Art, Art History, and Museology
Donald Preziosi
F
rom their Enlightenment beginnings, art
history and museology were components of
a mosaic of evolving social practices which
in concert worked to make versions of the past
synoptically visible so that they might function in
and upon the present; so that the present might be
seen as the demonstrable product of some specifi-
cally delineated and "re-presented" past; and so that
the past so staged might be framed as an object of
historical and genealogical desire in its own right,
(con)figured as that from which a properly social-
ized national subject — the citizen — might desire
descent, and thereby learn to delineate the horizons
of its own identity.
Museology shared with art history a dedication
to fabricating elaborate typologies of "specimens or
artistic activity, connected by branching episodic
chains of causality and influence over time and
space and across the kaleidoscope of cultures, which
could thereby be linked together as close or distant
in evolutionary and diffusionist ways. This immense
labor on the part of generations of historians, critics,
artists, connoisseurs, aesthetic philosophers, com-
modity traders, tourists, and the heritage industry
was in the service of assigning to each object a dis-
tinct and proper place and moment in the historical
evolution of (what thereby became further instanti-
ated as) the supposedly pan-human phenomenon of
'art' as an object worthy of historical, scientific, psy-
chological, and philosophical attention in its own
right. This astonishing European transformation of
an adverb into a noun — the noun "art" — still ne-
cessitates after two centuries extraordinarily sus-
tained work by all of us: art, art history, and
museology in that regard are historically co-con-
structed and co-determined social phenomena.
Museum Anthropology 20(2):5-6. Copyright ©1997 American Anthropological Association.
Underlying all of this accommodation of objects
to patterns of causality assumed to exist between
objects and makers, objects and objects, and be-
tween all of them and (what simultaneously became
co-constructed as) their various "contexts" was a
family of organicist metaphors both reflecting and
constructing certain common theories of race, per-
sonality, agency, and mentality in the early modern
period. These included in particular the assumption
of a certain demonstrable sameness or homology
amongst objects produced or appearing at a given
time and place: a kinship that might be plausibly
demonstrated as existing in whatever multiple in-
ternal dimensions art objects were at one time or
another presumed to manifest.
In the ideologies of romantic nationalism —
which still show no signs of being successfully tran-
scended anywhere in the world — it was highly de-
sirable to believe that products of an individual,
studio, nation, ethnic group, class, gender, or race
should share certain common, consistent, and
unique properties of form or principles of formation.
Correlative to this was a temporal notion of the (art)
historical period marked by comparable homologies
of style, thematic attention, or manufacture. Such
idealist, essentialist, and historicist notions which
were so unabashedly out on the table in ourfielduntil
World War II still in fact comprise the rhetorical sub-
text of much contemporary academic practice, under-
lying many superficially distinct or opposed
theoretical, critical, and methodological perspectives.
In short, such assumptions still function as the skele-
tal frame of art history, giving form, thrust, and orien-
tation to its modes of professional practice.
As the rhetorical and theatrical branches of the
larger domain of knowledge production, that larger
6 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 20 NUMBER 2
epistemological technology commonly termed mod-
ernism, art history and museology traditionally fab-
ricated histories of form as surrogates for or
parallels to histories of persons, mentalities, and
peoples. These consisted of narrative stagings which
served — on a nineteenth-century model of forensic
laboratory science still dear to us, and termed, ac-
cording to your taste, connoisseurship, stylistic
analysis, or semiology—to demonstrate and deline-
ate significant aspects of the character, level of civi-
lization, or degree of social, cognitive, or ethical
advancement or decline of an individual or nation.
Objects of study have always been object-lessons of
documentary value insofar as they might be staged
as cogent evidence of the past's causal relations to
the present, enabling us to articulate certain kinds
of desirable relationships between ourselves and
others. It is in this regard that the institution of the
museum may be seen as having served as a powerful
and effective modern concordance of politics, ethics,
and aesthetics.
Museums, in short, are social instruments —
epistemological technologies, if you will — for the
fabrication and maintenance of modernity The con-
temporary investigation of the museological en-
gines of modernity has expanded to the point that
there now exists a very substantial critical dis-
course on many facets of the subject. The papers in
this issue are part of this new discursive field, and
represent a fine cross section of some of the most
interesting writing on the subject by younger schol-
ars from around the country.
DONALD PREZIOSI is Professor of Art History at
the University of California, Los Angeles.