Beyond Stories: Art Writing and Narrative

Art historians tell stories. Recent approaches to art history and art criticism have begun to experiment with the narrative forms common in the historiography of art, drawing instead on literary modes ranging from the poetic to the essayistic or from data-driven visualizations and STEM-style presentations of evidence, argument, and findings. Yet the structuring role of narrative in art history—the fact that art historians tend to tell stories rather than convey their ideas in some other way—is still under analyzed. Art historical formats such as the article and the book, mirroring short stories and novels, rely on narrative elements including plot, conflict, protagonists and villains. Why? This panel brings a critical lens to the place of narrative in art historical method and art writing in general, asking how narrative techniques affect the reception and interpretation of art. What have been the costs of narrative, especially considering the need for broader social histories? Where has narrative been a strategic tool? What might experiments from adjacent disciplines such as fiction, poetry, comparative literature, and history have to teach art historians? How do writers as varied as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Teju Cole, Samuel Delaney, Roland Barthes, Saidiya Hartman, and Robin Coste Lewis challenge narrative norms in art writing? Papers are welcomed from across time and geography that analyze the impact of narrative forms in art history and art criticism or which themselves enact methods from outside art history, such as experimental fiction, narrative theory, rhetoric, comparative literature, historiography, or beyond.