Curved_Sw0rd
Just Like That Bluebird
So a couple days ago, I was on break at work, and was reading some news as I as wont to do. And I feel like an idiot for doing that sometimes, as sometimes you get articles like this one that sour the whole day and lead to a lot of angry pacing.
I want to believe that this has been done for the reasons people like Barringer state, that he does not want to exclude other art, but I'm in the same camp as the author of this article, I find the whole thing incredibly suspect and politically motivated. This is another clear case of European or Western traditions being pushed out for being, well, this time it's so it doesn't "Exclude" other forms of art.
That fact that classical art is not safe from this sort of weird Progressive restructuring is what really galls me. Art is meant to invoke feelings and expressions, and the classical European arts invoke feelings largely unique to the European situation. This is not to say there is no value in Art from other areas, on the contrary, all forms from all places should be explored.
Yet it's European art that is chosen to be targeted.
So what can be done to push back against this, if anything? Even small resistance is better than nothing at all, no?
But now, the art history department is junking the entire two-semester sequence, as the Yale Daily News reported last month. Given the role that these two courses have played in exposing Yale undergraduates to the joys of scholarship and knowledge, one would think that the department would have amassed overwhelmingly compelling grounds for eliminating them. To the contrary, the reasons given are either laughably weak or at odds with the facts. The first reason is the most absurd: the course titles (“Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to the Renaissance” and “Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present”). Art history chair Tim Barringer apparently thinks students will be fooled by those titles into thinking that other traditions don’t exist. “I don’t mistake a history of European painting for the history of all art in all places,” he primly told the Daily News. No one else would, either. But if the titles are such a trap for the Eurocentric unwary, the department could have simply added the word “European” before “Art” and been done with it. (Barringer, whose specialities include post-colonial and gender studies as well as Victorian visual culture, has been teaching the doomed second semester course—a classic example of the fox guarding the henhouse.)
I want to believe that this has been done for the reasons people like Barringer state, that he does not want to exclude other art, but I'm in the same camp as the author of this article, I find the whole thing incredibly suspect and politically motivated. This is another clear case of European or Western traditions being pushed out for being, well, this time it's so it doesn't "Exclude" other forms of art.
That fact that classical art is not safe from this sort of weird Progressive restructuring is what really galls me. Art is meant to invoke feelings and expressions, and the classical European arts invoke feelings largely unique to the European situation. This is not to say there is no value in Art from other areas, on the contrary, all forms from all places should be explored.
Yet it's European art that is chosen to be targeted.
So what can be done to push back against this, if anything? Even small resistance is better than nothing at all, no?