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Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion

from a World History of Art
Stephen F. Eisenman
Published online: 20 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Stephen F. Eisenman (2011) Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion from a World
History of Art, World Art, 1:2, 281-298, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2011.603738
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World Art
Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2011, 281
298
Intervention: position piece

Three criteria for inclusion in, or exclusion from a World

History of Art

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Stephen F. Eisenman*
The creation of a World History of Art has to this point been
handicapped by dependence upon a model of cultural relativism
derived from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Only by establishing clear criteria for the inclusion or
exclusion of objects from a WHA can the field establish a sound
basis for further expansion.
Keywords: World History of Art; criteria; fetishism; shoes; Van
Gogh

1. A World History of Art (in theory)

The creation of a new, World History of Art (WHA) has by now
progressed pretty far, but mostly in theory. There exists a portmanteau of terms derived from divergent (though exclusively Western)
philosophic, literary and social science traditions
transnational,
spectacle, other, subjects, rhizomatic, flows, simultaneity, space, place,
geography, virtual, sovereignty, hybridity, multivocality, subaltern,
mass, multitude, network
that are applied to a globally diverse
range of objects and practices, from Chinese performance art to preColumbian ceramics, providing the necessary jargon for the formation
of a discursive community that potentially extends from London to
Shanghai to Mexico City. Yet theoretical perspicuity does not
necessarily constitute intellectual or disciplinary rigor. However subtle
and sophisticated critics and scholars in the United Sates, Europe and
elsewhere believe they may be about how to go about the study of
world art, they have achieved very little consensus about precisely
what to study, nor created a global academic infrastructure. For
example, the 2011 College Art Association Program sessions on
Globalization, The crisis in art history, Global perspective on the
history of art, Nation building, and New paradigms for a global art

*Email: s-eisenman@northwestern.edu
ISSN 2150-0894 print/ISSN 2150-0908 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2011.603738
http://www.tandfonline.com

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S.F. Eisenman

history (I have shortened the invariably hyphenated session titles),

consisted either of broad position papers or narrow empirical studies
that generally precluded dialogue. And in the absence of artistic, visual
or material commonality, any consensus achieved at the level of theory
must break down, and communication strain to the breaking point.
Thus it seems to me that James Elkins remark in his book Is Art
History Global? that the subjects of art history need [not] be shared and
that the basis for a global discipline exists by virtue of common
assumptions, purposes, critical concepts and narrative forms, is
mistaken (Elkins 2007, 21). The assertion is both theoretically inadequate, and practically nave. As John Berger observed, quoting Goethe:
There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so
intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory (Berger 1980,
28). The styles and subjects of art
in other words, the specific visual
order and discipline they construe
constitute the very bases of theory,
and they must be shared for art historical discourse to exist. Can we
really expect intellectual exchange among scholars studying Sung
Dynasty frescoes, Indian campaign posters, Soviet clothing, Flemish
Mannerist prints, Impressionist painting, Caribbean postcards, Byzantine architecture, Lebanese pornography, Renaissance villas, French
urban planning, and Japanese electronics design? These were all
subjects studied and taught in my department at Northwestern in the
last few years. The effort to attain sheer empirical adequacy in a subfield
must inevitably create islands of theory and practice unless great efforts
are made to overcome scholarly isolation.
The key question faced by current proponents of the WHA is thus
the following: can a discipline or a curriculum be constituted out of
pedagogical autarchy? Surely it will not do to simply deny the problem
by creating ersatz global unities as John Onians does in his Atlas of
World Art or David Summers in his Real Spaces: World Art History and
the Rise of Western Modernism (Summers 2003; Onians 2004). The one
constitutes holism by a level of generalization so breathtaking that all
difference is erased, and the other by creating out of whole cloth
categories of vision and experience
facture, diachronicity, proximity,
virtuality, and so forth
that are supposedly shared by everyone on
earth! A WHA therefore
both in the sense of a global community of
scholars engaged in common research, and of a shared body of works
of art or visual and material culture
remains a long way off. What has
led to this impasse?

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2. Original sin
The question leads me back to what I believe is the original sin of the
World History of Art: its nave embrace of anthropology, a consequence of demands by the e lites in globalizing, neo-liberal states to
construct a more diverse university education and public culture. Two
hoary concepts in particular have lured global art history into
anthropologys Procrustean bed. The first is the culture concept itself,
devised by E.B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture (1871). The second is
cultural relativism, described by Franz Boas in his The Mind of Primitive
Man (1911). The culture concept states that there exist singular sets of
mental attitudes and material practices
cultures
shared by the
majority of the members of a population inhabiting a given place or
time. Tylor wrote:
Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide, ethnographic sense, is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society. . ..On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely
pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform
action of uniform causes; while on the other hand, its various grades
may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the
outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping
the history of the future. (Tylor 1871, 1)

Tylors idea was largely derived from Darwin, whose cladistic method
defined a species both as a lineage that maintained morphological
integrity through space and time, and as a group of similar organisms
that may be superseded by others better adapted to a given
environment, or better designed for reproduction.
Boass principle of cultural relativism (a phrase he never actually
used), became fundamental to modern, ethnographic practice; it
proposed that the beliefs, activities and material creations of a
community must be understood and interpreted through the prism
of that communitys own culture. He further proposed, in opposition
to Tylors stadial or developmental model, that all peoples have an
equal capacity for achievement. In Primitive Art (Boas 1955), he wrote:
In one way or another esthetic pleasure is felt by all members of
mankind. No matter how diverse the ideals of beauty may be, the
general character of the enjoyment of beauty is of the same order
everywhere; the crude songs of the Siberians, the dance of the African
Negroes, the pantomime of the Californian Indians, the stone work of

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the New Zealanders, the carvings of the Melanesians, the sculpture of

the Alaskans appeal to them in a manner not different from that felt by
us when we hear a song, when we see an artistic dance, or when we
admire ornamental work, painting or sculpture. (Boas 1955, 9)

Boass ideas were derived in part from the writings of the Romantic
nationalists of the early nineteenth century, J.G. Herder and Alexander
von Humboldt, mid-century historicists such as John Ruskin, who saw
the material production of a culture as the precise index of its moral or
ethical character, and Wilhelm Dilthey, the early twentieth century
founder of hermeneutics who emphasized the historical embeddedness
of interpretation. Unlike most of his predecessors however, Boas
emphasized the communal bases of art and culture, rejecting the idea

still implicit in the 1920s
that race was the determining factor in
expressive development (Elliott 2002, 26). Indeed, unlike Tylor, Boas
had little interest in development or evolution, shifting anthropology
away from its diachronic bias to a new, synchronic foundation. For
Boas, the cultural past
unavailable to ethnography
was an unknown
country.
Cultural relativism is a concept that is now generally taken to be
normative as well as descriptive
that is, it proposes that individuals
and communities should as far as possible avoid ethnocentrism,
respect or at least tolerate each others cultures and embrace an
ethic of non-interference. Among anthropologists this latter principle
generally remains the Golden Rule, what the writers of the original Star
Trek series called the prime directive. Claude Le vi-Strauss was the
most renowned twentieth century exponent of the principle, and
perhaps Boas greatest follower. He saw himself as a natural scientist,
observing and evaluating societies from the outside, as a botanist
might botanical specimens. To accept the legitimacy and significance of
any one was to accept all (Le vi-Strauss 1983).
However politically progressive during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century heyday of scientific racism and ethnocentrism, and
whatever its current value for anthropology
much debated since the
1970s
the culture concept and its cousin, cultural relativism, are
positive obstacles for the creation of a new, cosmopolitan and critical
World History of Art.1 In the institutionalized setting of the American
classroom at least, representations of the diversity of world arts and
cultures are likely to foster the non-scholarly perspective of the tourist,
which of course, many students actually become during their junior
year abroad. Cultural relativism permits temporary disorientation

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arising from the experience of otherness, but because it asserts that

every culture is logical and complete within itself, disallows critical
discrimination. And if the relativist gaze suspends evaluation of others,
it must also halt evaluation and criticism of ones own culture and
history. The possibility of what Gadamer called a true fusion of
horizons is thus obviated by the delineation of boundaries between
cultures.
Indeed, by virtue of its very circumscribed character, a WHA
founded on the culture concept may foster parochialism rather than
cosmopolitanism. Culture as a common denominator, Adorno and
Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, already contains in
embryo that schematization and process of cataloguing which brings it
within the sphere of administration (Horkheimer and Adorno 1977,
131).2 And it was Walter Benjamin of course, a few years before, who
specified the dangers of cultural studies, cultural history and a reified
notion of culture as civilization: The products of art and science owe
their existence not merely to the efforts of the great geniuses that
created them, but also to the unnamed drudgery of their contemporaries. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism. No cultural history has yet done justice to this
fundamental state of affairs and it can hardly hope to do so (Benjamin
2005, 233). Seventy years after those words were written, with cultural
studies broadly defined still in academic ascendancy, and tourism the
worlds leading industry, the administrative and reified character of the
culture concept is all the more apparent. Cultural products previously
thought inalienable
national and indigenous modes of music and
performance, food production and consumption, systems of faith, and
gender identities
are rapidly incorporated into the commodityexchange structure of the dominant global powers. Relativism, the
anthropologist Stanley Diamond wrote, echoing Benjamin, is the bad
faith of the conqueror who has become secure enough to become a
tourist (Diamond 1972, 110).
Of course, the discourse of hybridity, a product of post-colonial
theory of the 1990s, was meant in large part to forbid the essentialism
and reification at the heart of cultural relativism, but in practice, it has
served mostly to encourage recovery of the distinctive features of
particular national cultures and traditions, and to establish categories
of metissage or mestizaje that are themselves circumscribed, schematized and administered. The alternative to cultural administration, I
would therefore argue, is critical discrimination, combined with a
recognition that judgments concerning the appropriate subjects and

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objects of the World History of Art are always contingent; they will
require constant re-adjustment and revision, and sometimes wholesale
reconstruction. If they ever seem secure, we will know that we are
back in the bad old days of ossified canons and ethnocentrism. Yet
without critical discrimination, a discipline and a curriculum
and
discourse itself
are impossible. And in order to discriminate, we must
have criteria.

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3. Three criteria a propaedeutic

The World History of Art, as I therefore envision it, would be a
discipline that takes the global world of things as its object of study
but, nevertheless, by virtue of its critical character, has sufficient
coherence that it constitutes a theory and sustains a profession
it
must allow for the establishment of criteria for judging professional
competence. In lieu of dependence upon the categories of art and
culture, the WHA I imagine would be reliant upon pragmatics, and its
object selected primarily by virtue of their salience. The following are
three possible criteria for the inclusion of objects in, or exclusion of
objects from a new, more cogent World History of Art.
(1) Historical salience: the salience of an object or performance, or a
class of objects at the time of its production. The determination
of historical salience is measured by the quantity of resources
expended (prodigious for example, in the case of Renaissance
tapestries, Baroque marble revetments, and Pacific Northwest
Coast potlatches); by ritual significance (for example, Byzantine
icons, shamanic ceremonies, Kula rings and kachina dolls); by
public approbation (as measured in attendance figures, number
of newspapers reviews, prices realized at sale or simply the
breadth of reproduction and distribution of an object or motif);
and by institutional or art-community impact (challenges to
academic rules and standards and influence on peers, think
Gericault, Manet, Seurat, and so forth).
(2) Contemporary salience: the salience of an object, or class of
objects at the time of its art historical reckoning. The rules for
determining contemporary salience are the same as those for
historical salience, except that they are adjudged not at the time
of original creation but later. An object or performance that was
once insignificant may in the course of time accrue meaning and
authority and become tremendously evocative or powerful.

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Examples include archaeological artifacts that were literally

refuse at the time of their deposition, but upon discovery
became crucial linchpins for understanding the past; commercial
ephemera
broadsheets, posters, trade cards and so forth; as
well as certain household items such as baskets, quilts, and
ceramics. They also include artworks
including those by
Vincent van Gogh
that were unknown when first made, but
were later considered as masterpieces. (More on him later.)
(3) Non-translatability: an objects relative opacity to interpretation,
and the non-translatability of an object into written or spoken
language, as well as the non-substitutability of objects. An
artifact or performance that may be substituted for any other
without loss of meaning has no special claim for attention by the
WHA, though the class of things to which it belongs may. This
criteria is the closest to those provided by classical aesthetics,
recalling Kants third moment in his Critique of Judgment, the
idea that things of beauty must manifest purposefulness without
purpose. (The writings of Clement Greenberg, including Avantgarde and kitsch and Towards a newer Laocoon are crude,
later iterations of this position.) According to my argument, an
artifact that can easily be translated into another medium, that
can be substituted for another, or that is instrumental (purposeful) alone
and which does not otherwise satisfy Criteria One
and Two
has no special claim on an art historians attention.
Put another way, there is no reason to summon art historians to
examine an x-ray
an image that is merely purposive
unless of
course they are experts on x-rays, in which case they should put
an MD after their names and demand a better salary.
If an object satisfies a single criterion, according to my scheme, it may
be included in a World History of Art; if it is satisfies two of the three
criteria, it should be included; and if it satisfies all three criteria, it must
be included (Figure 1). As you can see, the area of intersection of all
three ovals on the Venn diagram, which designates objects that must
be included in a plausible World History of Art, represents a fraction

about one sixteenth
of the total area (Figure 2). In actuality, as the
next diagram illustrates (Figure 3), the fraction of objects that must be
treated is likely much, much smaller than this. Moreover, the total
number of objects that may, should, or must be addressed by the
World History of Art is miniscule as compared to the total number of
objects ever made, as the next diagram suggests (Figure 4). However

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Figure 1. Three criteria for the inclusion of objects in, or exclusion, of objects
from a World History of Art.

as this diagram also reveals, the salience of an artifact is precisely

revealed by critical consideration of its relationship to the world of
different and similar objects. Let me offer an example.
4. Athletic shoes
These new Nike sneakers (Figure 5)
modeled by a young pedestrian in
Highland Park, Illinois
have little salience for the World History of Art.
They were cheaply manufactured and purchased, are unconnected to
ritual, unknown (until now) to anyone except their anonymous user,

Figure 2. The intersection of all three ovals designates objects that must be
included in a World History of Art.

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1. Historical
Salience

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2. Contemporary
Salience

3. Non-Translatability

Figure 3. Showing small number of objects that should or must be included in

a plausible World History of Art.

and neither overturned nor challenged traditions or conventions of

shoe design or anything else. They have not gained salience with age,
and may easily be substituted for another pair of sneakers by Nike, or
some other manufacturer. But a closer consideration of them will
begin to indicate the dimensions of a possible non-anthropological,
non-cultural, or pragmatic and critical approach to the World History
of Art.
The invention of athletic shoes, trainers, tennis shoes, sneakers and
all the rest in the late nineteenth century was dependent upon the
vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear and the development of

Figure 4. Figure exemplifying the very small number of objects those that
should, or must be addressed by the World History of Art, when taking into
account the total universe of objects.

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Figure 5. New Nike sneakers
modeled by a young pedestrian in Highland

Park, Illinois.

leisure time, especially the 8 hour day, gradually achieved in the US and
other industrialized nations beginning in the 1880s.3 Vulcanization
permitted the creation of a not-soft but-not-hard, and a not-sticky-butnot-slick outer sole that could be sewn or glued to a leather or canvas
upper in order to offer a springy step and a sure grip ideal for certain
sports and recreational activities, especially boating, basketball and
tennis. By the 1910s, companies producing rubber tyres were also
producing sneakers (so named, it is supposed, because of their quiet
footfalls), with early proprietary names including Converse and Keds.
After World War II, with the relaxation of school dress codes, the mass
marketing of spectator sports, and the growth of advertising and
celebrity endorsements, the market for sneakers expanded enormously, culminating in the creation of Blue Ribbon Sports (later Nike)
by Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman in 1964. Michael Jordans endorsements of Nike products, the swoosh logo, the slogan just do it, and a
number of shrewd corporate acquisitions and consolidations have
made Nike the leading sport shoe supplier in the world with revenues
of nearly $20 billion dollars a year.4

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Nike, Adidas, ASICS, Converse, New Balance, Reebok and many

other companies produce billions of sneakers every year, mostly in
China, but also in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Mexico in factories whose owners openly defy labor laws that
themselves offer scant protection against unsafe working conditions,
unpaid overtime, and poor hourly wages. (Nike itself produces no
shoes
it is a design, development and marketing company; nearly all
manufactures are by independent contractors.)5
These shoe manufacturers continue because they provide large
numbers of jobs and are a major source of wealth for national elites
who have promulgated policies of export-led growth, the economic
orthodoxy embraced for more than a generation by US dominated
international funding organizations such as the IMF and World Bank.
National governments have subjected their populations to a global
Ponzi scheme that rewards first investors in major technological
and industrial innovations (including consumer product design),
but leaves later ones forever scrambling to maintain profitability.
And since capitals in developing nations generally lack the political and
educational infrastructure necessary for major innovation, they are
perpetually left behind. Sneakers, the product of low-tech and laborintensive manufacture, are therefore veritably allegories or fetishes of
the ongoing crisis of underdevelopment.
And fetishes they clearly are. Male sexual fetishism, you will recall
from Freud, is the consequence of the castration anxiety that arises
from the trauma caused by a boys first sight of female genitals and
their supposed lack. For if a woman can be castrated then his own
penis is in danger; and against that there rebels part of his narcissism
which Nature has providentially attached to this particular organ
(Freud 1924
1950, 199). Erotic energy is thereafter displaced from
womens sexual organs to the appendage that is first exposed during
sexual display, namely the foot or the shoe. Even if you do not buy this
explanation (and few any longer do), Freuds account accurately
describes the simultaneous intimacy and authority of the sexual fetish.
The fetish he says remains a token of triumph over the threat of
castration and a safeguard against it (Freud 1924
1950, 200). The
athletic shoe and the Nike logo
in Greek Nixh, the personification of
victory
signifies the triumph of the phallus.
Fetishistic displacement is also, as Marx explained, fundamental to
the commodity form. In describing the phenomenon by which
commodities appear to live and breathe independent of their makers,
Marx had recourse to eighteenth and nineteenth century writing about

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S.F. Eisenman

the evolution of religion and the worship of idols, or fetishes.6 In a

society and economy based upon the commodity, he wrote, social
relations between people assume

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the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to

find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions
of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain
appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into
relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world
of commodities with the products of mens hands. This I call the
Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon as they
are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from
the production of commodities. (Marx 1906, 83)

Sneakers therefore, as expressions of sexual prowess, and as objects

whose social reality is hidden from view (they are made, after all, in
factories 10,000 miles from where they are primarily bought and used)
are fetishes squared.
By themselves as I have said however, the Nike shoes I have
illustrated are not suitable objects for consideration by a projected
World History of Art. I needed no actual shoes, or even images of
shoes to make any of the basic points I made about footwear, fetishes,
commodities and capitalism. No art history training was necessary. But
artifacts such as sneakers, while not themselves salient for art history,
may nevertheless provide important points of critical mediation,
allowing us to better understand objects and classes of things that
are salient for the WHA.
5. Conclusion: Van Goghs shoes
As is well known, Martin Heidegger designated a particular painting of
shoes by Van Gogh from 1886 (Figure 6) (Amsterdam, Vincent Van
Gogh Museum), the centerpiece of his essay The origin of the work of
art. Standing before the canvas in a 1930 exhibition in Basel, the
philosopher detected the unconcealdness of its being and its distance
from the quotidian, or as Benjamin would have written, its unique aura
(Heidegger 2000, 95). At the same time however, Heidegger claimed
the painting afforded him access to the very essence of the objects
depicted, a pair of shoes which he supposed, belonged to a peasant
woman, who trembled before the impending childbed and shivered at
the surrounding menace of death (Heidegger 2000, 87). The work of
art by extension for Heidegger was thus at its core a disclosure of truth

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Figure 6. Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes, 1886, Amsterdam, Vincent Van
Gogh Museum.

and therefore the potential foundation of a genuine national culture

rooted in the soil. Some 30 years later, the art historian Meyer Schapiro
challenged the philosophers identification of the shoes as those of a
peasant woman, and argued that in fact they were Van Goghs own.
According to Schapiro, the shoes expose the fatalities of social being,
that is, the contingent facts of a particular Dutch artists negotiation of
city and country (Schapiro 1994b, 142).7 The painting of shoes was, he
concludes, a memorable piece of his own life, a sacred relic. Finally in
The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida rejected both Heideggers
ascription of blood and soil, and Schapiros of urban cosmopolitanism
to Van Goghs picture (Derrida 1978). Instead, he maintained that the
work provides no evidence of fixed social identity, and no certainty
even that the shoes are a pair at all, and not two left, or two right
shoes. In this way Derrida, far more than Heidegger, was concerned
with the painting as a work of art for itself alone
auratic, abstract,
non-mimetic, and possessed of its own truth.

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There are of course many available interpretations of Van Goghs

several paintings of shoes. But in light of the earlier discussion of
sneakers, the following questions must be asked: are Van Goghs
pictures, at the very least, allegories of development? Do they also
mediate between individual and collective class identity? The answer
appears to be yes to both. Judging by his letters written prior to
painting these works, and by the landscapes he made in Paris in 1886
depicting the terrain vagues between city and country, Van Gogh was
highly conscious of his own passage back and forth between the two
zones, the process of modernization, and his alternating bourgeois and
peasant, or bourgeois and proletarian identities. Shoes were at the
time particularly powerful markers of social and class location, and Van
Gogh would have known all the major artistic milestones either directly
or through reproduction, including Gustave Courbets The
Stonebreakers (Figure 7) in which the old man at the right, born a
peasant but now a proletarian, still clings to his clogs, while the
younger laborer on the left, lacking the historical attachment to the
land, wears a workmans books. And he enormously admired J.F.
Millet, whose drawing of sabots, known to him from Alfred Sensiers
monograph, was the probable basis for his own painting of a pair of
clogs (1889, Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh Museum). And further

Figure 7. Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849, Common Access, Yorck

Project.

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examples abound, from Millets The Gleaners (1863, Paris, Orsay

Museum) to Jules Bretons Vintage at Chateau Lagrange (1864, Omaha,
Joslyn Art Museum). Van Goghs painting from 1886 was in fact
probably based upon an ambiguously classed Pair or Boots (1882)
painted by the Swedish artist, Nils Krueger (Figure 8). By depicting so
many kinds of shoes
mens and womens, new and old, clog and
hobnail, worker and bourgeois
and by endowing them each with a
particularly subtle and contingent physiognomy, Van Gogh was
engaging in the same kind of Naturalist project as Emile Zola, or later,
the photographer August Sander
a collective portrait of his time. He
was exploring the marks of class upon the body, and the traces of the
body upon ones shoes. He was also exposing his own fetishistic
attachment to things with which he had an intimate relationship

shoes, to which must be added sunflowers, rush-seated chairs, pipes,
books. These would all be the subject of multiple pictures by Van Gogh.
For Van Gogh however, unlike the modern shoe fetishist, the object
of his attention did not cast a blinding spell
he was able to
manipulate its forms and reflect upon its supposed powers. Subsequent artists explored some of the same territory
Joan Miro , Rene
Magritte, Philip Guston, Andy Warhol, and Kehinde Wily to name just a
few who later painted feet and shoes
but their life experiences and
historical location did not seem to afford them the same access to
what I am calling the drama of development. Their work may not
announce that delicate form of the empirical that identifies itself so

Figure 8. Nils Krueger, Boots, 1882, Stockholm, Prins Eugens Gallery.

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S.F. Eisenman

intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory. But it is

precisely the province of art historians engaged in the WHA

buttressed by critical attention to history, class and power
to
make that determination.
Finally, though I obviously embrace the idea of employing specified
criteria in selecting works and traditions that are to be addressed by a
new, World History of Art, I do not think
despite my brief focus on
Van Gogh
that we should simply affirm and ratify already existing
canons and standards. Neither, however, should we just embrace the
diversity of art and culture, and assert the equal worth of all. I have
argued here that cultural relativism derived from early twentieth
century anthropology is the original sin of the WHA because it denies
the possibility of critical discrimination, and therefore impedes real
discussion and debate between and among individuals and communities. Yet it must be admitted that another approach too is possible

a radical autarchy that simply accepts and affirms difference in subjects
and theories, and makes no essential claims about the cross-cultural
salience of any artifact. It would deem the WHA a chimera or
pipedream, or else deny the possibility of a WHA altogether.
Notes
1. Three notable milestones in the reconsideration of anthropological
relativism are: Stanley Diamond (1972); James Clifford (1988); and Bruno
Latour (1993).
2. In Eisenman (1999, 101).
3. The Haymarket Affair or Riot in 1886 in my home city of Chicago was the
consequence of a demonstration in support of the eight hour day.
4. Goldman and Papson (1998).
5. Workers at Chinese sneaker factories, for example, often work 80 hours
per week for approximately 40 cents per hour. That averages out to just
$128 per month, almost 50% below the approximately $175.00 per month
considered a Chinese living wage. Investigative journalists and filmmakers
have documented extensive use of child labor in sports shoe manufacturing worldwide, dangerous working conditions (isocyanates have been
found in footwear factories in Thailand), as well as gross, environmental
pollution.
6. Marxs first use of the term fetish occurred in 1842 in his essay in the
Rheinische Zeitung (Marx 1842). For an incisive account of the significance
of this essay in the development of Marxs thought see Peter Linebaugh
(1976). Marx found the term in a German translation of de Brosses Du
culte des dieux fetiches ou Paralle`le de lancienne religion de lEgypte avec la
religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760) in which the French aristocrat described
the manner that many ancient and certain modern peoples (especially

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297

those in West Africa) endowed worthless things
from a European

mercantilist perspective
with great value. On the history of the term
fetish, see Pietz (1987).
7. See also Schapiro (1994a, b).

Notes on Contributor

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Stephen F. Eisenman is the author of seven major books and exhibition

catalogues, including The temptation of Saint Redon (1992), Gauguins skirt
(1997), and The Abu Ghraib effect (2007). He is also the editor and principal
author of the textbook, Nineteenth century art: A critical history (1994; 3rd ed.
2007). Professor Eisenman has also curated many exhibitions in the United
States and Europe, including Impressionism
the ecological landscapes.

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