WHAT ART HISTORIANS?

WHAT ART HISTORIANS DO
Art history has been described as the ‘discipline that examines the
history of art and artefacts’ (Pointon 1997: 21). Like many definitions,
it verges on the tautological, but Pointon succinctly registers
the expansive scope of study which typifies the discipline – those
objects and practices arising from human agency which are judged
to have aesthetic value. Fernie (1995: 326–27) defines art history as
the ‘historical study of those made objects which are presumed to
have a visual content’, with the task of the art historian being to
explain ‘why such objects look as they do’. He elaborates various
examples and concludes:
These objects can be treated as, among other things, conveyors of
aesthetic and intellectual pleasure, as abstract form, as social products,
and as expressions of cultures and ideologies.
(Fernie 1995: 327)
These definitions underline the extent to which art can sustain a
multiplicity of meanings, and that in attempting to interpret details
of form and content, the art historian is inevitably concerned with
broader issues of social context, causation and value. Exploring how
art looks or appears is just part of a wider interpretative framework,
within which there are various methodological approaches which are
neither value-free nor impartial. Although these will be discussed
in the following chapters, we should start by considering the origins
of art history as an academic discipline.