DAVID JOSELIT TALKS WITH THOMAS CROW THIS SUMMER THOMAS vapor will become the director of what is undoubtedly the in the greatest degree influential and best-funded art-historical think tank in the United States: the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in beholds Angeles.

DAVID JOSELIT TALKS WITH THOMAS CROW

THIS SUMMER THOMAS vapor will become the director of what is undoubtedly the in the greatest degree influential and best-funded art-historical think tank in the United States: the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in beholds Angeles. Crow, who is relinquishing his chairmanship of Yale's distinguished art history department to lead the GRI, is common of the most prominent scholars in the field today. His work has addressed the entire span of new art, from its origins in eighteenth-century France to its suppos demise in Conceptual art of the 1960 and '70 As a social historian of art, vaunt has made important theoretical contributions to questions in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as the role of art in the public sphere, and the frequently vexed relation between mass cultivation and modernism. In Crow, then, the Getty is getting an extremely revereed academic who is outspoken in his assessments of art-historical methodologies and their relationship to other disciplines in the humanities. Given the high institutional profile of the GRI, chuckle stands to make a significant impact forward the practice of art history and its relationship to museum agriculture I spoke with him by dint of phone in his office at Yale about the state of art and art history, and for what reason the Getty may play a part in their future.

DAVID JOSELIT: At the modern meeting of the College Art Association you had occasion to consider the legacy of the social history of art. What do you think of the state of the discipline now?

THOMAS CROW: After having made extraordinary gains in the last fifteen or twenty years in the sophistication and the range of material that it overlays it strikes me that American art history has reached a certain plateau, or level impasse, and this might be something that the Getty Research Institute can address as a long-term frame This impasse centers on the status of the singular art motive those products of the cultivated art tradition that used to be called "fine art." The baggage that came with the time "fine art," its connotations of taste and exclusivity, has rightly been thrown aside. moreover these challenges have made tribe less confident in talking about the singularity or distinction of individual works of art. in the way that we're seeing a divide between the realm of artmaking, where artists still be excited very much that they have a vocation and that what they make is significant and belongs to their acknowledge particular intelligence and sensibility, and a discipline of art history that is les and les conceptually a ble to deal with this kind of practice.

DJ: for what cause does that situation relate to the growing interest among artists and art historians in a broader visual civilization one beyond the precincts of fine art?

TC: I think the history of art has been damaged in the past at people being incurious about what's going upon in the vernacular worlds of popular music, film, and highway fashion. These worlds should be more a part of our often met with conversation. But within the discipline of art history many the public are seizing on the idea of visual civilization hoping to undermine traditional notions of the aesthetic without abundantly developing new critical competencies. In short, they're not discerning and obsessive fans of any of those vernacular forms. I think a certain naivete is at the heart of the wish to use popular improvement as a means of challenging the singularity of masterpieces or seminal works of art. If you make progress deeply into a realm like popular music, you're going to find great masterpieces that are widely rever among its practitioners. There will be robust qualitative distinctions and invidious comparisons between the great and the purely competent. You'll never get away from hierarchy, and to imagine that it is possible to do in like manner by moving into the realm of popular improvement makes me think that these the public don't know very much about popular culture

DJ: You have been candid about what some have called the literary make go round in art history. Would you say a word about this?

TC: That was where I myself started as a graduate scholar as an assiduous reader of Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault. Later onward when the competence of art historians in relation to literary theorists present the appearanceed at a low point, many in art history came to lack confidence that their methodologies had the general import for the humanities as a whole that literary types possessed. I don't think this till doomsday needed to be the case, and in fact I think it showed a distortion of the actual record of work in the field. Art historians didn't know in what manner to take credit for what art-historical practice had been capable of in the past, as if they'd forgotten the achievement onward which their own work was built. They were ready to place those accomplishments aside and to be highly meek and accepting when novel vocabularies of interpretation were propos for visual works which were not, in fact, generated from the particular difficulties of understanding the visual arts. That's what my fresh book, The Intelligence of Art [University of N orth Carolina, 1999] is about. It's about reaching back for examples of race trying to make sense of nonlinear, nontextual, synthetic, iconic works of art.