Perpustakaan Digital ITB

For a long time now, many have considered art history to be in a state of crisis. In the last decade, numerous publications have attempted to reimagine the discipline, addressing its future or even its supposed death.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, as art history was affirming itself as an established, autonomous field within the humanities, art itself was going through its own crisis. A profound dissatisfaction with art and art institutions was prevalent, and many artists who looked for fresh ideas turned to non-European traditions for inspiration. African masks, Japanese art, and indigenous artifacts all aroused the interest of Fauvists, Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. However, it is clear now that these non-European traditions were not perceived in their own terms to produce what could have been a genuine artistic exchange. On the contrary, they were evoked in strictly European terms, as a “radical other,” which, as opposed to Western art, was imagined as innocent, strong, and connected to real life. Taking the frequent parallels between the developments of art and art history evidenced by history, in my opinion, we should be very cautious in the way we deal with the present crisis of the discipline.