Reviving the Stories of Art
The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones doesn’t have time for contemporary art history. In his latest post, “The trouble with art history? It’s boring,” he explains why:
Perhaps art history is coming to its senses, and learning to tell stories that bring great art to life. If so, it is finally catching up with historians, paleontologists and physicists who in the last 30 years have remade their subjects in the public eye.
At just the same time that Simon Schama was calling on art to help bring social history to life, art historians were disappearing up a dark theoretical hole … The “new art history” is no longer new. But it still seems to result in books that don’t quite work as either history or criticism.
Amen. Can someone put the highly intellectualized/pop psychology hybrid that we have come to know as contemporary art history to sleep so we can start telling stories about art that everyone can relate to? Bring back the passion people!
