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Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusionfrom a World History of ArtStephen F. EisenmanPublished online: 20 Feb 2012.

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Intervention: position piece

Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion from a WorldHistory of Art

Stephen F. Eisenman*

The creation of a World History of Art has to this point beenhandicapped by dependence upon a model of cultural relativismderived from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthro-pology. Only by establishing clear criteria for the inclusion orexclusion of objects from a WHA can the field establish a soundbasis for further expansion.

Keywords: World History of Art; criteria; fetishism; shoes; VanGogh

1. A World History of Art (in theory)

The creation of a new, World History of Art (WHA) has by nowprogressed pretty far, but mostly in theory. There exists a portman-teau of terms derived from divergent (though exclusively Western)philosophic, literary and social science traditions � transnational,spectacle, other, subjects, rhizomatic, flows, simultaneity, space, place,geography, virtual, sovereignty, hybridity, multivocality, subaltern,mass, multitude, network � that are applied to a globally diverserange of objects and practices, from Chinese performance art to pre-Columbian ceramics, providing the necessary jargon for the formationof a discursive community that potentially extends from London toShanghai to Mexico City. Yet theoretical perspicuity does notnecessarily constitute intellectual or disciplinary rigor. However subtleand sophisticated critics and scholars in the United Sates, Europe andelsewhere believe they may be about how to go about the study ofworld art, they have achieved very little consensus about preciselywhat to study, nor created a global academic infrastructure. Forexample, the 2011 College Art Association Program sessions on‘Globalization,’ ‘The crisis in art history,’ ‘Global perspective on thehistory of art,’ ‘Nation building,’ and ‘New paradigms for a global art

*Email: s-eisenman@northwestern.edu

World ArtVol. 1, No. 2, September 2011, 281�298

ISSN 2150-0894 print/ISSN 2150-0908 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis

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history’ (I have shortened the invariably hyphenated session titles),consisted either of broad position papers or narrow empirical studiesthat generally precluded dialogue. And in the absence of artistic, visualor material commonality, any consensus achieved at the level of theorymust break down, and communication strain to the breaking point.

Thus it seems to me that James Elkins’ remark in his book Is ArtHistory Global? that ‘the subjects of art history need [not] be shared’ andthat the basis for a global discipline exists by virtue of common‘assumptions, purposes, critical concepts and narrative forms,’ ismistaken (Elkins 2007, 21). The assertion is both theoretically inade-quate, and practically naıve. As John Berger observed, quoting Goethe:‘There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself sointimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory’ (Berger 1980,28). The styles and subjects of art � in other words, the specific visualorder and discipline they construe � constitute the very bases of theory,and they must be shared for art historical discourse to exist. Can wereally expect intellectual exchange among scholars studying SungDynasty frescoes, Indian campaign posters, Soviet clothing, FlemishMannerist prints, Impressionist painting, Caribbean postcards, Byzan-tine architecture, Lebanese pornography, Renaissance villas, Frenchurban planning, and Japanese electronics design? These were allsubjects studied and taught in my department at Northwestern in thelast few years. The effort to attain sheer empirical adequacy in a subfieldmust inevitably create islands of theory and practice unless great effortsare made to overcome scholarly isolation.

The key question faced by current proponents of the WHA is thusthe following: can a discipline or a curriculum be constituted out ofpedagogical autarchy? Surely it will not do to simply deny the problemby creating ersatz global unities as John Onians does in his Atlas ofWorld Art or David Summers in his Real Spaces: World Art History andthe Rise of Western Modernism (Summers 2003; Onians 2004). The oneconstitutes holism by a level of generalization so breathtaking that alldifference is erased, and the other by creating out of whole clothcategories of vision and experience � facture, diachronicity, proximity,virtuality, and so forth � that are supposedly shared by everyone onearth! A WHA therefore � both in the sense of a global community ofscholars engaged in common research, and of a shared body of worksof art or visual and material culture � remains a long way off. What hasled to this impasse?

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2. Original sin

The question leads me back to what I believe is the original sin of theWorld History of Art: its naıve embrace of anthropology, a conse-quence of demands by the elites in globalizing, neo-liberal states toconstruct a more diverse university education and public culture. Twohoary concepts in particular have lured global art history intoanthropology’s Procrustean bed. The first is the culture concept itself,devised by E.B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture (1871). The second iscultural relativism, described by Franz Boas in his The Mind of PrimitiveMan (1911). The ‘culture concept’ states that there exist singular sets ofmental attitudes and material practices � ‘cultures’ � shared by themajority of the members of a population inhabiting a given place ortime. Tylor wrote:

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide, ethnographic sense, is thatcomplex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as amember of society. . ..On the one hand, the uniformity which so largelypervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniformaction of uniform causes; while on the other hand, its various gradesmay be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each theoutcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shapingthe history of the future. (Tylor 1871, 1)

Tylor’s idea was largely derived from Darwin, whose cladistic methoddefined a species both as a lineage that maintained morphologicalintegrity through space and time, and as a group of similar organismsthat may be superseded by others better adapted to a givenenvironment, or better designed for reproduction.

Boas’s principle of ‘cultural relativism’ (a phrase he never actuallyused), became fundamental to modern, ethnographic practice; itproposed that the beliefs, activities and material creations of acommunity must be understood and interpreted through the prismof that community’s own culture. He further proposed, in oppositionto Tylor’s stadial or developmental model, that all peoples have anequal capacity for achievement. In Primitive Art (Boas 1955), he wrote:

In one way or another esthetic pleasure is felt by all members ofmankind. No matter how diverse the ideals of beauty may be, thegeneral character of the enjoyment of beauty is of the same ordereverywhere; the crude songs of the Siberians, the dance of the AfricanNegroes, the pantomime of the Californian Indians, the stone work of

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the New Zealanders, the carvings of the Melanesians, the sculpture ofthe Alaskans appeal to them in a manner not different from that felt byus when we hear a song, when we see an artistic dance, or when weadmire ornamental work, painting or sculpture. (Boas 1955, 9)

Boas’s ideas were derived in part from the writings of the Romanticnationalists of the early nineteenth century, J.G. Herder and Alexandervon Humboldt, mid-century historicists such as John Ruskin, who sawthe material production of a culture as the precise index of its moral orethical character, and Wilhelm Dilthey, the early twentieth centuryfounder of hermeneutics who emphasized the historical embeddednessof interpretation. Unlike most of his predecessors however, Boasemphasized the communal bases of art and culture, rejecting the idea �still implicit in the 1920s � that race was the determining factor inexpressive development (Elliott 2002, 26). Indeed, unlike Tylor, Boashad little interest in development or evolution, shifting anthropologyaway from its diachronic bias to a new, synchronic foundation. ForBoas, the cultural past � unavailable to ethnography � was an unknowncountry.

Cultural relativism is a concept that is now generally taken to benormative as well as descriptive � that is, it proposes that individualsand communities should as far as possible avoid ethnocentrism,respect or at least tolerate each other’s cultures and embrace anethic of non-interference. Among anthropologists this latter principlegenerally remains the Golden Rule, what the writers of the original StarTrek series called ‘the prime directive.’ Claude Levi-Strauss was themost renowned twentieth century exponent of the principle, andperhaps Boas’ greatest follower. He saw himself as a natural scientist,observing and evaluating societies from the outside, as a botanistmight botanical specimens. To accept the legitimacy and significance ofany one was to accept all (Levi-Strauss 1983).

However politically progressive during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century heyday of ‘scientific racism’ and ethnocentrism, andwhatever its current value for anthropology � much debated since the1970s � the culture concept and its cousin, cultural relativism, arepositive obstacles for the creation of a new, cosmopolitan and criticalWorld History of Art.1 In the institutionalized setting of the Americanclassroom at least, representations of the diversity of world arts andcultures are likely to foster the non-scholarly perspective of the tourist,which of course, many students actually become during their ‘junioryear abroad.’ Cultural relativism permits temporary disorientation

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arising from the experience of otherness, but because it asserts thatevery culture is logical and complete within itself, disallows criticaldiscrimination. And if the relativist gaze suspends evaluation of others,it must also halt evaluation and criticism of one’s own culture andhistory. The possibility of what Gadamer called a true ‘fusion ofhorizons’ is thus obviated by the delineation of boundaries betweencultures.

Indeed, by virtue of its very circumscribed character, a WHAfounded on the culture concept may foster parochialism rather thancosmopolitanism. ‘Culture as a common denominator,’ Adorno andHorkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘already contains inembryo that schematization and process of cataloguing which brings itwithin the sphere of administration’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1977,131).2 And it was Walter Benjamin of course, a few years before, whospecified the dangers of cultural studies, cultural history and a reifiednotion of culture as civilization: ‘The products of art and science owetheir existence not merely to the efforts of the great geniuses thatcreated them, but also to the unnamed drudgery of their contempor-aries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time adocument of barbarism. No cultural history has yet done justice to thisfundamental state of affairs and it can hardly hope to do so’ (Benjamin2005, 233). Seventy years after those words were written, with culturalstudies broadly defined still in academic ascendancy, and tourism theworld’s leading industry, the administrative and reified character of theculture concept is all the more apparent. Cultural products previouslythought inalienable � national and indigenous modes of music andperformance, food production and consumption, systems of faith, andgender identities � are rapidly incorporated into the commodity-exchange structure of the dominant global powers. ‘Relativism,’ theanthropologist Stanley Diamond wrote, echoing Benjamin, ‘is the badfaith of the conqueror who has become secure enough to become atourist’ (Diamond 1972, 110).

Of course, the discourse of hybridity, a product of post-colonialtheory of the 1990s, was meant in large part to forbid the essentialismand reification at the heart of cultural relativism, but in practice, it hasserved mostly to encourage recovery of the distinctive features ofparticular national cultures and traditions, and to establish categoriesof metissage or mestizaje that are themselves circumscribed, schema-tized and administered. The alternative to cultural administration, Iwould therefore argue, is critical discrimination, combined with arecognition that judgments concerning the appropriate subjects and

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objects of the World History of Art are always contingent; they willrequire constant re-adjustment and revision, and sometimes wholesalereconstruction. If they ever seem secure, we will know that we areback in the bad old days of ossified canons and ethnocentrism. Yetwithout critical discrimination, a discipline and a curriculum � anddiscourse itself � are impossible. And in order to discriminate, we musthave criteria.

3. Three criteria � a propaedeutic

The World History of Art, as I therefore envision it, would be adiscipline that takes the global world of things as its object of studybut, nevertheless, by virtue of its critical character, has sufficientcoherence that it constitutes a theory and sustains a profession � itmust allow for the establishment of criteria for judging professionalcompetence. In lieu of dependence upon the categories of art andculture, the WHA I imagine would be reliant upon pragmatics, and itsobject selected primarily by virtue of their salience. The following arethree possible criteria for the inclusion of objects in, or exclusion ofobjects from a new, more cogent World History of Art.

(1) Historical salience: the salience of an object or performance, or aclass of objects at the time of its production. The determinationof historical salience is measured by the quantity of resourcesexpended (prodigious for example, in the case of Renaissancetapestries, Baroque marble revetments, and Pacific NorthwestCoast potlatches); by ritual significance (for example, Byzantineicons, shamanic ceremonies, Kula rings and kachina dolls); bypublic approbation (as measured in attendance figures, numberof newspapers reviews, prices realized at sale or simply thebreadth of reproduction and distribution of an object or motif);and by institutional or art-community impact (challenges toacademic rules and standards and influence on peers, thinkGericault, Manet, Seurat, and so forth).

(2) Contemporary salience: the salience of an object, or class ofobjects at the time of its art historical reckoning. The rules fordetermining contemporary salience are the same as those forhistorical salience, except that they are adjudged not at the timeof original creation but later. An object or performance that wasonce insignificant may in the course of time accrue meaning andauthority and become tremendously evocative or powerful.

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Examples include archaeological artifacts that were literallyrefuse at the time of their deposition, but upon discoverybecame crucial linchpins for understanding the past; commercialephemera � broadsheets, posters, trade cards and so forth; aswell as certain household items such as baskets, quilts, andceramics. They also include artworks � including those byVincent van Gogh � that were unknown when first made, butwere later considered as masterpieces. (More on him later.)

(3) Non-translatability: an object’s relative opacity to interpretation,and the non-translatability of an object into written or spokenlanguage, as well as the non-substitutability of objects. Anartifact or performance that may be substituted for any otherwithout loss of meaning has no special claim for attention by theWHA, though the class of things to which it belongs may. Thiscriteria is the closest to those provided by classical aesthetics,recalling Kant’s ‘third moment’ in his Critique of Judgment, theidea that things of beauty must manifest purposefulness withoutpurpose. (The writings of Clement Greenberg, including ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’ and ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’ are crude,later iterations of this position.) According to my argument, anartifact that can easily be translated into another medium, thatcan be substituted for another, or that is instrumental (purpose-ful) alone � and which does not otherwise satisfy Criteria Oneand Two � has no special claim on an art historian’s attention.Put another way, there is no reason to summon art historians toexamine an x-ray � an image that is merely purposive � unless ofcourse they are experts on x-rays, in which case they should putan MD after their names and demand a better salary.

If an object satisfies a single criterion, according to my scheme, it maybe included in a World History of Art; if it is satisfies two of the threecriteria, it should be included; and if it satisfies all three criteria, it mustbe included (Figure 1). As you can see, the area of intersection of allthree ovals on the Venn diagram, which designates objects that mustbe included in a plausible World History of Art, represents a fraction �about one sixteenth � of the total area (Figure 2). In actuality, as thenext diagram illustrates (Figure 3), the fraction of objects that must betreated is likely much, much smaller than this. Moreover, the totalnumber of objects that may, should, or must be addressed by theWorld History of Art is miniscule as compared to the total number ofobjects ever made, as the next diagram suggests (Figure 4). However

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as this diagram also reveals, the salience of an artifact is preciselyrevealed by critical consideration of its relationship to the world ofdifferent and similar objects. Let me offer an example.

4. Athletic shoes

These new Nike sneakers (Figure 5) � modeled by a young pedestrian inHighland Park, Illinois � have little salience for the World History of Art.They were cheaply manufactured and purchased, are unconnected toritual, unknown (until now) to anyone except their anonymous user,

Figure 1. Three criteria for the inclusion of objects in, or exclusion, of objectsfrom a World History of Art.

Figure 2. The intersection of all three ovals designates objects that must beincluded in a World History of Art.

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and neither overturned nor challenged traditions or conventions ofshoe design or anything else. They have not gained salience with age,and may easily be substituted for another pair of sneakers by Nike, orsome other manufacturer. But a closer consideration of them willbegin to indicate the dimensions of a possible non-anthropological,non-cultural, or pragmatic and critical approach to the World Historyof Art.

The invention of athletic shoes, trainers, tennis shoes, sneakers andall the rest in the late nineteenth century was dependent upon thevulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear and the development of

1. HistoricalSalience

1. HistoricalSalience

3. Non-Translatability3. Non-Translatability2. Contemporary

Salience2. Contemporary

Salience

Figure 3. Showing small number of objects that should or must be included ina plausible World History of Art.

Figure 4. Figure exemplifying the very small number of objects those thatshould, or must be addressed by the World History of Art, when taking intoaccount the total universe of objects.

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leisure time, especially the 8 hour day, gradually achieved in the US andother industrialized nations beginning in the 1880s.3 Vulcanizationpermitted the creation of a not-soft but-not-hard, and a not-sticky-but-not-slick outer sole that could be sewn or glued to a leather or canvasupper in order to offer a springy step and a sure grip ideal for certainsports and recreational activities, especially boating, basketball andtennis. By the 1910s, companies producing rubber tyres were alsoproducing sneakers (so named, it is supposed, because of their quietfootfalls), with early proprietary names including Converse and Keds.After World War II, with the relaxation of school dress codes, the massmarketing of spectator sports, and the growth of advertising andcelebrity endorsements, the market for sneakers expanded enor-mously, culminating in the creation of Blue Ribbon Sports (later Nike)by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman in 1964. Michael Jordan’s endorse-ments of Nike products, the swoosh logo, the slogan ‘just do it,’ and anumber of shrewd corporate acquisitions and consolidations havemade Nike the leading sport shoe supplier in the world with revenuesof nearly $20 billion dollars a year.4

Figure 5. New Nike sneakers � modeled by a young pedestrian in HighlandPark, Illinois.

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Nike, Adidas, ASICS, Converse, New Balance, Reebok and manyother companies produce billions of sneakers every year, mostly inChina, but also in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, andMexico in factories whose owners openly defy labor laws thatthemselves offer scant protection against unsafe working conditions,unpaid overtime, and poor hourly wages. (Nike itself produces noshoes � it is a design, development and marketing company; nearly allmanufactures are by independent contractors.)5

These shoe manufacturers continue because they provide largenumbers of jobs and are a major source of wealth for national eliteswho have promulgated policies of export-led growth, the economicorthodoxy embraced for more than a generation by US dominatedinternational funding organizations such as the IMF and World Bank.National governments have subjected their populations to a globalPonzi scheme that rewards first investors in major technologicaland industrial innovations (including consumer product design),but leaves later ones forever scrambling to maintain profitability.And since capitals in developing nations generally lack the political andeducational infrastructure necessary for major innovation, they areperpetually left behind. Sneakers, the product of low-tech and labor-intensive manufacture, are therefore veritably allegories or fetishes ofthe ongoing crisis of underdevelopment.

And fetishes they clearly are. Male sexual fetishism, you will recallfrom Freud, is the consequence of the castration anxiety that arisesfrom the trauma caused by a boy’s first sight of female genitals andtheir supposed lack. ‘For if a woman can be castrated then his ownpenis is in danger; and against that there rebels part of his narcissismwhich Nature has providentially attached to this particular organ’(Freud 1924�1950, 199). Erotic energy is thereafter displaced fromwomen’s sexual organs to the appendage that is first exposed duringsexual display, namely the foot or the shoe. Even if you do not buy thisexplanation (and few any longer do), Freud’s account accuratelydescribes the simultaneous intimacy and authority of the sexual fetish.The fetish he says ‘remains a token of triumph over the threat ofcastration and a safeguard against it’ (Freud 1924�1950, 200). Theathletic shoe and the Nike logo � in Greek Nixh, the personification ofvictory � signifies the triumph of the phallus.

Fetishistic displacement is also, as Marx explained, fundamental tothe commodity form. In describing the phenomenon by whichcommodities appear to live and breathe independent of their makers,Marx had recourse to eighteenth and nineteenth century writing about

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the evolution of religion and the worship of idols, or fetishes.6 In asociety and economy based upon the commodity, he wrote, socialrelations between people assume

the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, tofind an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regionsof the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brainappear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering intorelation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the worldof commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call theFetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as theyare produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable fromthe production of commodities. (Marx 1906, 83)

Sneakers therefore, as expressions of sexual prowess, and as objectswhose social reality is hidden from view (they are made, after all, infactories 10,000 miles from where they are primarily bought and used)are fetishes squared.

By themselves as I have said however, the Nike shoes I haveillustrated are not suitable objects for consideration by a projectedWorld History of Art. I needed no actual shoes, or even images ofshoes to make any of the basic points I made about footwear, fetishes,commodities and capitalism. No art history training was necessary. Butartifacts such as sneakers, while not themselves salient for art history,may nevertheless provide important points of critical mediation,allowing us to better understand objects and classes of things thatare salient for the WHA.

5. Conclusion: Van Gogh’s shoes

As is well known, Martin Heidegger designated a particular painting ofshoes by Van Gogh from 1886 (Figure 6) (Amsterdam, Vincent VanGogh Museum), the centerpiece of his essay ‘The origin of the work ofart.’ Standing before the canvas in a 1930 exhibition in Basel, thephilosopher detected the ‘unconcealdness of its being’ and its distancefrom the quotidian, or as Benjamin would have written, its unique aura(Heidegger 2000, 95). At the same time however, Heidegger claimedthe painting afforded him access to the very essence of the objectsdepicted, a pair of shoes which he supposed, belonged to a peasantwoman, who ‘trembled before the impending childbed and shivered atthe surrounding menace of death’ (Heidegger 2000, 87). The work ofart by extension for Heidegger was thus at its core a disclosure of truth

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and therefore the potential foundation of a genuine national culturerooted in the soil. Some 30 years later, the art historian Meyer Schapirochallenged the philosopher’s identification of the shoes as those of apeasant woman, and argued that in fact they were Van Gogh’s own.According to Schapiro, the shoes expose ‘the fatalities of social being,’that is, the contingent facts of a particular Dutch artist’s negotiation ofcity and country (Schapiro 1994b, 142).7 The painting of shoes was, heconcludes, ‘a memorable piece of his own life, a sacred relic’. Finally inThe Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida rejected both Heidegger’sascription of blood and soil, and Schapiro’s of urban cosmopolitanismto Van Gogh’s picture (Derrida 1978). Instead, he maintained that thework provides no evidence of fixed social identity, and no certaintyeven that the shoes are a pair at all, and not two left, or two rightshoes. In this way Derrida, far more than Heidegger, was concernedwith the painting as a work of art for itself alone � auratic, abstract,non-mimetic, and possessed of its own truth.

Figure 6. Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes, 1886, Amsterdam, Vincent VanGogh Museum.

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There are of course many available interpretations of Van Gogh’sseveral paintings of shoes. But in light of the earlier discussion ofsneakers, the following questions must be asked: are Van Gogh’spictures, at the very least, allegories of development? Do they alsomediate between individual and collective class identity? The answerappears to be yes to both. Judging by his letters written prior topainting these works, and by the landscapes he made in Paris in 1886depicting the terrain vagues between city and country, Van Gogh washighly conscious of his own passage back and forth between the twozones, the process of modernization, and his alternating bourgeois andpeasant, or bourgeois and proletarian identities. Shoes were at thetime particularly powerful markers of social and class location, and VanGogh would have known all the major artistic milestones either directlyor through reproduction, including Gustave Courbet’s TheStonebreakers (Figure 7) in which the old man at the right, born apeasant but now a proletarian, still clings to his clogs, while theyounger laborer on the left, lacking the historical attachment to theland, wears a workman’s books. And he enormously admired J.F.Millet, whose drawing of sabots, known to him from Alfred Sensier’smonograph, was the probable basis for his own painting of a pair ofclogs (1889, Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh Museum). And further

Figure 7. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849, Common Access, YorckProject.

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examples abound, from Millet’s The Gleaners (1863, Paris, OrsayMuseum) to Jules Breton’s Vintage at Chateau Lagrange (1864, Omaha,Joslyn Art Museum). Van Gogh’s painting from 1886 was in factprobably based upon an ambiguously classed Pair or Boots (1882)painted by the Swedish artist, Nils Krueger (Figure 8). By depicting somany kinds of shoes � men’s and women’s, new and old, clog andhobnail, worker and bourgeois � and by endowing them each with aparticularly subtle and contingent physiognomy, Van Gogh wasengaging in the same kind of Naturalist project as Emile Zola, or later,the photographer August Sander � a collective portrait of his time. Hewas exploring the marks of class upon the body, and the traces of thebody upon one’s shoes. He was also exposing his own fetishisticattachment to things with which he had an intimate relationship �shoes, to which must be added sunflowers, rush-seated chairs, pipes,books. These would all be the subject of multiple pictures by Van Gogh.

For Van Gogh however, unlike the modern shoe fetishist, the objectof his attention did not cast a blinding spell � he was able tomanipulate its forms and reflect upon its supposed powers. Subse-quent artists explored some of the same territory � Joan Miro, ReneMagritte, Philip Guston, Andy Warhol, and Kehinde Wily to name just afew who later painted feet and shoes � but their life experiences andhistorical location did not seem to afford them the same access towhat I am calling the drama of development. Their work may notannounce that delicate form of the empirical that identifies itself so

Figure 8. Nils Krueger, Boots, 1882, Stockholm, Prins Eugens Gallery.

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intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory. But it isprecisely the province of art historians engaged in the WHA �buttressed by critical attention to history, class and power � tomake that determination.

Finally, though I obviously embrace the idea of employing specifiedcriteria in selecting works and traditions that are to be addressed by anew, World History of Art, I do not think � despite my brief focus onVan Gogh � that we should simply affirm and ratify already existingcanons and standards. Neither, however, should we just embrace thediversity of art and culture, and assert the equal worth of all. I haveargued here that cultural relativism derived from early twentiethcentury anthropology is the original sin of the WHA because it deniesthe possibility of critical discrimination, and therefore impedes realdiscussion and debate between and among individuals and commu-nities. Yet it must be admitted that another approach too is possible �a radical autarchy that simply accepts and affirms difference in subjectsand theories, and makes no essential claims about the cross-culturalsalience of any artifact. It would deem the WHA a chimera orpipedream, or else deny the possibility of a WHA altogether.

Notes

1. Three notable milestones in the reconsideration of anthropologicalrelativism are: Stanley Diamond (1972); James Clifford (1988); and BrunoLatour (1993).

2. In Eisenman (1999, 101).3. The Haymarket Affair or Riot in 1886 in my home city of Chicago was the

consequence of a demonstration in support of the eight hour day.4. Goldman and Papson (1998).5. Workers at Chinese sneaker factories, for example, often work 80 hours

per week for approximately 40 cents per hour. That averages out to just$128 per month, almost 50% below the approximately $175.00 per monthconsidered a Chinese living wage. Investigative journalists and filmmakershave documented extensive use of child labor in sports shoe manufactur-ing worldwide, dangerous working conditions (isocyanates have beenfound in footwear factories in Thailand), as well as gross, environmentalpollution.

6. Marx’s first use of the term fetish occurred in 1842 in his essay in theRheinische Zeitung (Marx 1842). For an incisive account of the significanceof this essay in the development of Marx’s thought see Peter Linebaugh(1976). Marx found the term in a German translation of de Brosse’s Duculte des dieux fetiches ou Parallele de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec lareligion actuelle de Nigritie (1760) in which the French aristocrat describedthe manner that many ancient and certain modern peoples (especially

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those in West Africa) endowed worthless things � from a Europeanmercantilist perspective � with great value. On the history of the termfetish, see Pietz (1987).

7. See also Schapiro (1994a, b).

Notes on Contributor

Stephen F. Eisenman is the author of seven major books and exhibitioncatalogues, including The temptation of Saint Redon (1992), Gauguin’s skirt(1997), and The Abu Ghraib effect (2007). He is also the editor and principalauthor of the textbook, Nineteenth century art: A critical history (1994; 3rd ed.2007). Professor Eisenman has also curated many exhibitions in the UnitedStates and Europe, including Impressionism � the ecological landscapes.

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