Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Mar 2013
4:30 PM - 5:45 PM
Location
McCormick Hall
Category(ies) No Categories
On Thursday March 28 at 4:30 PM in McCormick 106 Robert Bagley will give a dry run of a lecture I’m giving at a conference this summer. The lecture will be tricky to deliver, and I am greatly in need of an audience to ask questions and give me feedback. All are welcome!
Styles, periods, and the life cycle of the goblin
Robert Bagley
The origin of no previous style can be pinpointed as exactly as that of Gothic. It was born between 1137 and 1144 in the rebuilding, by Abbot Suger, of the Royal Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, just outside the city of Paris.
—H.W. Janson
Styles and periods are concepts that art historians take for granted and use constantly but seldom examine or define. I should like to argue that we would be better off without them. In fact I wish to argue that they are pernicious fictions. I hope to persuade you that there is no such thing as “the Gothic style” or “the style of Cézanne”; there is no “Romanesque period” or “Renaissance period.” All these things are fictions, and the fictions are harmful for at least two reasons: first because they distort our understanding of our real subject—artists and patrons, buildings and paintings; and second because they confound us with logical problems of our own making, artifacts of our belief in entities that have no more reality than goblins.