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The art historical canon is defined as a consensus of art – objects, monuments, buildings, sites, installations, performances, and more – that is considered to include the “best” and most representative works of world culture. As an arbiter of quality, today’s canon identifies and organizes so-called masterpieces of civilization by region and period, producing a timeline of art that structures survey textbooks and course syllabi. It provides our discipline with a common core, offering touchstones and bridging divisions. The canon, however, is not simply a list of “greatest hits,” but is a complicated, dynamic, and powerful phenomenon formed by questionable Western agendas and biases that it continues to propagate. Today, more than ever, the canon needs to be critically confronted and re-assessed as the face of our discipline.

In the wake of #MeToo-inspired interventions, intersectionality, post-colonial revision, the global turn, interdisciplinarity, cultural heritage destruction, public access to images on the Internet, digital pedagogies that replace textbooks, and other factors, art historians are moving away from traditional canon-tied narratives. But when a discipline diverges from its canon, what becomes of the discipline, and of its canon? What is to be done with the current, still dominant, canon? Critiqued for decades, but with little resolution, the canon stands at a crossroads, to be salvaged or transformed. How can today’s scholars, artists, educators, publishers, and museum professionals ethically and productively engage with and determine the canon’s future? This session is a call for reflection and for action.