Radical Art Caucus Sessions for the College Art Association Annual Conference, Boston MA, February 2006:
SESSION 1: ART HISTORY AS A CLASS ACT
The aim of this panel will be to take up the question of art history in both senses suggested by the session title: as a class and as an act. Panelists will be asked to consider each of these two roles in their conventional senses and draw new insight by bringing them together in a common analysis. “Class,” as such, is intended to summon consideration of the broadest social, political and economic tendencies (such as those associated with terms like “bourgeois” or “proletarian” or “middle class”) and not those ascribed to more specialized groupings (such as the “professional-managerial class,” for example, or academics or intellectuals broadly conceived as a cultural elite, or, for that matter, art historians themselves as a discrete formation), at least not on their own. “Act” is meant here to bring evaluation to the work of art historians as, first, a deed or action performed for an audience, second (certainly!), a pretense, and, third, an example or standard (as when we say something is “a hard act to follow” or a “class act”). Bringing “class” and “act” together will provide opportunity to consider the ways that art history both reaffirms and intervenes in the existing social order in the exercise of its own social role.
In one sense, the terms of that role have always been clear. T.J. Clark, for example, did little more than confirm a commonplace when, in 1974, he seconded Kurt Forster’s description of the discipline as a “vehicle for reach--mexdown notions of taste, order and the good life.” (This art historian, for one, routinely feels summoned to reach for such stock-in-trade by the assumptions and expectations of students, their parents, university administrators and others, even by colleagues in other humanities departments and programs who I seem always to assume should know better.) But Clark endorsed this statement as part of a manifesto intended to redirect art history, to help define a new art history. Such a new art history, many now seem to assume, has long been in place in one form or another, even if there is a range of better and less salutary examples to point to. How, then, does art history as a discipline perform class now? Art historians come from all ranks, of course, and fine arts professionals of most types are never more than a stone’s throw from the wishes of the patron class. But how does the discipline come to us already class-coded and how do we impact that coding? What class role do we perform? What does the good work we do as a group mean as a class act?
STEVE KURTZ CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES
Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge’s dismissal, please visit:
http://caedefensefund.org
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