Art History versus Aesthetics Roundtable (11 July 2004)
How is it possible to imagine the intersections of art history and aesthetics? Given the time that has passed since the anti-aesthetic appeared as the principal alternative to the modernist aesthetic, and given the current interest in institutional critique, relational aesthetics, and identity politics, the question of the relevance of aesthetics to art history is more pressing than ever. In this roundtable over ten of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject pondered the disconnect between these two disciplines.
Art history and aesthetics–two distinct academic fields–offer very different ways of understanding artworks. Aesthetics considers concepts such as beauty or the sublime; in art history those same ideas appear entangled in particular historical circumstances. How, then, can those two approaches be related?
Participants included Diarmuid Costello (Oxford Brookes University), Arthur Danto (Columbia University), Nicholas Davey (Dundee University), Anna Dezeuze (Manchester University), Martin Donougho (University of S. Carolina), Thierry de Duve (Université de Lille 3), James Elkins (University College Cork), Francis Halsall (University College Cork), John Hyman (Oxford University), David Raskin (Art Institute of Chicago), Dominic Willsdon (Royal College of Art), and Richard Woodfield (Nottingham Trent University).
This was the first roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
Photography Theory Roundtable (27 February 2005)
Now that photography is accorded the status of a fine art in museological practice, and is commonly taught in postgraduate programmes in history of art, it becomes even more necessary to clarify the grounds on which that valuation is based. Part of it comes from poststructuralist criticism including such different voices as Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss; but photography is also theorized using a mixture of historical, technical, and vernacular criteria.
Photography has been around for nearly two centuries, but we are no closer to understanding what it is. For some people, a photograph is an optically accurate impression of the world, for others, it is mainly a way of remembering people and places. Some view it is a sign of bourgeois life, a kind of addiction of the middle class, whilst others see it as a troublesome interloper that has confused people's ideas of reality and fine art to the point that they have difficulty even defining what a photograph is. For some, the whole question of finding photography's nature is itself misguided from the beginning. This provocative rountable discussion presented not one but many answers to the question what makes a photograph a photograph.
Participants included Jan Baetens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Diarmuid Costello (Oxford Brookes University), James Elkins (University College Cork), Jonathan Friday (Kent University), Margaret Iversen (Essex University), Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork), Margaret Olin (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Graham Smith (St Andrew's University), and Joel Snyder (University of Chicago).
This was the second roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
Is Art History Global? Roundtable (13 March 2005)
One of the principal problems facing the discipline of art history is the character of art historical practices throughout the world. There is a difference, simply put, between the central tenets of multiculturalism, and the ways that art history is actually practised and taught in places such as
Is Art History Global? staged an international conversation among art historians and critics on the subject of the practice and responsibility of global thinking within the discipline. The topics were political, economic, philosophic, linguistic, and personal. Should Chinese art be discussed using Western methods such as psychoanalysis or deconstruction? Is it best to use words like "space" and "time" to describe non Western art, or should historians try to employ the words used in different cultures? How is art history taught without books, slides, or artworks? What relevance does the Western narrative of art have for art history students in
Participants included Sandra Klopper (University of Stellenbosch), Friedrich Teja-Bach (University of Vienna), Andrea Giunta (University of Buenos Aires), Ladislav Kesner (Charles University, Prague), James Elkins (UCC), and David Summers (University of Virginia).
This was the third roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
Genealogies of Art Criticism Roundtable (17 June 2005)
History of Art (UCC) collaborated with the Burren College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to present an open roundtable discussion of art criticism on Friday 17 June 2005 at the Burren College of Art. The event brought some of the most prominent names in contemporary art criticism together to discuss some key issues. The place of art criticism in art history and in art education was discussed in the morning, and judgement within art criticism was discussed in the afternoon.
Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized, and its history has hardly been investigated. The roundtable considered the relation between criticism and art history, especially in light of the recent October roundtable on the subject (which gave evidence of the dissociation of academic art history and journalistic criticism); in that light we considered the possibility of criticism becoming a university subject.
Participants included Guy Brett (freelance art critic), Whitney Davis (University of California, Berkeley), Jean Fisher (freelance art critic), Boris Groys (Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe), Timothy Emlyn Jones (Burren College of Art & NUI Galway), Irit Rogoff (Goldsmith College, University of London), Abigail Soloman-Godeau (University of California, Santa Barbara), Gemma Tipton (art critic for Circa), and James Elkins (University College Cork).
This was the fourth roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
Renaissance Theory Roundtable (3 April 2006)
A roundtable discussion about the optimal ways of conceptualising Renaissance art, and the links between Renaissance art and contemporary art and theory, was hosted by UCC’s History of Art on 3 April 2006.
The Renaissance is at one and the same time a cornerstone of art history (it provides many of Western art history’s founding concepts, as well as its models for historical consciousness and historical writing), and a specialty among other specialties, somewhat lost in the increasingly irrelevant past before modernism. Here some of the world’s foremost Renaissance scholars considered the position of their work in relation to contemporary art, modernism, and other periods of art history.
Participants included Stephen Campbell (
This was the fifth roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
Landscape Theory Roundtable (17 June 2006)
History of Art (UCC) collaborated with the Burren College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to present an open roundtable discussion on landscape theory on 17 June 2006 at the Burren College of Art.
Ten of the world's experts on landscape in painting, film and photography discussed the subject in a four-hour conversation in which the following questions were addressed:
How is landscape represented in art?
What is a national tradition in landscape?
What is the 'light' in a painting?
Is there pure landscape?
What does it mean to say a landscape is 'spiritual'?
Is landscape painting a thing of the past?
The idea of this roundtable was to capture the current state of theorizing on the representation of landscape in art. Artistic representations of landscape are studied in a half-dozen disciplines (art history, geography, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology…), and there is no master narrative or historiographic genealogy to frame interpretations. The discussion attempted to capture ways of talking about landscape in those disciplines and in related fields such as landscape architecture and Geography.
Participants included James Elkins, David Hays, Rachael DeLue, Rebecca Solnit, Minna Torma, Denis Cosgrove, and Michael Gaudio.
This was the sixth roundtable discussion in UCC's Book Series: The Art Seminar series.
