Art History Theses List Essays Example

Shiner

The distinction between “Art” and craft begins with cultural, social, and economic changes in the 17th century, and the definition of “Art” is a social construction for the purpose of creating an elite class.
Wölfflin

Art’s formal characteristics can be categorized according to meaningful relationships to members of an elite class.

Ruskin
Greatness in art is measured by the quantity and quality of ideas deemed relevant to members of an elite class.
Hegel
Art uses sensuous form to ennoble viewers, making them adopt values akin to those of an elite class.
Leoussi
Art is a useful tool in the production of a sense of national identity, which can be understood as sharing the values of an elite class.

Saint-Simon

As intellectuals, artists should run society along with scientists and industrials.
Boccioni
Artists must innovate or fall into mere tradition.
Greenberg
Artists must innovate or fall into kitsch.
Lewitt
Ideas are more important than skill, but artists are not scientists.
Adorno
Cultural industries exist to placate the masses.
Barthes
One can go beyond denotation into connotation by performing close readings of cultural objects with “a science of signs.”
Foucault
There is no right way to understand phenomena, because “knowledge” is nothing more than an expression of some kind of social power.

Derrida

Meaning is ultimately not decidable because of indeterminacy.
Baudrillard
There is no real world; there are only simulations of simulations.
Benjamin
Fine arts were developed; their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison to the present.

Nochlin

There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness. Women artists are more inward-looking, more delicate, and nuanced in their treatment of their medium.

Robertson and Weber

If we consider art as mediation, then perhaps words are not the best means to describe what is beyond because it seems whenever words come into intercultural communication, variations unconsciously emerge; art offers opportunities for communication that bridge those intercultural spaces in some way.

Winegar

Artistic production and consumption were primarily motivated and shaped by discourses of authenticity.
Pasztory
It is not possible to separate art from non-art; there are only things of various sorts, functions, forms, and meanings.
Justifications
The main reason why this format has been used is for the readers to be able to differentiate the main ideologies of the different people whose concept of criticism when it comes to art. In the case of Nochlin and her work about why there are no great women artists and Benjamin’s work about fine arts and how they develop, it would be easier to obtain the relevance of the works simply by looking at their main theses. All in all, it can be asserted that the art critics have their own perceptions of art and other means of creation.
Weber, for example, in an interview conducted by Robertson, asserted that art can be considered as a form of meditation, which combines intercultural, communication, and other variables. This can be perceived as totally different to Pasztory’s argument about art that suggests that there are art and non-art forms; and that it is not possible to separate these two (i.e. in his work, he classified medieval art works as “art”). To be able to view their perceptions collectively and on a larger picture can make it easier to dissect real differences on their criticisms about art.
Using this method of outlining the thesis of different critics of art, one can notice, for example how Baudrillard’s thesis which suggests that there is no real world and there is only simulations of simulations can easily be related to Pasztory’s thesis which suggests that there are two forms of art—the arts and non-arts, and that there is no way how one can differentiate them. Another example of partial similarities or correlations between two critics’ perception on or criticism of art would be the thesis of Greenberg which states that artists must always follow the trend of innovation. This thesis is somewhat correlated to by Winergar’s thesis which acknowledged that in order for art forms to survive, they must continuous be developed and new ones must be innovated, from discourses of authenticity that is.
Lewitt also argued that ideas are more important than skills and that artists are not and are therefore different from scientists. This can be easily correlated with what Boccioni said in his thesis that artists must always innovate. Innovations are born from ideas and without ideas (as how Lewitt described them) new art forms would not be developed. All in all, similarities and differences between the authors’ of different theses about art can easily be identified and analyzed using this approach.