Tea at Trianon: In Defense of Art History

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

In Defense of Art History

From i-D:

The idea that the arts aren't vocational, or that they don't nurture employable skills, is a hangover from a very different economic era, one still peddled by a generation whose vision of the creative industries is a hemp-clad aristotwat explaining why the triangle he sketched on some loo roll is a master class in conceptual art. The Creative Industries Federation released a paper last week demonstrating just how erroneous that idea is: the creative industries are worth well in excess of £85bn per annum to the UK economy, and employ 1 in 11 of all working people. Since the 2008 crash, it has been the fastest growing sector of the British economy. The critical and creative faculties that art, design, graphics and - yes, even art history - develop are of profound importance to our prosperity.

Yet the very idea of employability as the sole end of knowledge - particularly for 16 and 17 year olds who might not yet have had their curiosity extinguished by the drudgery of endless examination - should be as unsettling as it is bleak. Any defence of art on the basis of its instrumental value - that is, what it can achieve beyond itself - is starkly incomplete, and entirely alien to what art is as an experience. You don't go to a conference on accounting to hope to discover something fundamental to your experience of the world, just as you don't go to the Tate to pick up tips on how to sleaze your way to your first million. (Read more.)