Posted on 01/24/2020 2:00:18 PM PST by billorites
Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course.
Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” was once touted to be one of Yale College’s quintessential classes. But this change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.
This spring, the final rendition of the course will seek to question the idea of Western art itself — a marked difference from the course’s focus at its inception. Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.
“I believe that every object I discuss in [“Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present”] (with the possible exception of one truly ghastly painting by Renoir) is of profound cultural value,” Barringer said in an email to the News. “I want all Yale students (and all residents of New Haven who can enter our museums freely) to have access to and to feel confident analyzing and enjoying the core works of the western tradition. But I don’t mistake a history of European painting for the history of all art in all places.”
Instead of this singular survey class, the Art History Department will soon offer a range of others, such as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.” Barringer added that in two or three years, his department will offer a substitute class to “Introduction to Art History.” But the new class “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” Barringer said.
While concerns about the class’s singular focus in Western art has led to its cancellation, student enrollment in Barringer’s course skyrocketed this semester after the department’s plan was announced. Over 400 students shopped the class last week, though the course is capped at 300 due to constraints in the number of sections that the YUAG can host.
Phoebe Campbell ’22 — who was among the lucky 300 to enroll in Barringer’s course — said student interest likely stems from positive reviews, as well as the fact that the class is being offered for a final time.
According to Barringer, the class will still cover Western art chronologically from 1300 to the present and hopscotch across European art movements under the roof of the Yale University Art Gallery. Students in sections will still examine objects directly from Yale’s vast collections.
In his syllabus note to potential students on Canvas, an online course management tool, Barringer wrote that the emphasis would be placed on the relationship between European art and other world traditions. The class will also consider art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and discuss its involvement with Western capitalism, Barringer wrote. Its relationship with climate change will be a “key theme,” he wrote.
Barringer has also focused attention on the course’s written assignments. He said that he will invite students to write an essay nominating a work of art that has been left out of the course’s curriculum or its textbook. Like the changes to the course itself, this essay is designed to challenge long-held views of art history.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing what works the students come up with to counteract or undermine my own narratives,” he wrote.
In an interview with the News, Campbell said she appreciates Barringer’s efforts to point out the limited scope of the course.
“The class title is ‘Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present,’ but in lecture and on the slides, [Barringer] calls it ‘Introduction to Western Art’ because he is aware, while teaching it, that it is not a comprehensive introduction to the global history of art, and that everything we talk about is from a Western perspective,” Campbell said.
Campbell added that while is supportive of the changes, she hopes that the pre-modern Western course material will not be lost amongst the shuffle.
But other students expressed certain dissatisfactions with the Art History Department’s decision to get rid of Barringer’s class.
“My biggest critique of the decision is that it’s a disservice to undergrads,” Mahlon Sorensen ’22 said. “If you get rid of that one, all-encompassing course, then to understand the Western canon of art, students are going to have to take multiple art history courses. Which is all well and good for the art history major, but it sucks for the rest of us, which, I would say, make up the vast majority of the people who are taking [HSAR 115].”
The decision to get rid of this survey art history course resembles the English Department’s move to “decolonize” its degree requirements in 2017. At the time, the department made a sequence titled “Major English Poets” optional for majors.
For years, the Directed Studies program — a six-credit sequence for first-year students focusing on philosophy, literature and political philosophy — has also fielded criticisms about its exclusive focus on the Western canon.
But in an interview with the News in 2018, humanities professor and then-Director of Undergraduate Studies of the program Kathryn Slanski said while many of the authors discussed in the program are “dead white men,” everyone can learn from their texts as long as they perform nuanced and analytical readings. While concerns regarding the diversity of texts taught in Directed Studies are perennial, the University is “up-front that Directed Studies is an introduction to the Western tradition and its influence,” Slanski said.
Political science professor Steven Smith, who teaches a Directed Studies class in the fall, agreed that there is no course that can address everything and that Directed Studies already covers plenty. Still, some students are pushing to increase minority and female representation among authors in the DS curriculum.
Over the past several years, structural changes in the art history major have come largely in part to the department’s active response to similar student suggestions. According to the Director of Undergraduate Studies Marisa Bass, students motivated the creation of courses like “Global Decorative Arts,” “Sacred Art and Architecture” and “The Politics of Representation.”
“Yale’s History of Art department is deeply committed to representing the intellectual diversity of its students and its faculty, and we believe that introductory surveys are an essential opportunity to continue to challenge, rethink and rewrite the narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place,” Bass said. “These surveys and those that we will continue to develop in the future are designed in recognition of an essential truth: that there has never been just one story of the history of art.”
Margaret Hedeman | margaret.hedeman@yale.edu
Matt Kristoffersen | matthew.kristoffersen@yale.edu
Western civilization is being shredded because of these woke a-holes and by the way I despise African art.
Just following in the footsteps of University of Pennsylvania (founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1740, before the American Revolution), which allowed student activists of color to remove the portrait of William Shakespeare that had hung in the English Department for over a century, to be replaced by a portrait an obscure lesbian of color no one has ever heard of. She’s intersectionally oppressed, though. /s
Remember the Venus of Willendorf? The first image taught during the class. Quite a sight for the dull-witted 17 year old I was.
Yes indeed. And there is another factor: preservation of historical sites and works. I have no doubt there have been great works in Africa but how many have survived the generations? There were great statues in Afganistan but the Taliban blew them to smithereens. The Western Canon has preserved its monuments to the best of its abilities; from the bible to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde and James Joyce and Arthur Heller and so on. From pre-Renaissance artists like Cimabue to Davinci to Jaques Louis David. From the Dome of the Rock to the Colosseum to the Louvre and Monmartre. In India and in Asia they have also preserved their historical monuments, artifacts, literature.
Not all of these works were created by straight white men, fwiw. Art is supposed to be transcendent of personality. Great art is universal, though, if one has no understanding of the history of his or her culture some of that will be lost on the observer. I won’t get the same understanding of Kabuki theater that a native of Japan would. A Pakistani would probably not understand much of Samuel Beckett. But we can all learn - Unless they stop teaching!
LOL, actually many military officers Major in History.
Kenneth Clark may not know how to spell “civilization” but he can speak about it very well.
I took an Art History class in college, and you are correct. We learned about Western culture and history from prehistoric times on. I loved that class.
Sad!
“Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Civ Has Got to Go!”
"Mention Modern Arts, Civil Rights or Folk Music and you're in like Flynn"
Important to remember MLK changed the world for the better - and Bull Conner stayed a democrat...
From link:
What makes them uneasy is the clear superiority of Neo-classical and Renaissance oil paintings and sculptures: they are amazing. Nothing anywhere rises to that level.
Hey, mon, we hates da white folks.
It was one of best courses I took in college. It enriches your understanding of western history and culture. I value it as much as I do my 8th grade typing class. Much more than that worthless sociology class we were required to pay for.
I took 8th Grade typing too! I had no idea how much I was going to use that skill in my lifetime. Like typing this message!
Always considered the Venus appellation as an insider joke. Now I've come to realize it was prescient in foretelling the rise of the Kardashians.
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