diverse and inclusive, writing about art is becoming less diverse and more uniform There is, I think, a single model