Replies

Get a chill pill people. First of all not all art historians follow any particular ideology. Many of us r like archaeologists who do the spade work and report the findings. Most art historians I know particularly distrust art historians who have an axe or bias to grind, whether Marxist or radical right. What most of us see is that sometimes doing a particular reading can yield meaning. Paintings r not fixed eternal buckets of meaning, cultures shift and so do meanings like the ocean tide on the shoreline. However, two things that r an absolute demand. Evidence. Derrida is not an art historian, he does not mount or marshal evidence; he is an essayist, musing somewhere between different texts: poetry, cookbooks, fictional prose, obssesive compulsive; no one in the art world takes him for an art historian. R the conservatives guilty of half-truths?
The second thing that is absolute in art history is writing and Mr. Kimball's in my class would get a C- at best. He never quotes enough of his opponents to make his case, his use of out of context intellectual words is embarrasing, his sentence fragments torment the brain and his poorly done research (getting Derrida wrong as an art historian!) all add up to debased mediocrity.