13. Art History As a Global Discipline - James Elkins.docx

Elkins, James Guest Author of February 2012 It is our great pleasure to introduce James Elkins as our 2012 second “Monthly Guest Author”. Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism of the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in Art History in 1989. As an art historian, art critic and theorist of the image, his numerous writings investigate visuality as an inter-disciplinary subject. He published on fine arts but also on scientific and non-art images. Elkins, who had also participated in our Hong Kong Platform in 2009, kindly gave us the permit to publish an updated version of a fundamental contribution to the global art discourse. His introductory essay “Art History As a Global Discipline” to the volume?Is Art History Global??(Elkins, ed., New York: Routledge, 2006) sketches the landscape of the discipline at the moment of its global diffusion. With a schematic approach Elkins questions the Euro-American legacy in terms of “methods, concepts and purposes” and therefore criticizes the singularity and authority of one history. We are sure that these reflections are still a valid orientation system in the complexity of theories on global contemporary art and we hope they can encourage further discussions. Art History As a Global Discipline學科 The following essay was an early contribution to the literature on global art history. It appeared as the Introduction to the book?Is Art History Global??in 2006 HYPERLINK http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site/guest_author/220 \l fn1 1, and before that it was given as a lecture in Trinity College, Dublin, in 2005. Since the book?Is Art History Global??the subject of theorizing the worldwide spread of art history has itself spread, to the point where the literature is almost unmanageably large. My own contributions, after?Is Art History Global??are the books?Art and Globalization?and?Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History HYPERLINK http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site/gu