Against Digital Art History
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Digital Art History has a fraught relationship to history and interpretation. Against Digital Art History Claire Bishop Abstract: This article responds to two issues affecting the field of contemporary art history: digital technology and the socalled computational turn in the humanities. It is divided into two parts: the first connects problems with “digital art history,” an offspring of digital humanities, to neoliberal metrics; the second suggests how digital art history’s “distant reading” might nevertheless be deployed critically in the analysis of contemporary art. Keywords: Computational, digital, metrics, reading Part One1 First, let me clarify that I am not Drucker nevertheless imagines that talking about digitized art history (i.e., future digital databases will permit the use of online image collections) but new questions to be asked of canonical rather digital art history, that is, the works; she imagines, for example, a use of computational methodologies database containing the provenance and analytical techniques enabled by history of different sources of pigments new technology: visualization, network used in Western manuscript illu mi na- analysis, topic modeling, simulation, tion and Renaissance painting, which pattern recognition, aggregation of would situate a work like Van Eyck’s materials from disparate geographical Arnolfini Wedding (1434) in relation to locations, etc. Some of these techniques global systems of trade and economic have been around for several decades value. Her vision of digital art history and have proven useful, especially for thus stands as a combination of digital scholars working on periods where technologies, network analysis, and there is little surviving visual evidence connoisseurship. (e.g., reconstructing ancient sites). Yet the visual theorist Johanna Drucker, Rather than thinking in terms of writing in 2013, states that so far theo re ti cal chan ges, how ever, we should none of art history’s “fundamental ap- compare the in cursion of di gi tal re pro- proaches, tenets of belief, or methods duc tion into art history to previous are altered by digital work”—unlike in tech no log i cal in no va tions. Prior to the 1980s, when “traditional art his- the late nineteenth century, art histor - tory” was upended by the incursion of ians employed originals, casts, prints, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, sketches, and verbal descriptions to feminism, post-colonial theory, and support and dis seminate their research post-structuralism (Drucker 2013).2 (Nelson 2000). The introduction of Against Digital Art History photographic reproduction enabled (PCA) of over six thousand Impressionist whol ly new meth od ol o gi cal ap- paint ings, calculating visual similarities proaches in art his tory—from the for- in content and coloration.3 Another mal ism of Heinrich Wölfflin, who in- pa per, by K. Bender, analyzes 1,840 tro duced the slide comparison to the works of art from the thirteenth to the art history lecture in the 1880s, to twentieth centuries showing the figure the iconographical approach of Aby of Aphrodite or Venus, revealing that Warburg in the 1920s, who drew upon on average, artists turned to this theme a vast archive of photographic re pro- 2.8 times in their lives (Bender 2015). ductions from antiquity to advertising A third article reports the results of to advance his theory of nachleben. The feeding 120,000 portraits from the change wrought by the digitization of thirteenth to the twentieth centuries slide collections since 2000 is therefore through facial-recognition software in not only one of size and speed (an in- order to establish whether the “canon creased quantity of images for analysis of beauty” had changed over time (de la and faster search returns), but also one Rosa and Suárez 2015). Unsurprisingly, of method, opening the door to “dis- it had—the study concludes that there tant viewing.” Already well known is a conspicuous decrease of “beauty” in in Comparative Literature as “distant the twentieth century. Only to some one reading,” this method proceeds by entirely unfamiliar with modernism subjecting vast numbers of cultural would this come as a surprise. artifacts to quantitative computational analysis. I admit that most academic papers, when boiled down to one line, risk A troubling introduction to this sounding simplistic, but in this case meth od can be found in the first issue of the fatuity is extreme. Basic terms like the International Journal for Digital Art beauty (and even portraiture) remain History, launched in June 2015. In the uninterrogated; instead, the authors first of six articles, new media theorist observe that the “more average and Lev Manovich introduces five key terms symmetri cal, the more beautiful a face from data science that he believes to be is usually ranked,” noting with appro val useful to art historians: object, features, that this criterion turns “a sub jec tive data, feature space, and dimension opinion such as what face is beauti- reduction (Manovich 2015). His text is ful into something measurable and illustrated with examples of his own ob jective” (ibid.). A complex human research projects that draw upon Big evaluation is reduced to statistical Data, including Selfiecity(visualizations calculation. Equally blunt is the claim, of thousands of Instagram selfies found in almost every essay in this in different cities around the globe, jour nal’s inaugural issue, that “this assessing the images in terms of age, empirical finding has never before been gender, position, frequency of smiling, highlighted in art history”—as if novelty etc.) and a principle content analysis were a sufcient measure of interest and 124 DAH-Journal #3 Against Digital Art History substance. Further, the data set afrms sidelines, were repositioned as key the art historical canon (“Impressionist players: Sonia Delaunay and Natalia paintings,” “figures of Aphrodite or Goncharova were ranked as the Venus”) rather than challenging it “most connected” alongside Jean Arp, or even addressing it critically. Who Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, decides what is understood as the Tristan Tzara, and Alfred Stieglitz. canon? What is left out? On the evidence But what does it really mean to be of these articles, practitioners of digital “connected”? As art history doctoral art history have a limited awareness of students Jonathan Patkowski and critical debates within art history (such Nicole Reiner argue in their critique as the long-standing, and some would of the exhibition, this map recodes say long-dead, question of “beauty”), the early twentieth-century artist as a but also a limited grasp on how to contemporary networked entrepreneur frame a meaningful research question. whose importance is now gauged in Theoretical problems are steamrollered terms of number of social connections flat by the weight of data. (i.e., documentable acquaintances) rather than artistic innovations (Pat- This silence, however, seems to be to kowski and Reiner 2013). Carefully rea- digital art history’s advantage. This new soned historical narrative is replaced approach is already finding its way into by social network (the avant-garde museums, and not just conservation equivalent of LinkedIn) and has no departments that have long had a re- room for non-human agents that la tionship to scientific research. Con- elude quantification—such as African sider the network map produced by artifacts, which were crucial to the the Museum of Modern Art, New development of abstraction, or the York, for the exhibition “Inventing Ab- imperial powers that mobilized their straction 1910–1925” (2012–13), created circulation in Europe. by the curators in collaboration with a professor and a doctoral student My point is that subordinating art at Columbia University’s business history—whether the invention of school.4 The map, an update of Barr’s abstraction, Impressionist painting, or well-known diagram for the catalogue the new genre of the selfie—to com- Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), covered putational analysis might well reveal a wall at the entrance to the exhibition. “empirical findings never before On the exhibition website, the map highlighted in art history,” but this allows users to click on various names, method also perpetuates uncritical mapped geospatially from the West to assumptions about the intrinsic value the East, in order to see which artists of statistics. In Undoing the Demos were in contact with whom dur ing (2015), Wendy Brown argues that this period. One positive outcome neoliberalism should be regarded less of this mapping was that several fe- as a political formation than as a form male artists, usually relegated to the of reason, a system of governance in DAH-Journal #3 125 Against Digital Art History which “all spheres of existence are study that mobilizes Big Data needs to framed and measured by economic reflect critically on the mechanisms by terms and metrics, even when those which this data is gathered: corporate spheres are not directly monetized” data mining, state surveillance, and (Brown 2015, 10). Her examples include algorithmic governance techniques.7 any online activity that measures output by the number of “likes” or “followers,” Digital art history, as the belated tail from Facebook and Instagram to online end of the digital humanities, signals a dating. Digital art history is just such change in the character of knowledge a subordination of human activity to and learning. Ideals like public service, metric evaluation. It is inextricably citizenship,