...is not the memorization of names, dates, titles, materials, and dimensions.
I am grateful to Sally Everett from Metro State University who required us to memorized drawers of images that she kept in a box labeled "Post-war Art". At the time, the import of the Abstract Expressionists was lost on me. Same with the Minimalists. The Impressionists, Surrealists, Pre-Raphaelites, and Social-Realists --these were instantiated by Sally with a projection at the front of the dark classroom that was flatly reminiscent of a calendar page or a poster in someone's house. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Cole, O'Keefe - they had become cliche early on, and there was little Sally could say that would make them fascinating. I do not remember many art revelations, but I did get very good at memorization. I learned later that the fascination comes with going deeper down the rabbit hole of history, philosophy, logic, psychology, and mysticism.
The importance of Art History, or rather, the value gained from an understanding of art history, is a portal into the way an artist's unique voice has been broadcast, co-opted, subverted, marginalized, commodified, subsumed, and extinguished. It is a record -- an artifact. Who was paying for the art? Was it a benefactor, like the Catholic Church or the Medicis? Who made the arbitrary decision to assign value? Was anyone paying them? Were they paying for it themselves with money made on Fiver or with their blood, like Van Gogh, or someone else's blood, like Caravaggio? Were they groomed like Frank Lloyd Wright? Were they harnessing their grief into icons, like Kathe Kollowitz? Were they confined to a bed, like Frieda Khalo? Why do we know what we know about them? What did their medium say about the times, like the way the Art Nouveau period was affected by printing techniques and a backlash against mechanization?
Its obvious that one would ask these questions, going beyond Sally Everett's slides, but the depth of it is recurring to me in the way that knowledge does. I want to feel distain for the deluge of names I still need to memorize, but every time I look up a new artist, living or dead, I find myself again, fascinated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
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