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Quote by K.M. Mayville

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The Glass Cloister

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K.M. Mayville

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“Historians, theorists, and critics of contemporary art do not directly study the proliferation of non-art images and things in contemporary society, nor do they examine from a sociological or anthropological point of view the interactions of modern people with art. They do not need to because advertising, fashion, celebrities, television, tattoos, toys, comics, pornography, politics, iPhones, and stuff in general, as well as all the many modes of beholding and possessing are already the content of so much elite contemporary art. The images, thing, and practices have already been filtered and framed by art, absorbed into artworks whose autonomy - unlike the autonomy of the premodern works - remains unchallenged. The main task of the art historian of the modern and the contemporary is to justify the value of those works. The paradoxical result is that the art history of the present has nothing to say about mass culture that art itself doesn't already tell us. So-called mass or popular culture ought to be art history's topic, but it proves too difficult to grasp. The image-surfaces enfolding us will not take on density; they melt or disintegrate too quickly, such that art is everywhere but nowhere. How should art history, with its specialized conceptual toolbox, solve the puzzle of entertainment, when society itself has two or more minds about everything, admiring, for example, Hollywood movies that break box-office records on their first weekend and at the same time revering Vincent van Gogh because he was unappreciated in his own time - and yet not knowing exactly what, if anything, differentiates a painting by van Gogh from a well-crafted movie.”

ArtSocietyModernity
Book:A History of Art History
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