Image by Zero Take.

Watching the celebrations for the inauguration of the New York City mayor, my mind suddenly turned back to my intellectual career early in this century. I remembered some writings I had almost forgotten, which I developed twenty-some years ago. Here, then, briefly looking back I return to consider how my early concerns with a world art history now have new relevance. How can people from diverse ethnic or religious backgrounds co-exist justly in a unified society? How can artworks from diverse visual cultures coexist in our artworld? There is an obvious analogy between the two questions. Art is an important form of cultural expression; when we understand someone’s artworks, we know something significant about them. Like contemporary political life, the unity of the art world requires empathetic mutual understanding.

Trained as a philosopher in the 1960s and 70s, I transitioned into art history in the late twentieth century. And so I traveled to many sites of European old master painting. I went to London, Paris and many cities in Italy. And so then when I took an interest in a world art history, I continued to travel. I visited Istanbul and Morocco, taught in China and lectured in India, Japan and Taiwan. Naive as I was, I sought in these journeys to get some sense of these varied cultures whose art interested me. Having previously learned about the sites of European visual art, I extended my concerns in a natural way. For a long time, many Western art museums have collected art from all cultures. And art historians have often interpreted this art. My concern, then, with the philosophical implications of that discussion, was to gain some sense of how to compare these varied cultures. To the best of my recollection, my concerns were purely intellectual. I thought that a world art history raised fascinating intellectual challenges. My teachers in aesthetics, Arthur Danto and Richard Wollheim. were well traveled and widely read. But although they offered universal aesthetic theories their examples almost all came from Western European and North American art. They assumed that their general account would be sufficient for all art from everywhere. (Danto published a short book about non-Western ethics, but he didn’t extend analysis to visual art.) I questioned that way of thinking. Is aesthetics general?— Does it describe all art made everywhere? Religious customs are culturally relative. And political institutions are varied. And so art, too, may, I thought, be diverse in different cultures. My account was staged within the framework of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers are familiar with questions about how to understand people whose beliefs are different from ours. And thanks to Isaiah Berlin, the visionary pioneering account of cultural relativism by Giambattista Vico has been discussed. But when I began my research, to the best of my knowledge, these materials had not yet been applied to art history. At this time, however, some other Western scholars, including James Elkins, David Summers, and John Onians, were also exploring this issue.

Chinese art was my first case study. Like Europe, China has a long, relatively self-sufficient tradition which develops naturalism. Chinese religious beliefs and the political developments are strikingly distinct from those of Europe. And so, it’s unsurprising that their artworks look different from those of Europe. Still, it seems that there are real parallels in these two traditions. I was led to this way of thinking because I had written extensively about Ernst Gombrich, whose account of European naturalism can be extended to China. (Gombrich himself didn’t do that, in part, perhaps, because he never got to China. But James Cahill, whose writing influenced mine, did.) In China, as in Europe, naturalism, it might be argued, is the natural, inevitable product of an illusionistic picture tradition. In that way, the development of visual art is like scientific progress. Having read portions of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, it was natural for me to question cultural relativism, at least when applied to art and technology. However exotic are Chinese institutions, their machines obey the same laws of physics as those in Europe. Here I should thank my oldest Chinese friend, Professor Ding Ning, a professor in Beijing who hosted me in China, provided many fruitful discussions and translated my book on the art museum.

I was also fascinated by Islamic art, as discussed by Oleg Grabar, a leading Western scholar who focused intensively on methodological questions. The early Muslims inherited but largely rejected the European naturalist tradition, for reasons he sought to understand. More was at stake, he showed, then just iconoclasm. Here, then, we have an elaborate Islamic tradition which develops in part in opposition to European naturalism. Earlier Western scholars, including Alois Riegl and Gombrich, had discussed decoration, and in theorizing, Grabar critiqued and extended.

I asked a very simple question: If what defines the art writing about Western art is a narrative, a story in which what’s earlier leads to what’s later, to what extent can that same structure be found in non-Western art history? The book I produced, A World Art History And Its Objects (2008) was a very tentative attempt to map Western art historical thinking onto art from China and the Islamic world. (I had very little to say about art from Africa, from Oceania or from the Old Americas, which were places I knew little about.) When I worked out my intellectual analysis I never imagined that these academic questions would become of broader interest. I did, however, discover that political concerns were basic to understanding multicultural art history. My own interest in a world art history was primarily promoted by intellectual curiosity. I sought to understand how artworks from these diverse cultures might be interpreted. But the idea that you cannot study another culture without trying, to some degree at least, to control it was always in the background. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) was an inescapable reference, though his own immediate concerns with art history were, I believe, very limited. In 1972, before he became famous, he was on my doctoral committee. But so far as I can remember, we didn’t discuss politics.

The basic idea of trying to understand another culture distant from mine was exciting for me. I had, I remember vividly, once in Beijing the moment where I truly felt as if I had gone through the looking glass and come out to the other side, no doubt an illusion. In the seventeenth-century the voyage from Europe to China took many months and was very dangerous. How extraordinary that you now can travel from North America to Beijing in half a day! Mine was an apolitical multiculturalism. Interested in understanding the art of other cultures, I didn’t moralize about that prospect. Of course, concerns with multiculturalism often involve expressions of pride in one’s heritage. I remember walking through the Metropolitan when it had just rehung the Islamic galleries, immensely pleased to see that many Muslims were visiting. You cannot talk about the art museum and multiculturalism without dealing with politics.

How quickly the intellectual world changes! Were I redoing a world art history now, I would phrase my concerns somewhat differently, with more focus on political issues. That said, I am unconvinced that the basic claims I have outlined here are not still of interest. This period of scholarly work now belongs to the past, for I didn’t see how to develop further my basic philosophical analysis. But in my current writing as an art critic, I have been fascinated by the challenges of understanding visual works from other cultures, which pose fundamental issues at present. That’s why the recent election in New York City is obviously linked to my bookish theorizing. And every time I review an exhibition with art from non-European cultures, I think again about these basic concerns of a world art history.