INTRODUCTION
Historically, August 25—the feast day of St. Louis—marked the public opening of the Paris Salon, the biannual showcase of the Beaux-arts between the mid-seventeenth and late-nineteenth century. It is a fitting feast day to begin our course, as so much of art history, as it has been taught in the western academy over the past hundred and fifty years, derives from ideas set down by the French academic tradition. It was through the academy and the Salon, for instance, that we get venerable ideas like “the hierarchy of genres”, the separation of fine art from craft and decorative art, little things like the exhibition catalogue, the practice of vernissage, and pubic art criticism. Though art and art history did not emerge from the French Academy, and indeed the class is largely about teasing apart these terms ‘art’ and ‘art history’, the French tradition still looms quite large, even in very subtle ways; for example, the use of the term catalogue raisonné for published volumes of an artist’s complete works, their oeuvre.
Prior to coming to all of that, however, I want to begin the semester by laying the groundwork for our semester with a few basic questions: What is art, conceptually and historically? Why study it and art’s history? What are art museums and where did they come from? What are universities and where did they come from? What are the liberal arts, and what are the humanities? Such questions broaden beyond the semester yet they will remain at the back of this survey course, always appearing in its the margins.
I will open class with a short introduction to these questions, then we will review the syllabus and expectations, and we will introduce each other to the class. Finally, time allowing, I’ll give a quick survey. A few useful pages to familiarise yourself—if interested—in the broad history of museums and the definition of the humanities.
— “A Brief History of the Museum“
— Bod, Rens. “Introduction of the Humanities,” in The Making of the Humanities, Volume 1: Early Modern Europe, Rens Bod et al., eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 7-14.
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