Obviously, in French literature you would to be able to read French very well, not just modern French but Medieval French. In art history there are also skills, like connoisseurship, and at least some slight knowledge of conservation. (Krauss, quoted in Rothkopf 1997)
But, if we take Krauss’s initial objection of “deskilling” seriously, we have to ask whether connoisseurship is really a skill to be lauded or simply a mode of distinction based on the making of distinctions (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense; see Bourdieu 1979)—and one that results in setting up a privileged class of “knowers” who rule the day (and the art market) through their impositions of aesthetic value. In a manner intertwined with the question of deskilling and the need for art historical reskilling, Krauss also launches into visual studies and its visual cultural object, describing them as anti‐disciplinary. In other words, she argues that it is visual culture’s disregard for the disciplines that engenders deskilling. To recite: “So what I have against ‘visual studies’ is the project of getting rid of the disciplines. People say ‘film studies, what’s that?’ or ‘art history, je ne connais pas.’ That’s just forgetting about the fact that there are certain skills involved in both the fabrications of certain objects and the unpacking of those objects” (Rothkopf 1997).
What we witness in the Rothkopf interview, then, is Krauss’s partial recanting of the implications of Steinberg’s position with a concerted attack on visual culture along the lines of deskilling and anti‐disciplinarity. Crucially, visual culture and visual studies become the target of her attack precisely on account of an assertion that affirms horizontal thinking. Thus Krauss’s diatribe is directed precisely against the leveling that visual culture as a mode of criticism introduces. She calls in turn for reskilling and for the reassertion of disciplinary constraints that she believes only art history can provide. In this way Krauss’s hatred of visual culture turns out to be another attempt to recuperate the aura of art through an elitist insistence that the art historical object carries a special authority, privilege, and stature. We have come full circle with this attempt to repair the rupture within art historical discourse that both Laurence Alloway and Leo Steinberg had opened up. The pyramid returns with a vengeance, as Rosalind Krauss and the October group attempt to set themselves up as the new custodians of tradition and as keepers of the flame in a last‐ditch effort to stop the dreaded emergence of visual culture and the triumph of horizontal thinking.
More than two decades later, there is still the ongoing need to resist any such artful reactions and retrenchments. We must stand ready to commit iconoclastic acts against those who would know better and who would resurrect the vertical and the pyramidal in the name of reskilling and of reconstituting the artistic elites. We must affirm horizontal thinking as, and at the very root of, a visual cultural criticism that seeks to put things into crisis. We must affirm horizontal thinking as, and at the root of, a visual cultural aesthetics that upends the vertical valuations of fine art. We must pursue horizontal thinking as a mode of inquiry in a networked digital visual cultural landscape that has provided us with a wealth of emergent forms and new keywords in need of theoretical, critical, and historical elaboration, whether augmented reality or interactive video games. To conclude with a prescriptive injunction, there is only one way to ensure an ongoing attentiveness to the disruptive legacy and agenda of Alloway, Berger, and Steinberg. In the name of visual culture, we must keep our eyes peeled and glued to the horizon wherever it leads, in a daily practice of drawing lines _______ and following them.
References
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3 Alloway, Lawrence. 1979. “The Complex Present.” Art Criticism 1(1): 32–41. (Reprinted in Imagining the Present: Essays by Lawrence Alloway, edited by Richard Kalina, London: Routledge, 2006.)
4 Alloway, Lawrence. 1987. “The Long Front of Culture.” In This Is Tomorrow Today: The Independent Group and British Pop Art, edited by Brian Wallis, 31–4. Long Island City, NY: Institute for Art and Urban Resources.
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21 Rothkopf, Scott. 1997. “Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy.” Harvard Crimson, May 16. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1997/5/16/krauss‐and‐the‐art‐of‐cultural.
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25 Sweeney, James Johnson. 1946. Interview with Marcel Duchamp in “Eleven Europeans in America.” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13(4–5): 19–21.
26 Wood,
