Stories of Art by James Elkins: A Critical Book Review

Introduction: The Problem with Art Survey Courses

Elkins, James. Stories of Art. Routledge, 2002.

Imagine a book entitled World Literature A–Z or Science: Everything You Need to Know. Very likely, you would be suspicious of such texts as superficial and would not regard them as serious academic overviews that treat their subject matter in any real depth. Yet according to James Elkins' Stories of Art, art history survey courses often adopt a similarly inclusive project of ambitious scope. They are accepted by undergraduate students as having absolute academic authority over what constitutes art and the history — or story — of art. But Elkins argues that "the single story of art is too flawed to function as the repository for the current sense of art history... Already the major art historians keep a mile away from survey texts: such books are written...by minor art historians who are more involved in teaching than in shaping the discipline" (Elkins 130).

Elkins stresses throughout his text that students and readers of art books generally "expect sense and structure in their art history, and so far at least the overwhelming majority of attempts to write different kinds of art history have failed" (Elkins 55). Any type of story and structure created for the history of art — however deeply craved by the reader — will not be able to achieve the all-encompassing scope desired by most students while remaining accurate. Just as art is subjective and located in the voice and perspective of the teller, so are the critic's ideas about art. This has long been accepted as true with art aesthetics, but the idea of what art history itself is is no more fixed in stone.

The Beach Metaphor: Personal Topographies of Art

Thus Elkins' text is called Stories of Art, not The Story of Art. Elkins argues that there are many stories of different artists, genres, peoples, and nations. Art history — particularly in terms of undergraduate education — is falling behind other humanities disciplines that are attempting a more multicultural and multifaceted approach. The story of Western art continues to dominate the introductory portions of the discipline in the form of survey classes and the textbooks designed to serve those courses. Every book and every class is slightly biased and inadequate, at best, depending upon the author and the teacher. This means that potential art majors, or simply people with an interest in art, gain a misguided perspective of the field. They receive their introduction to art from the point of view of a lesser scholar whose ideas are simplified and very likely conflict with how the most cutting-edge theorists of art are articulating their views.

The reason there is not as much Indian or Islamic art included in the curriculum is that the "history of art" — indeed all history — "privileges what is near at hand," so stories of Russian art privilege Russia, American textbooks stress national and European art, and so on (Elkins 91). Another problem Elkins has with the way art is taught in colleges and universities today is that it is taught in a linear rather than a conceptual fashion. Just as every national history, as conceived by members of the nation, is intensely personal, so is every person's conception of art itself.

Elkins encourages his own students and readers to be intensely self-critical of what they personally consider art. He instructs the reader to imagine standing on a beach and looking out at an ocean. The sea represents looking into the past of what is considered art (Elkins 55). The sand nearby represents the art the reader is personally familiar with, the shallow waters contain the art of the recent past and the reader's cultural milieu, and the deeper ocean waters contain art from different cultures and time periods. "What would your version of such a landscape look like? Which artists or periods would be nearby, and which would be sunk in the abyss?" (Elkins 5). This is the individual's own personal, highly specific topography of art — and everyone has such an inner map: academic, critic, student, and ordinary human being alike. Art is a topography; the history of art is not a list or a timeline.

Non-Western Art and the Limits of the Survey

Every person would construct their beach topography of art in a very different fashion. For some young Americans, the familiar images of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists like Monet and Van Gogh would be closest at hand; for others, the Pop Art of Andy Warhol; and still others might see all of art as a great and sinking abyss, with only a few media photographs standing in for the "sand." But even an art historian would see his or her own period as more familiar than others, and someone of a particular nation would be less familiar with the depths of another nation's great works of art.

For the majority of American college students — even aspiring students of art — the abyss, regardless of their familiarity with their own culture, is that of non-Western culture, unless they come from a non-Western cultural heritage. Even if they appreciate the beauty of non-Western art, it is difficult to gain a full sense of that art's significance within its own context unless one is intimately familiar with the history, people, and ideological attitudes that stimulated its production. This does not mean that such art is necessarily incomprehensible to someone from an alternative culture, but that more work is required of the student to gain a full-bodied appreciation for that art's significance and importance. It is not enough to include it as merely one chapter among many in a survey history of art.

Of course, the West has apparently produced numerous, very distinctive periods with very different standards of what is art and what is beautiful. But these periods exist in the mind of the beholder; we see them because we have been taught to see such divisions. Elkins does not deny that different time periods have produced very different works of art in terms of appearance, materials, and subject. Someone from the neo-Classical era would not understand an artistic product from the postmodern era of contemporary America, even if they came from the same nation. The later work would not seem like art — it would seem like a travesty. But periods of artistic division, even within a single culture, are not as certain and defined as textbooks might suggest.