I’m sitting in on a seminar this fall called “New Directions in the Study of American Culture.” It’s also the introductory seminar of the new Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. The class, being taught by Center Co-director Eric Slauter, has a clear premise: each week, we read a recently published book about American culture written by a faculty member. In class, the first 90 minutes is spent discussing the book. The second 90 is spent in a Q&A with the author. In this way, we can have a discussion about how interdisciplinarity is being pursued right now at the UofC
So in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, the class is pretty much evenly split between History, English, and Divinity. There’s an art historian and a human developmentist in the class, but I think the rest of the 20 or so students all come from one of those three departments. And in the first meeting, we talked with an English professor, and everything went very smoothly and everyone had a blast.
For the second guest, Eric invited David Galenson, from the Department of Economics, to discuss his forthcoming book about how it was the young conceptual innovators who took over the 20th century art world. Galenson devised a technique of determining artistic importance quantitatively, and his results (Picasso is the most important artist of the 20th century) are not very surprising, but his methodology has unleashed quite a bit of retaliation from art historians and others.
The second class was, for lack of a better term, a bloodbath. Everyone I talked to afterward was, at the very least, disappointed with how we were totally unable to have what looked like a useful conversation about the manuscript. And though there are many reasons why the class fell apart like it did, it’s useful to focus on two main issues that sort of energized my thinking about my discipline.
First, we spent the first 90 minutes (as in, the time before Galenson was there) discussing and criticizing his methodology. He arrived at his conclusion about Picasso by making a list of art history textbooks from the past 18 years, counting how many times each artist has a work represented visually, and, then, from there determining importance. We spent a lot of time arguing that his sample was messed up: what about museum exhibition catalogs? What about non-American textbooks? What about monographs?
My own primary issue with this question of sample was largely that Galenson seemed to be talking about two different populations with two different influence streams: on the one hand, there were art history textbooks to be consumed by the cultural élite as they develop a sense of taste at university; on the other were the artists’ works to artists themselves, who are not necessarily attached to the same set of influences. Musicians, I argued as an analogy, probably consider something like Pet Sounds to be far more influential and important than the regular, élitist music-consuming public would.
Galenson instantly explained to our class that he’s an empiricist and, hence, not at all interested in theory. That is, he avoids “staring at the ceiling” first and gathering the evidence second. Then he addressed (though it doesn’t seem like the whole class picked up on it) this issue of sample right away. Regarding my take, he said that textbooks are marketed not to the aspiring cultural élite, but, rather, to professors. Furthermore, there is no significant artist today who would not have been exposed to such a textbook. Arguing that there are different streams of influence, it seems, unnecessarily complicates the issue.
His response to the expanded “what about other sources?” question, though, was far more useful. Give me a break, he basically said. The social sciences are way more advanced than the humanities when it comes to controlling for sample bias. So what about those other sources? He had already checked them, and they returned pretty much the same results. Why, he seemed to say, should the humanists feel they have some sort of special insight into the biases in his study that he would have overlooked?
Things got testy here, but that point is a very important one. Reading Galenson’s book, I immediately made all these mental, “but what about?” questions, never guessing that maybe he had controlled for it–though, to be fair, he doesn’t mention that extra work (he argued that he didn’t have to). But maybe it is a sort of disciplinary bias. Aren’t I always convinced that, in reducing things to quantitative research, social scientists are missing something?
Isn’t that, after all, the knock on Moretti, when he gives lectures based on 17,000 novels? That he’s missing “something”? Well, what? What goes missing? A “human” touch? A “human” effect or affect? But isn’t it precisely, as Moretti argues, not the point to read James if one wants a sense of the generally human? James is an outlier, a mutant, an aesthetic freak. He’s not a typical novelist of his time–he’s the best. Why would a mutant freak be able to best portray the real world, to best show a feel of his time?
It doesn’t make sense, and my “what if?”s don’t really begin to give me any special kind of entry into Galenson’s argument. I’m just trying to nit-pick, as he explained. Nit-picking is, of course, a funny thing to be accused of by a social scientist if you’re a humanist. After all, I’m supposed to be the one who is loosey-goosey with the reliance on ideas of truth. But either way, in fact, the jumbled, chaotic system that is a society’s culture only starts to make sense when you step back and look at it as–instead of a jumble of seemingly randomly moving actors–a complex system moving toward something. And that is, essentially, what Galenson has done for 20th century art.
How would an art historian answer his question, I wondered. An art historian would probably not care at all about “who is the most important artist of the 20th century?” After all, I certainly don’t care about the answer to that question in literature. I’ve never even given it any thought since I was, like, 18 (Joyce was in the lead by a mile–but, then, 18 year old me would say that). Whenever someone asks me, out of courtesy to my bizarro profession, who my favorite author or book is, I always say, “well, that’s complicated, and there’s no answer.” Well, what the fuck does that mean? I mean, give me two books, and I can tell you which I like more (at that specific time). Expand this to a massive bracket, and a favorite will emerge. That, then, could be my stock answer to non-specialists. (Incidentally, this is exactly how Nate Silver decided which place had the best burrito in Wicker Park, and it’s stupidly obvious. Arriving at the answer just takes iteration, which means it’s not for the lazy. The answer doesn’t just arrive after thinking about it long and hard–it takes eating the same burritos over and over.)
But the move Galenson makes is to take what would be a question of seeming no interest to art historians and turn it into something that he feels art historians should care about (in their role as, you know, historians of art, and, therefore, theoretically somewhat social scientifically inclined): how to account for the increasingly fractured and cloistered world of contemporary art. For Galenson, it grows out of Picasso’s influence–specifically that Picasso showed that it’s possible to become important very quickly and at a young age just by having a new conceptual idea about art. And this model of innovation was reproduced over and over again, including, crucially, in the textbooks that young artists were reading in art school. For Galenson, the chaos also grows out of the end of the monopoly on the artistic market provided by patrons and the salon. The Impressionists broke the monopoly of artistic evaluation, thereby turning the art world into a free for all.
And that’s it. If you want to make sense of the system of contemporary art, the answer to the question of importance becomes, you know, important. This answer, however, cannot be found in the meticulous, “close” work that (at least) English scholars at the UofC do. Nor can it be sussed from a critical positioning that is constantly not trusting the data (unreliable author, etc.). If you don’t trust the data, that means you adjust your confidence levels–not that you give up on the question.
So what kind of questions could knowing who the most important author of the 20th century is answer? For a literary critic, I’m not sure. But Galenson’s project has forced me to reconsider the scope of my own dissertation. I’m currently mining about 50 novels written between 1928 and 1941 for geographical information with which to draw maps. Is 50 enough? Obviously no, though it would be impossible for this kind of work to be done on a much larger scale (without massive assistance). So what can I say with 50?
And, this question, then, brings up Galenson’s second big take-home point. What is what I can say about 50 novels worth? That is, if I write a dissertation about these 50 novels, leave it at that, get my degree, and then… well, what have I accomplished? Galenson explained that his books sell far better on Amazon than those by art historians. The reasons, I suppose, are two: first, he writes for a non-specialized audience (and has the attendant press managers, etc., to push a book in the popular marketplace–though I don’t know if he was comparing himself to popular art histories); second, he answers questions that a non-specialized audience would like to know. They don’t care about some obscure artist from some corner of the world who toiled in obscurity. They want to know more about what they already know.
If that second point is not a goal of my dissertation already, should it be? If it isn’t, can I say that what I’m doing in graduate school is anything but killing time while pursuing a hobby? What value, really, is the hyper-specialization of my field?
Tags: art history, complexity, David Galenson, Eric Slauter, Franco Moretti, Henry James, humanities, James Joyce, literature, Picasso, systems
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