Civilization Is History at Yale

[Apollonius]

Civilization is history at Yale - Roger Kimball, Wall Street Journal, 29 January 2020
https://www.wsj.com/articles/civilizati ... 1580342259

Great art is too ‘white, straight, European and male,’ so it’ll have to give way to the latest agitprop.

[Apollonius]

Stalin at Yale - James Panero, Spectator USA, 29 January 2020
https://spectator.us/stalin-yale-art-history/

Art history for the age of identity politics

[Apollonius]

Yale against Western art - Heather Mac Donald, Quillette, 13 February 2020
https://quillette.com/2020/02/13/yale-a ... stern-art/

... Barringer’s proposed deconstruction of Western art illustrates a central feature of modern academia: The hermeneutics of suspicion (Paul Ricoeur’s term for the demystifying impulse that took over the humanities in the late twentieth century) applies only to the Western canon. Western academics continue to interpret non-Western traditions with sympathy and respect; those interpreters seek to faithfully convey the intentions of non-Western creators and to help students understand what makes non-Western works great. So, while the replacement European art survey courses will, in Marissa Bass’s words, “challenge, rethink, and rewrite” art historical narratives, the department will not be cancelling its Buddhist art and architecture class due to the low representation of female artists and architects, nor will it “interrogate” (as High Theory puts it) African Arts and Cultures for their relationship to genocidal tribal warfare, or Aztec Art & Architecture for their relationship to murderous misogyny.

In the replacement European survey courses, however, Tim Barringer will ask students to nominate a work of art that has been left out of the curriculum or textbook, in order to challenge long-held views of art history. Barringer is looking forward to seeing how students will “counteract or undermine” his own narratives about Western art, he wrote in an online syllabus note. Will students in Painting and Poetry in Islamic Art be asked to nominate an excluded art work? Unlikely. The idea that a Yale undergraduate knows enough to “counteract or undermine” the expertise of Islamic scholars would be seen as ludicrous. Only with regards to the Western tradition are ignorant students given the power to countermand what was once the considered judgment of the scholarly profession.

Students exert pressure over what gets taught not just through explicit pressure but also through their mere existence, if they possess favored identity traits. The “diversity of today’s student body” guides the art history department’s curricular thinking, department leaders explained in a statement on the cancelled survey courses. But the ephemera of students’ race and sex have no bearing on the significance of the past. The sublimity of Chartres Cathedral, a focal point of Scully’s fall semester course, transcends the skin color of the latest round of freshmen. If the University of Lagos suddenly received a large influx of students from Idaho, that would not change how Yoruba bronzes would be taught or interpreted. It is only in the West where scholarship and pedagogy are held hostage to some students’ demographic profile.

[Apollonius]

Yale’s art department commits suicide - Michael Lewis, Commentary, March 2020
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... s-suicide/

The shutdown of a Western survey course is a historic debacle


... The abolition of the survey is only the tangible sign of deep-seated changes that have been going on in the field of art history, and largely invisible to the public. Until a generation or so ago, the unspoken premise underlying the teaching of art was that it was the expression of a civilization, and among the loftiest of its creations—as lofty as the music of Mozart or the drama of Shakespeare, and something about which one might take a certain proprietary pride. Art history quite naturally concentrated on those moments of great creative fervor, as in the 13th century or the High Renaissance, or the great galloping leap of artistic development that in the space of a lifetime vaulted from impression to cubism. That this art was Western, reaching all the way back to Classical Greece, was not something that required a justification or an apology.

What has changed, and what has made scholars squeamish, is any sense that Western art is “our” art. To emphasize the Western tradition is to validate it and be complicit in whatever historic crimes you might choose to impute to it, whether imperialism, colonialism, or environmental mayhem. The notion that some art is better than others, that some even rises to the pinnacle of human achievement, has become embarrassing. But even as the collapse of cultural confidence in the West was creating a void, that void was being filled from another quarter as scholars discovered that they could avoid making judgments of value by looking at art objects not as a connoisseur but rather as an anthropologist.

[crashtech66]

To me, the real question is if this postmodernist purge will eventually be able to erase from history the works they disdain and replace them with their preferred narrative. I hope not. I like to think that future historians will cast this current crop of self-righteous assholes as the villains they are. For now, though, there seems to be little will to defend against their predations.

[Simple Minded]

Great Thread Apollonius. Other than a bit of schadenfreude for those isolated behind walls in the Ivy League, who are being eaten by their protégés, , words fail me.

thank God for memes: