Academic Sessions: London 2008
On Art History and Bullshit
Session Convenor:
Gavin Parkinson, Courtauld Institute of Art, gavin.parkinson@courtauld.ac.uk
Speakers:
Alex Hannay (University of Leeds) Holy Crap: Confabulating neo-crypto symbology, the Ark/Grail/Head of God and the Shattering Lost Secret to weighing the gravity of Rosslyn Chapel’s Bullshit
Monica Kjellman-Chapin (Emporia State University) Constructing Kinkadeland
Thomas Loveday (University of New South Wales) Scatological Approach
Erin Starr White (Texas Christian University) Rethinking Bernstein: The genre of fictional criticism and why it matters to Art History
Session Abstract:
The popular, bestselling success of Harry G. Frankfurt’s little philosophical treatise On Bullshit (2005) has found an enthusiastic echo in academia, where the historical roots of Frankfurt’s survey of philosophical bullshit have been deepened, perhaps surprisingly, to reflections on the question by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Carnap. This scholarly reception has also analysed, criticised, and refined Frankfurt’s own definition of bullshit, which frames the category as a process and product of human interactions that is distinct from lying in the sense that it does not necessarily oppose truth but is complacently ‘unconnected to a concern with the truth’ (meaning bullshit might even stray accidentally into truth). Because of its indifference to truth, Frankfurt finds bullshitting more insidious than lying, which at least takes truth as a point of reference. The debate over bullshit has now extended beyond philosophy to survey its prevalence in politics, science, the law, and education (Hardcastle and Reisch eds., Bullshit and Philosophy, 2006).
The temptation to bullshit in such a widely interdisciplinary field as art history is spelled out by Frankfurt where he writes ‘the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.’ Accordingly, this session calls upon curators, artists, and academics at all levels working in all periods to help extend the debate on bullshit into writing on art, with a view towards historicising the category across art history, theory, criticism, and practice. It aims to link the concept of bullshit to the professional demands made upon those in the art world, in order to test how far bullshitting is obligated by the spaces of the museum and seminar room; to examine whether the desire for institutional acceptability and career stability in academic art history serve to channel research in line with the demands of mainstream methodologies, with the concomitant temptation or even requirement to bullshit brought about by those pressures; and to explore how far the current theoretical state of the discipline has been shaped by those constraints, with their potential to initiate conflict between professional and personal versions of the truth; and to discuss the positive value of supposedly marginal strategies in art history such as hoax, parody, and fictional writing.
Gavin Parkinson, Courtauld Institute of Art, gavin.parkinson@courtauld.ac.uk
Speakers:
Alex Hannay (University of Leeds) Holy Crap: Confabulating neo-crypto symbology, the Ark/Grail/Head of God and the Shattering Lost Secret to weighing the gravity of Rosslyn Chapel’s Bullshit
Monica Kjellman-Chapin (Emporia State University) Constructing Kinkadeland
Thomas Loveday (University of New South Wales) Scatological Approach
Erin Starr White (Texas Christian University) Rethinking Bernstein: The genre of fictional criticism and why it matters to Art History
Session Abstract:
The popular, bestselling success of Harry G. Frankfurt’s little philosophical treatise On Bullshit (2005) has found an enthusiastic echo in academia, where the historical roots of Frankfurt’s survey of philosophical bullshit have been deepened, perhaps surprisingly, to reflections on the question by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Carnap. This scholarly reception has also analysed, criticised, and refined Frankfurt’s own definition of bullshit, which frames the category as a process and product of human interactions that is distinct from lying in the sense that it does not necessarily oppose truth but is complacently ‘unconnected to a concern with the truth’ (meaning bullshit might even stray accidentally into truth). Because of its indifference to truth, Frankfurt finds bullshitting more insidious than lying, which at least takes truth as a point of reference. The debate over bullshit has now extended beyond philosophy to survey its prevalence in politics, science, the law, and education (Hardcastle and Reisch eds., Bullshit and Philosophy, 2006).
The temptation to bullshit in such a widely interdisciplinary field as art history is spelled out by Frankfurt where he writes ‘the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.’ Accordingly, this session calls upon curators, artists, and academics at all levels working in all periods to help extend the debate on bullshit into writing on art, with a view towards historicising the category across art history, theory, criticism, and practice. It aims to link the concept of bullshit to the professional demands made upon those in the art world, in order to test how far bullshitting is obligated by the spaces of the museum and seminar room; to examine whether the desire for institutional acceptability and career stability in academic art history serve to channel research in line with the demands of mainstream methodologies, with the concomitant temptation or even requirement to bullshit brought about by those pressures; and to explore how far the current theoretical state of the discipline has been shaped by those constraints, with their potential to initiate conflict between professional and personal versions of the truth; and to discuss the positive value of supposedly marginal strategies in art history such as hoax, parody, and fictional writing.