Скачать или смотреть Limits of diversity in art historical writing (lecture)

This is a talk originally given in Sydney, at the Power Institute in autumn 2017. I recorded it later because there were technical problems at the time.

The subject is the variety of ways art history is written worldwide. Just as the diversity and quantity of visual art is increasing, the diversity of writing about that art is diminishing. It's often said that there are regional and national ways of writing about art that are significantly different from those practiced in Europe and North America (and in universities and other institutions linked to those regions). I find that in art history, that diversity is only notional, and that art history tends more and more to be written in a mode I call "North Atlantic": it's influenced by certain poststructural models, by mainly French poststructuralism, by a few journals (including "October"), and by a small number of leading universities and scholars. The diversity metaphor is meant to suggest that if the fields of art history, theory, and criticism do not become more aware of this narrowing orthodoxy, there may soon be only a single normative way of writing the histories of the world's art.