Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon’s production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change. Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt’s works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists’ efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history. Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos

Case studies that counter the idea of a transcendent art canon by demonstrating that the content of any and every canon is historically and culturally specific.

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1960s and onwards challenged the concept of art - hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures - manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history’s most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices. By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of ‘inclusiveness’, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of ‘exclusion’, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of ‘others’ from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Upending traditional perspectives on the art historical canon, Painting by Numbers offers an innovative look at the nineteenth-century art world and its legacy.

In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, Daniel Savoy assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to evaluate the global discourse on early modern European art. Over the course of eleven chapters and a roundtable, the contributors assess the discourse’s goal of transcending Eurocentric boundaries, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of current terms, methods, theories, and concepts. Although it is clear that the global perspective has exposed the artistic and cultural pluralism of early modern Europe, it is found that more work needs to be done at the epistemological level of art history as a whole. Contributors: Claire Farago, Elizabeth Horodowich, Lauren Jacobi, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Jessica Keating, Stephanie Leitch, Emanuele Lugli, Lia Markey, Sean Roberts, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, and Marie Neil Wolff.

A Companion to Popular Culture is a landmark survey of contemporary research in popular culture studies that offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the field. Includes over two dozen essays covering the spectrum of popular culture studies from food to folklore and from TV to technology Features contributions from established and up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines Offers a detailed history of the study of popular culture Balances new perspectives on the politics of culture with in-depth analysis of topics at the forefront of popular culture studies