While the essays in Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield (New York: Routledge, 2002), explored art history’s beginnings as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, her latest edited volume on the subject, Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, examines its recent past. The consistently high-quality contributions link principles and assumptions that have structured art-historical study with current dilemmas and developments. Key for Mansfield is the notion of art history as institution as embodied in a group of identifiable “organizing principles” able to shape conduct and propagate “particular habits, beliefs, and allegiances” (1). As such, art history is “a medium for the circulation of ideas—and ideology—throughout contemporary Western culture” (1). Mansfield’s focus in the introduction and in comments preceding the book’s four sections—Border Patrols: Art History as Identity; The Subjects of Art History; Instituting Art History: The Academy; Old Masters, New Institutions: Art History and the Museum—is on the process of disciplinary professionalization as art history’s most important technique of diffusion and administration of its tenets. She sketches out the history of this complex and ambivalent process, one that is closely intertwined with early twentieth-century developments in “nationalism and social mobility” (3). These both broadened and limited the discipline, granting wider admission to its cultural authority, transforming the supervision and direction of art’s history into a career, and standardizing methods and objects of study.

Art history as professionalized practice helped shape national identities. Art historians in newly established university departments and museums catalogued and imbued artifacts and monuments with meaning, in the process demarcating areas of expertise. This deployment of analytical skills led to the spread of the discipline’s reach, the most important result of which may be that art history has become a “core component of higher education in many Western countries” (2). At the center of this enlargement of influence is a cluster of ideas about art and art history’s “representational ‘adequacy,’” as articulated by Donald Preziosi in his essay in part 2, “Unmaking Art History,” particularly the notion that artifacts represent the character of their makers, and related ideas concerning the human faculty for artmaking as well as art’s power to “transform our lives” (124, 127). Equally fundamental, as Dan Karlholm demonstrated in Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History In Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), is the creation of a single self-identical subject called “art” that has a continuous history.

If professionalization in the early years of the discipline had to do with the demarcation of expertise, the production and undoing of boundaries is still the activity around which many contemporary debates about the field revolve, as, for instance, in those regarding visual studies. This question of art history’s inclusivity or exclusivity as the most persistent way of conceiving its functioning, and the problematizing of this conception, are themes that run throughout the book. While some deal theoretically with art history’s deep structures as a way of pointing to quandaries embedded within, others approach this issue on the level of its impact on particular sub-fields, addressing, among others, questions of how art history deals properly and in a complex manner with the art of formerly excluded groups, with objects acquired through imperial practices, with highly politicized regions of the world, with how it came to incorporate contemporary art, with how museums have attempted in recent years to enlarge the possibilities of viewer experience, and with the boundaries between art history and natural history.

Marlite Halbertsma’s essay in part 1, “The Call of the Canon: Why Art History Cannot Do Without,” deals with the art-historical concept and structure most readily associated with the activity of demarcation. She argues that the concept of canon is built into art history in several ways, but mainly by means of two competing notions of culture and their respective notions of canon. The first (usually designated “civilization”) is the idea of culture as a collection of exemplary achievements and continuous improvement, evidenced in various societal spheres. The nineteenth-century romantic notion of culture, in contrast, potentially includes all activities of a people, dignifies previously underappreciated non-classical objects and cultures, and valorizes seemingly stable and singular cultural features. While the second concept is sometimes considered a corrective to the first, it is dependent on and an effect of the first, a re-demarcation of a field activated by an earlier apportionment. The second canon has its own limitations and the first its own inclusivity. In contrast to the romantic, the classical canon is theoretically without “spatial or temporal bounds,” having become an accumulated fund of the exemplary production of all peoples and available to all for pleasure and emulation, as embodied, for example, by the UNESCO World Heritage List (22). It has grown to incorporate media, genres, and cultures it did not previously include, as evidenced by changing art-historical surveys. One way of imagining the activation of a field and the work of demarcation implied by such shifts is the art-culture system described by anthropologist James Clifford. While in this system objects seem to move into the sphere of art through positive valuation, this movement does not ultimately solve the problem of canons. Halbertsma’s examples show how the two canons collude and overlap, while remaining devices of selection and division. German art historians from the turn of the twentieth century retained the first notion of the canon but created a space within it for the second, as in qualities of Northern art excluded by the classical canon. Or, as theorized by Alois Riegl, art history could exist with a number of different driving powers, but nevertheless progressed as a single history of art with a coherent traceable subject.

In “On the Institution of Limits” in part 3, Stephen Melville also argues for the embeddedness of the canon in art-historical practice, suggesting that the notions of canon and institution are better understood as activities rather than as designations of a store of objects or physical locations. One believes that the canon expands through the addition of new objects or locations and the concomitant representation of constituencies. He suggests, however, drawing on Peggy Kamuf’s writings, that art is better understood as an unstable collection of judgments, techniques, and customs, and as actively “instituted” in order to become part of the university (149). To have a canon is to have an object of study. Quoting Kamuf, Melville writes, art history is “not merely . . . one division among others but . . . divisionality” (151).

One emphasis found in several of the essays is the point that to practice art history thoughtfully means to acknowledge that its objects cannot be understood apart from the history of their becoming objects of study and “art” in the first place: in other words, how these objects are able to represent their makers and contexts, and how they are represented by techniques and institutions. Yet this consideration of processes of demarcation and representation is not only theoretical. Steven Nelson’s essay in part 1, “Turning Green into Black, or How I Learned to Live with the Canon,” addresses the problems of an African American canon begun to be formed by African American writers in the 1920s as part of their struggles against discrimination and to gain acknowledgement of their achievements. The utter lack of recognition of these accomplishments necessitated such a canon, and still does, but the nature of the way in which these were incorporated into the canon representing the art of all peoples has shaped how this art is interpreted. African American artworks are often interpreted as representations of their own “blackness” and correlated with struggles against racism. However, these representational techniques, as Nelson demonstrates with various examples, cannot account for certain formal aspects of artworks or for the multi-layered, discursive practices of certain artists. Thus an expansion of the canon requires the expansion of methodologies and conceptual boundaries.

Finbarr Barry Flood’s essay, “From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art,” also in part 1, deals with a related issue within the problematics of the study of Islamic art. Again, the way in which Islamic art became art and part of art history structures current practices in the field. Orientalist tropes of the former eminence and present fall into decadence of the Arab world are reflected in the way currently burgeoning surveys of Islamic art still have difficulty accounting for art produced after the rise of colonialism. The hybridity of Islamic art is celebrated in earlier inter-Asian contexts but denounced in relation to contact with and adaptation of Western art practices after this time. Flood outlines how this charge is paralleled today in the rhetoric of neoconservatives and Islamists, and how Islamic art and art history are deployed in the post-9/11 world to “reconcile” Islam with the West. Museums and government officials embroiled in these debates have tried variously to demonstrate the “former greatness” and “tolerance” of Islamic cultures in order to aid Islamic countries and Muslim immigrants in “rediscovering” their own pasts via presentations of liberal versions of Islam. Flood refers to Preziosi on the “performative” quality of art history, i.e., performing models of national character and “social relations” (44). Flood argues that while an expansion of the canon is absolutely necessary, one must understand the functioning of art history from—quoting James Herbert—"within the colonial" and as part of a “rethinking of modernity” as conceived by Dipesh Chakrabarty (46, 47).

Claire Farago’s essay in part 3, “Remaking Art History: Working Wonder in the University’s Ruins,” considers how scholars might behave ethically within the contemporary university. She argues that the solution lies not in “‘adequate’ representation” or abolishing disciplines but rather in placing the exclusions and inclusions of disciplinarity at the center of a rethinking (158, 159). Her approach to this question occurs via the historical category of wonder, which acquired a special meaning in relation to the material culture of exotic places during the early modern period. The study of such objects within current disciplinary divisions, especially those objects once designated idols or fetishes, obscures the power relations and “self-other relationships” that were at the basis of their incorporation into collections (166). However, attention to histories of collection and reclassification can denaturalize these divisions and illuminate the different philosophies, subject-object relationships, and understandings of intellectual capacities these objects were once thought to embody.

Both Janet Kraynak’s “Art History’s Present Tense” in part 2 and Christopher R. Marshall’s “Re-Imagining Meaning in the Contemporary Museum: From Things That Go Beep in the Case to the Artist Ex Machina” in part 4 address recent re-divisions and updatings of the field. Kraynak’s discussion of contemporary art’s incorporation into art history begins by pointing out how this process is linked with the conceptual destabilization caused by the encounter with so-called theory, creating a situation in which “an astonishing range of ideas and methods from widely diverse fields must be partially ‘mastered’” (83). Kraynak traces how art criticism and history were traditionally distinguished, and she examines the various bases of art history’s transformed relationship to time, history, and the present. Marshall, addressing strategies of museal representation, explores how, in recent years, the embrace of spectacular museum redesigns by prominent architects and the utilization of immersive technologies have gone together with claims of engaging audiences in debates about the interpretation of the past and national identity and allowing more “opened-ended” and “poetic” museum experiences (223, 224). This has been the case especially in history and natural history museums, while national art museums have tended to cordon off their use of interactive features in an attempt to present their collections more “neutrally.”

One important thrust of this volume is the argument that the canon cannot simply be expanded or abolished, but rather must be complicated and is most productively understood as a structure and an activity that is the basis for art-historical knowledge and an object of study and reflection. On the one hand, there is a belief in retaining the canon so that art history may fulfill its theoretical duty to represent; on the other hand, the contributors express deep doubts as to whether representation is satisfactorily understood as the function of art history.