The Getty museum commissioned a series of blogs entitled "Getty Voices" for guest bloggers to discuss the future of art history. One blog post by Nuria Rodríguez Ortega entitled It’s Time to Rethink and Expand Art History for the Digital Age will be examined. Ortega is a professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Málaga and participated in a digital art history lab the Getty hosted.
Ortega is right in expressing concerns over digital art history (DAH) not receiving as much recognition as textual based areas of study. Based on my own research for LIS 9372 assignments a year after this post was written, I still believe this is true. But google searches for DAH bring up some major research projects for developing tools as well as DAH university programs.
The reader is introduced to CHArt (Computers and the History of Art), a society that is interested in the application of computers to the study of art and design. Ortega likens that digital art historians should all have such an open understanding of their field, and doing so will re-established DAH as a legitimate field. Ortega includes museums in her definition of what digital art history entails which is very interesting. While I agree with her understanding of museums as an integral part of art history, I also believe a distinction should still be made between the two. Art history deals with the entire cultural and symbolic framework surrounding an art work and its artist. Museums, on the other hand, are businesses designed to present art within curated narratives aimed at pleasing a large number of the general population. Thus, while museums support the arts, they are different, which is why Museum Studies exists as a separate academic area of study. Museums also can help develop DAH projects, but research needs to also be conducted in DAH field itself.
Ortega sums up three main points of her article:
While these are all valid points, I believe they need to be placed within context to make sense. For instance, in her second point, Is Ortega talking about the creation of DAH projects or tools(or both) that are all based on the same type of research, analysis and framework? Under examination, this point seems to go against the main theme of her blog post to, "rethink and expand art history."
Ortega then goes on to critique the entire field of digital humanities. She says, "the barriers related to infrastructure (or the lack thereof), the conservative mentality of scholars, the rigidity of the traditional academic system, the sustainability (or lack thereof) of projects...are shared by all of the disciplines of the digital humanities...we should join forces." Forgoing the problems associated with generalization of many different groups, I think it is overtly idealistic to insist that those in DH 'join forces.' There will always be those who want to focus on textual based specific humanity projects and those whose projects will not be enhanced by visual tools. However, collaborative projects between fields might have the potential for larger developmental growth if each area can be expanded.
I think the major problem running through Ortega's blog post is her attempts to define what DAH is and what its researchers are supposed to accomplish. But at the same time, she also calls for changes that need to occur in the field for it to become relevant. In her second last paragraph, she discusses a definition of digital humanities, " as a new way to produce knowledge based on the use of new research methodologies derived from the potential of computational linguistics and digital media, in which interdisciplinary and transdisciplinarity become the essential nucleus."
By simply being a digital humanity, DAH is already interdisciplinary. I think Ortega forgets about the significance of the digital in DH. Ironically, much like images have been traditionally used as decoration for texts in the past, Ortega sees technology as a decoration to enhance art history.
Furthermore, what happens when the digital becomes art itself and develops a history like in the video below?
Ortega is right in expressing concerns over digital art history (DAH) not receiving as much recognition as textual based areas of study. Based on my own research for LIS 9372 assignments a year after this post was written, I still believe this is true. But google searches for DAH bring up some major research projects for developing tools as well as DAH university programs.
The reader is introduced to CHArt (Computers and the History of Art), a society that is interested in the application of computers to the study of art and design. Ortega likens that digital art historians should all have such an open understanding of their field, and doing so will re-established DAH as a legitimate field. Ortega includes museums in her definition of what digital art history entails which is very interesting. While I agree with her understanding of museums as an integral part of art history, I also believe a distinction should still be made between the two. Art history deals with the entire cultural and symbolic framework surrounding an art work and its artist. Museums, on the other hand, are businesses designed to present art within curated narratives aimed at pleasing a large number of the general population. Thus, while museums support the arts, they are different, which is why Museum Studies exists as a separate academic area of study. Museums also can help develop DAH projects, but research needs to also be conducted in DAH field itself.
Ortega sums up three main points of her article:
- We are in the midst of a "re-establishment' of digital art history thanks to new technologies.
- To achieve this re-establishment, DAH needs to establish itself in accordance with its own idiosyncrasies, basing itself on the preceding decades of research, analysis, and exploration .
- Focus our attention on the specific epistemological and methodological problems of our discipline, and that we include not only academic art history but also museums, art publications, art criticism, artistic creation, the reception of works of art by the public, and so on, under the rubric of digital art history.
While these are all valid points, I believe they need to be placed within context to make sense. For instance, in her second point, Is Ortega talking about the creation of DAH projects or tools(or both) that are all based on the same type of research, analysis and framework? Under examination, this point seems to go against the main theme of her blog post to, "rethink and expand art history."
Ortega then goes on to critique the entire field of digital humanities. She says, "the barriers related to infrastructure (or the lack thereof), the conservative mentality of scholars, the rigidity of the traditional academic system, the sustainability (or lack thereof) of projects...are shared by all of the disciplines of the digital humanities...we should join forces." Forgoing the problems associated with generalization of many different groups, I think it is overtly idealistic to insist that those in DH 'join forces.' There will always be those who want to focus on textual based specific humanity projects and those whose projects will not be enhanced by visual tools. However, collaborative projects between fields might have the potential for larger developmental growth if each area can be expanded.
I think the major problem running through Ortega's blog post is her attempts to define what DAH is and what its researchers are supposed to accomplish. But at the same time, she also calls for changes that need to occur in the field for it to become relevant. In her second last paragraph, she discusses a definition of digital humanities, " as a new way to produce knowledge based on the use of new research methodologies derived from the potential of computational linguistics and digital media, in which interdisciplinary and transdisciplinarity become the essential nucleus."
By simply being a digital humanity, DAH is already interdisciplinary. I think Ortega forgets about the significance of the digital in DH. Ironically, much like images have been traditionally used as decoration for texts in the past, Ortega sees technology as a decoration to enhance art history.
Furthermore, what happens when the digital becomes art itself and develops a history like in the video below?
Crash course internet art from Vera Tan Hoveling on Vimeo.
A quick n dirty video on the history of internet art, freely following the storyline provided by 'Internet art' by Rachel Greene.
Ortega concludes, " So how can a project distinguish itself as digital art history in a scenario where methods, technologies, visualizations, and platforms are shared among various disciplines? From my point of view, the key is in the objectives and intellectual paradigms at the heart of art historical research. And this is why I firmly believe that what I am calling the “re-establishment” of digital art history presents us with an overarching task: we need to “rethink art history” all the way back to its conceptual foundations.
The more I read the above paragraph, the more it becomes an oxymoron. However, I think Ortega wants DAH to focus on the art work and artist them-self, but expand what constitutes as art.. When I studied art history, all my professors accepted net-art as a legitimate form of artistic expression and area of study. I understand net-art to be a DAH, and judging from the image below, a very large and diverse community. Instead of spending most of the article vaguely explaining why DAH and art history needs to be reestablished, Ortega would have been better off exploring all the emerging DAH projects as well as provide a broadest possible description of different fields that make up DAH. Readers of her article would have left much less confused.
The more I read the above paragraph, the more it becomes an oxymoron. However, I think Ortega wants DAH to focus on the art work and artist them-self, but expand what constitutes as art.. When I studied art history, all my professors accepted net-art as a legitimate form of artistic expression and area of study. I understand net-art to be a DAH, and judging from the image below, a very large and diverse community. Instead of spending most of the article vaguely explaining why DAH and art history needs to be reestablished, Ortega would have been better off exploring all the emerging DAH projects as well as provide a broadest possible description of different fields that make up DAH. Readers of her article would have left much less confused.