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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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The history of the so-called ‘historical’ avantgardes, during the second half of the XXth century, was the object of a specific reinterpretation: their revolutionary aspirations, - formulated since 1910, both by the works of art and by the theoretical texts, and later supported by the political and social European revolutions-, would have made of them the victims of all the returns to the political order. The formal freedoms recently acquired, and that made of art a ‘hope of happiness,’ would have then come into contradiction with the constraints of the social field in which they had emerged. Therefore, art became ‘the promise of a happiness which breaks up’, as Adorno claimed in his Aesthetic Theory at the end of the 1960ies. During the 1990thies, the idea of a ‘failure’ of the avantgardes became increasingly accepted (Eric J. Hobsbawm, T. J. Clark). Confronted by the over- whelming power of an economical and ideological ‘system,’ according to this interpretation, art would have been condemned to either compromises or ‘recuperations’ that would necessarily neutralize its subversive challenge. Now, all these claims were grounded on the certitude that art, during its historical development, had acquired its ‘autonomy’. But how should we understand ‘autonomy’? At least five different meanings have emerged since the beginning of the XIXth century. The first referred to the emancipation of the liberal arts, or Fine Arts, from the mechanical arts that had occurred since the Renaissance. The second meaning of the autonomy of art implied that it was emancipated from the authority of religious and political powers and coupled this progressive liberation with that of the individual subject. The ‘unlimited freedom’ granted to art sanctioned the fact of its entry into the highly competitive realm of the market economy. While, almost at the same time, appeared the idea that art was independent of its historical and social conditions: the theory of l’art pour l’art. The theory of the work of art as a pure monad thus answered the one of a social art, advanced in France and Europe by the Saint-simoniens who wanted the task of art to be the one realizing the Golden Age on Earth. A fourth conception of the autonomy of art was more formalistic: it celebrated, since the end of the 19th century, the divorce of art from the classical tradition of mimesis and its quest for its own laws. To this conception was linked a last one, according to which artistic activity and its productions were absolutely independent from the public and the conditions of reception. If all these acceptations of the autonomy of art are to be found in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, then this last was elaborated already in the 1930thies at the time of the debate that opposed Adorno to his friend Walter Benjamin on the occasion of Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Benjamin’s theses were anthropological rather than political. For him, ever since art had been detached from a magical or religious cult, seeming to thereby affirming its autonomy, its objects no longer demanded meditation or contemplation. These objects produced their effect in distraction, or, better yet, in distracted use. But these fabricated objects, giving their rhythm to the minute rituals of everyday life, conserved for art its own essential function of humanity’s self-instigation and training. A humanity increasingly exposed to the dangers provoked by modern life would secrete an art capable of preparing men for yet newer dangers. Adorno’s theses on the relative autonomy of art, which would found his Aesthetic Theory and would rephrase in their own terms the dominant discourse of these 30 years, were evidently in complete opposition with the anthropological conception that Benjamin defended and which implied the dissolution of the classical concept of art as a socially separated activity. To Adorno’s pessimist and lofty vision, Benjamin opposed in advance the precise and technical observation of the transformations of the mimetic comportment that operated before his eyes and, after the age of gods, succeeded in destroying the age of art.
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Until the 1980s, when the notion of the “end of art history” first came under discussion, the question of the identification and legitimacy of this scholarly discipline related to the domain, which we are wont to designate by the general term of Fine Arts, had never been of topical interest. This is no more the case. Our time has problematized the boundaries, the generic specifics of the traditional and novel forms, which are more appropriately referred to as “visual arts”. Under the impact of post-modernist ideas were revised the epistemological models that had been functioning in European science ever since the age of the Enlightenment. Modernism, with its anti-essentialism and anti-fundamentalism, undermined the “metaphysical” concepts that, alongside those of gender, history, nation etc., included also the concept of art, which had emerged in Europe in the era of Modernity. Art history was also affected by the mistrust towards the transhistorical global categories. To shed some light on the situation, it is necessary to go back to the genesis of this branch of the humanities and, concurrently, examine the correlation between the developments in art and art history. Art history, as an academic discipline formed during the second half of the 19th century, established its methods and tools of inquiry at a time when art was thought of as a distinct and clearly defined object of study. Having come into being simultaneously with modernism, which proclaimed the autonomy of art, art history is by presumption “modernist”. Insofar as Modernity has laid the foundations of the historical understanding and forged the very concept of “art”, the notion of the “death” of art too is connected with the exhausting of the modernist paradigm. This in turn has led to a state of crisis in art history that could be described as loss of identity and disintegration of the discipline itself. Possible prospects for the future development of this field of study can be sought in the interdisciplinary exchanges of art history with cultural anthropology (the so-called Cultural Studies) and the exploration of ways for a more flexible application of the dialogic approach, in keeping with the ideas of the Russian scholar M. Bakhtin. Are we entitled today to speak of “non-classical” art history in the way we speak of “non-classical” physics?
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A distinctive feature of art criticism in the 1990s was the emergence of new strategies of interpretation. The period was characterized by institutional instability and a change of the model of contemporary art, as a result of which contemporary art criticism too saw itself lacking in a systematic methodology. A criticism emancipated from all ideological dogmatism was born at the same time as professional art academic education was confronted by a nonconformist, militant kind of “operative” critical writing, which had set itself the aim of provoking a radical change in the art model inherited from the previous system. The 1990s in Bulgaria saw the emergence of some new functions in the social role of the art critic. From a figure taking his cue from the ideas and works of the artist he evolved into an all-important ideologue and selector “casting the characters” on the “art scene”. While art criticism took on new functions and developed a new awareness of its tasks and relevance, one can ask whether the actual increase in the importance of the critic-curator hybrid does not reflect the global crisis in the functioning of this specific activity? If we can really speak of a crisis in the institution of art criticism at present, this might well be the result of a loss of the critic’s credibility as a mediator between art and the public. Art criticism is losing its homogeneity as a specific subject and is dissolving in the practice of the curator, the gallery owner, the art dealer, etc. Because of these institutional commitments, the critic is increasingly forfeiting the liberal (postmodern) mainstays of his position. The critic’s activity is ruthlessly exploited as the warden of territory. In the 1990s art criticism in Bulgaria experienced a revival only to be deformed again due to its inability to establish itself as an autonomous cultural field – the mediator between the artwork and the public being foredoomed to act as a figure belonging to realms parallel to art criticism. The problem confronting criticism is revealed in its functions as a subservient activity. Instead of analysing and interpreting contemporary art in terms of possible historical and socio-cultural meanings, it is toying with issues of the immediate present, which are more properly the domain of the curator, the museum worker, the art dealer, etc. The role of intermediary, historically bequeathed to European art criticism, fails to carry conviction nowadays, because the Mediator’s vocation has been reduced to a mere mask on the face of a relatively new social figure aspiring to play a leader’s part in the interrelations between the artist, his work and the public.
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