The Politics of Relevancy: What is the Value of Art History Today?

In this session sponsored by the Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee, we seek to explore a key question levied at historians of art and visual culture as well as the institutions where they work and teach: what is the relevance of art history today? We aim to take this question head on. How might, for example, a department respond to such a question received from an administrator? Or a parent of a potential major? In this session, we aim to excavate the complexities of such queries. How have what we might call a politics of relevancy shaped the discipline of art history? For whom have art history and an art-historical education been valued across time, place, and diverse cultural contexts? We seek presentations exploring both the genealogies of and contemporary responses to these questions.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Alternative careers for art historians
• Combating stereotypes about what art history is perceived to be
• Questions about/strategies for recognizing and valuing labor
• Explorations of shifting valuations of the discipline across time and place
• Strategies for self-advocacy and the valuation of labor
• Acknowledging art history’s ambivalence to accessibility of the discipline
• Value of visual literacy in image-saturated world
• Advocating the discipline’s value to students, parents, administrators, donors, institutions, the public
• The in/hospitableness of the discipline to DEI initiatives
• Explorations of what visual studies might offer to myriad STEM professions
• The instrumentalization and weaponization of art history in cultural discourse, past or present