L’art : Histoire et Histoires. Regards et perspectives
Art: History and Histories Perceptions and Perspectives

Summary/Abstract: Art history, a rich and stimulating field of study, owes no doubt the gist of its appeal to the exceptional objects it studies and to their specific and changing nature. It finds itself, however, in a paradoxical situation: being an objective science, its almost boundless range compels it to make choices that are frequently arbitrary and subject to the whims of personal taste and fashion; being a cross- roads discipline, it tends to resist interdisciplinary exchanges; open by vocation to the least conformist human inventions, it often confines itself to the prudent academicism of accumulated erudition. As a result, its break-up into competing, even hostile special fields, especially exacerbated in France, handicaps the efforts and research work. The reflections set out here follow from this realization. They deal with the various aspects of the institutions, the field, the approaches, the very nature of art; the problems related to diachrony and synchrony, the “long” and “brief” histories and, finally, the recurrent question of the dis- course. Far from being exhaustive, this study con- fines itself to pointing out some of the onto-epistemological difficulties inherent in this practice, according to perspectives, which open up many prospects for research. What matters now is to confront them with others in order to carry out, as far as possible, common investigations of problems conducted within the dynamic pluralism of the histories of art.

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