1.3 Trends  (Page 4/4)

Art history in the expanding field of visual inquiry

The advent of cultural studies in the 1970s has had transformative effects on art and architectural history, asit has on most humanistic disciplines. Art history has expanded the medial range of its objects of study, diversified its researchquestions and protocols in theoretical and social directions, and begun to adjust the balance of its interests toward the modern, thecontemporary, and the global. As before, art history continues to be centrally concerned with the distinctive materiality, visualappearance, and spatial experience of works of art and architecture, but its texts have become more self-conscious aboutthese defining characteristics of the discipline.

Art history's internal diversifications and theoretical articulations have not exhausted or satisfied expandedscholarly interest in ways and forms of seeing, however. Over the past three decades, scholars from a wide variety of humanities andsocial sciences have pursued stimulating new questions about the visual constitution and experience of the world, in itsphysiological, phenomenological, and social aspects. Much of this interdisciplinary inquiry has been institutionalized as visualculture or visual studies in new academic programs, curricula, centers, and departments in North American and Europeanuniversities. Some visual culture programs are symbiotically allied with traditional art history departments, others are subordinatedto art history, and yet others are integrated with film and media studies, studio art programs, cultural studies, and visualanthropology and sociology in entirely different departments or schools.

While the objects and methodological purview of visual culture studies remain matters of exciting possibilityand vigorous debate, it is already clear that many visual culture scholars and publications address questions and images that mightbe, but have not quite been, central to art history as well. "Popular" arts, decorative arts, design, phenomenology, and,especially, modern conditions of visuality and contemporary media are topics of great interest to visual culture studies, yet theyare also the kinds of concerns that have not sat easily within an art history foundationally dedicated to the pre-modern, primarilyWestern arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The many visual culture publications dedicated to cultural theories ofseeing and to modern and contemporary art and design appear to fill some of art history's gaps from outside the discipline, and theyhave in turn shaped new directions within art history.

The expansion of the visual investigation of culture has had several consequences for scholarly publication inart history. There are welcome new journals, edited volumes, and press lists in which to publish—and they are open to art historians, particularly in the subfields mentioned.

The lure of the potential cross-over book has encouraged some university presses to shape art history lines thatare liberally inclusive of visual culture or to publish monographs with an art historical component under other headings, such asclassics, cultural history, or visual studies. Inherent in this interdisciplinary shift is the risk of neglecting core areas ofscholarship dedicated to the material, visual, and social character of art and architecture. Our study suggests that while theopportunities for publishing art history monographs have retrenched, new modes of disseminating scholarship are available tobe developed. The extant and prospective publication opportunities for art historical research are not utilized fully atpresent.