U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES SPRING 2009

Histart 290

GRADUATE SEMINAR: SPECIAL TOPICS (4 units)
Wednesays, 7-10pm
425 Doe, CCN: 05673
Whitney Davis

"WORLD ART STUDIES": WHAT, WHY, AND HOW?

This seminar investigates one of the three major intellectual and professional developments in art history in our time. (The other two are the rise of "digital imaging" and the consolidation of "visual studies.") In the past five years, "World Art Studies" has emerged not only as an academic topic but also as a professional niche, indeed as a field definition that has begun to supplant more traditional field definitions and that has increasingly attracted the interest of employers (especially
colleges and universities that cannot afford to maintain traditional comprehensive art-history departments). We can assume that World Art Studies is not the same as simply "diversifying" the art-history canon or curriculum to take account of less-well-studied traditions of art making around the world; that concern has been with us since Riegl if not before, and it became a topic of renewed agitation and anxiety in the academy with the emergence of "postcolonial" approaches in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s. Indeed, World Art Studies seems to be as much
about recognizing certain homogeneities in world visual culture as it is about affirming its supposed cultural diversity. Is it the study, then, of emergent forms of globalized-hybridized contemporary art (cf. "world music")? Is it the study of circumstantial historical interactions between supposedly disjunct traditions, e.g., African and European or Oceanic and indigenous American? Is it a renaissance of transhistorical morphological analysis, continuing the pioneering (but in the end unrealized) work of Riegl and Warburg? Is it a rediscovery of comparativism and internationalism in an era when routinized and overly specialized historicism and contextualism, usually limited to
national-ethnic identities, have proved to be parochial? Is it an academic industry spawned by political-economic globalization, or does it resist the cultural consequences of globalization? What world or worlds and what art or arts are meant by world art?

The seminar will proceed in very practical terms by identifying and evaluating the emergent literature of world art studies and by trying to define its intellectual and professional implications. Key texts will
include the Atlas of World Art (edited by John Onians) and the recent anthology World Art Studies (edited by Ziljmans and Van Damme). We will also examine the curricula and syllabi of innovative academic programs that have recognized World Art Studies (East Anglia, Leiden, Chicago, Penn, UCLA/World Art Program); evaluate the contributions at the special day-long symposium on World Art Studies to be presented at the Association of Art Historians annual meeting in Manchester, UK, in early April; and consider how World Art Studies relates to new studies of digital imaging technologies, past or present, and to the emergence of a cross-disciplinary visual studies that includes fields as diverse as opthamology, computer vision, film, and CAD.