Academic Sessions: London 2008
Museums, the Academy and the Studio
Session Convenor:
Martin Myrone, Curator, Tate Britain martin.myrone@tate.org.uk
Speakers:
Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Archaeology, Oxford University) The Archaeology of Artworks
Janice Hart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts) Studio Vistas: Spaces of creative production and identity construction from Paul Sandby to Antoine Claudet
Beth Williamson (University of Essex) Paint and Pedagogy: The aesthetics of art education
Philippa Simpson (Courtauld Institute of Art/ Tate Britain) Schools of Art: Collecting as art historical practice in the early 19th century
Konstantinos Stefanis (London Consortium) A Birthplace for the Retrospective Exhibition: London, Paris, Düsseldorf
Caroline Palmer (Oxford Brookes University) ‘Beyond the Fringe’: The dislocation of female art-writer
Fae Barbara Brauer (University of New South Wales/ University of East London) A Collision Course: 19th-century visual cultures in the Academy and the Musée d’Orsay
Victoria Preston (Birkbeck College) Kunsthallen and Art Historical Discourse
Session Convenor:
Session Abstract:
The relative authority of the curator, the academic, and the artist to shape and broadcast art-historical knowledge has been an area of fraught and sometimes unproductive dispute. The art histories generated in the museum, the academy, and in the context of the art school and studio vary, conflict and interact in largely unexamined ways. The social, structural and historical issues at stake here have been only incompletely addressed through the ‘Two Art Histories’ debate, which has pitched (if only for rhetorical effect), the blunt materialism or airy connoisseurship of the museum curator against the speculative, reflexive and politicised approaches characteristic of the university-based art historian. Thus, the museum and the academy have been cast as mutually exclusive arenas of expertise, which, in the English-speaking world at least, can be brought into dialogue only by deliberate, perhaps agitational or transgressive, strategies. Yet have these debates in themselves contributed to a meaningful shift in the relations between the museum and the academy? This session seeks to reflect upon, test and extend these arguments, in particular by focusing on a further arena for the production of art historical knowledge – that constituted by the art school and the studio – and by drawing in questions of aesthetics and disciplinarity. By addressing the cultural and physical locations of art history, and the historical genesis of its most visible arenas, this session will seek to re-address the questions of social value, cultural difference and economic and political capital which shape art-historical knowledge in the present day. This session seeks to address aspects of: the historical genesis of the discipline of art history and its institutions; the role of exhibitions; the function of the media in shaping the image of art history; questions of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and of art history and aesthetics, in their institutional dimensions; globalisation, new media, and the locations of art history.
Martin Myrone, Curator, Tate Britain martin.myrone@tate.org.uk
Speakers:
Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Archaeology, Oxford University) The Archaeology of Artworks
Janice Hart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts) Studio Vistas: Spaces of creative production and identity construction from Paul Sandby to Antoine Claudet
Beth Williamson (University of Essex) Paint and Pedagogy: The aesthetics of art education
Philippa Simpson (Courtauld Institute of Art/ Tate Britain) Schools of Art: Collecting as art historical practice in the early 19th century
Konstantinos Stefanis (London Consortium) A Birthplace for the Retrospective Exhibition: London, Paris, Düsseldorf
Caroline Palmer (Oxford Brookes University) ‘Beyond the Fringe’: The dislocation of female art-writer
Fae Barbara Brauer (University of New South Wales/ University of East London) A Collision Course: 19th-century visual cultures in the Academy and the Musée d’Orsay
Victoria Preston (Birkbeck College) Kunsthallen and Art Historical Discourse
Session Convenor:
Session Abstract:
The relative authority of the curator, the academic, and the artist to shape and broadcast art-historical knowledge has been an area of fraught and sometimes unproductive dispute. The art histories generated in the museum, the academy, and in the context of the art school and studio vary, conflict and interact in largely unexamined ways. The social, structural and historical issues at stake here have been only incompletely addressed through the ‘Two Art Histories’ debate, which has pitched (if only for rhetorical effect), the blunt materialism or airy connoisseurship of the museum curator against the speculative, reflexive and politicised approaches characteristic of the university-based art historian. Thus, the museum and the academy have been cast as mutually exclusive arenas of expertise, which, in the English-speaking world at least, can be brought into dialogue only by deliberate, perhaps agitational or transgressive, strategies. Yet have these debates in themselves contributed to a meaningful shift in the relations between the museum and the academy? This session seeks to reflect upon, test and extend these arguments, in particular by focusing on a further arena for the production of art historical knowledge – that constituted by the art school and the studio – and by drawing in questions of aesthetics and disciplinarity. By addressing the cultural and physical locations of art history, and the historical genesis of its most visible arenas, this session will seek to re-address the questions of social value, cultural difference and economic and political capital which shape art-historical knowledge in the present day. This session seeks to address aspects of: the historical genesis of the discipline of art history and its institutions; the role of exhibitions; the function of the media in shaping the image of art history; questions of disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and of art history and aesthetics, in their institutional dimensions; globalisation, new media, and the locations of art history.