Why art history matters

especially in Times Like These.

Recently, like two months ago, I finished my master’s degree. I now find myself back in the slog of job hunting and launching a nascent career as a curator. I am suddenly overwhelmed with free time.

More recently, a majority of Americans gathered on election day and opted to send a demagogue, convicted felon, and twice-impeached president back to the White House.

The intersection of these two events and the gnawing void they produced taunted me to start writing the writings I always said I’d write but never wrote because I was ~too busy~ not writing.

Rewinding to the start of my master’s program, I sat in a lecture hall with ironically terrible acoustics, as the course leader asked us all why we wanted to study the history of art. What was it about the subject that rang with importance and immediacy for us? There was the expected shuffling in seats and feigning of note taking and downward looks of everyone wanting to avoid answering the question. The embarrassment was needless; there is no wrong answer to why something is personally valuable to you. My memory insists that surely someone answered.

The budding academician in me silently stewed over the much-touted and highbrow idea that (takes glasses off, cleans them) art history matters because of the lens it provides us with which to observe the past and our perceived role within that history, that understanding historical context was a prerequisite to gain further insight to the cultural-social-religious-political dynamics of a given timeframe (pushes glasses up the bridge of nose). Simply put, know thyself.

I think its a good answer. And I am certain there is more to it.

Art is enduringly relevant
While financial barriers do exist for folks to enjoy cultural institutions, in general, art museums and galleries offer a relatively accessible opportunity for visitors and learners to expand horizons and foster global perspectives. Indeed, art offers us forum to disagree, debate, and listen. It would be all too easy to dismiss art and culture as irrelevant in the face of global conflict, rising authoritarianism, and compounding climate crises. The privileges of leisure time, expendable cash, reliable transportation, and freedom of movement required to even enter a museum space are strong examples of this very space’s own redundancy In Times Like These. But it is this same art and culture hanging on clean white walls that is being fought for on distant battlefields, legislative halls, and streets swollen with protestors. There is not less at stake in a gallery, in the white cube, in the colonnaded marble corridors. This is the very arena in which the struggle for expression, identity, and culture is waged.

Sliman Mansour, Homeland, 2010.

Art challenges dominant narratives
Curated installations and exhibitions have increasingly emphasized previously overlooked and censored artists and creatives, including women, Indigenous groups, Black artists, non-Western cultures, and LGBTQIA2S+ voices. This interrogation of the cannon reshapes our understanding of history, challenges dominant (read: pale, male and stale) narratives and encourages a more inclusive, complex view of both the past and present, and informs where future curating practices can lead. Applied to our everyday lives, this normalization (of what never should have needed normalization), allows for curiosity about other people, culture, and opinions to permeate our collective conversation in an age of echo chambers and social bubbles. Art and its study provide historically marginalized artists a platform from which to amplify and have validated their myriad life experiences, providing a broader visual record of our collective memories. Our visual continuity of human existence, heretofore skewing Western and monochromatic, is more resplendent and all the richer for its inclusivity.

Marie Watt, Skywalker/Skyscraper (Portrait), 2021.

Art reveals the power of visual culture
Art has always been a powerful medium for communication, persuasion, and resistance. Propaganda posters, religious icons, and social critique in art show how visual culture can shape public opinion and challenge or reinforce ideologies. The simultaneous immediacy and gradual unfolding of art help us to interpret the Right Now in a way other media (ahem, doom scrolling, the ceaseless screaming of political ads) fail. There is no doubt great uncertainty in this moment. Yet art and its initial incomprehensibility teaches us to sit with this uncertainty, a silent companion to our own doubts and insecurities. Perhaps we don’t immediately understand an artist’s intentions, subtext, choice of medium. Perhaps we can’t get past the thought, “My five-year-old could have done that.” Perhaps the accompanying wall text leaves us doubly confounded. But as we settle in with the confusion of the world, the confusion of the artwork, the confusion of our inner lives, we can find there is a pathway to understanding. To paraphrase Rumi, when you start to look, what’s there to see is revealed.

Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective (Tiananmen), undated.

I could continue to wax poetic on the ways art and its history are relevant today: art helps us plumb the depth (and breadth) of human creativity. It encourages critical thinking and the weighing of nuance and interpretation. Art intersects with and connects seemingly disparate disciplines, highlighting the zeniths of human achievement. I think back on my graduate professor asking us why we were gathered to undertake a master’s degree. I am still struck by the idea that art history is indeed a powerful tool with which to place ourselves in the universe, a confounding and impossible task, but both aspirational and essential.

While the recent election (and ensuing abundant free time) was the impetus for the start of this Substack, not everything I write about will have a political tilt—although some art definitely and needfully does. Sure, I’ll write about gallery and exhibition openings and try to review them through a variety of different lenses. I’ll write about some paintings and films and performance I love (and maybe some I don’t). I’d love to share with you what I’m reading and listening to and who I’m learning from. Mostly, I want to share and write about the broad and varying theme and act of art. I hope you’ll join me.

The ivory towered museums are not a place for the highly educated, but rather for the highly curious. There is space enough for all who want to participate in sitting with the unknown, in asking inward and outward questions, in listening, discovering, and growing. Now more than ever, art matters, history matters, the stories we tell matter. And the fact is that we can share and learn from each other and exercise opinion and engage in critical thinking. Let’s practice looking, sitting with the unknown, listening, weighing other viewpoints, and journeying to the other side of the preconceived.

This is nice. Thanks for being here.