Books
Interpreting Art (UCL Press, 2022)
Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (Penn State University Press, 2019)
Journal articles
‘Post-Impressionism: Universal, British, Global’, Art History (2022)
‘Peer Review in Art History’, The Burlington Magazine 161 (August 2019): 621-5
The history and practice of peer review in the humanities has received little attention relative to the sciences. With art history as its main focus, this article gives historical background to peer review in the Anglo-American university system, followed by discussion of the state and consequences of peer review in the present.
‘The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory’, New Literary History 48 (Spring 2017): 223-44
Can 'aesthetics' now meet the accusations often levelled against it? This article examines three of the most common ways in which art and literary theorists have attacked aesthetics, along with counters to each of these. 1) that aesthetics is based around overly narrow conceptions of "art" and "the aesthetic" (or that aesthetics and formalism are synonymous). 2) that aesthetics is politically disengaged. 3) That aesthetics fails to engage with actual art objects and their histories.
‘Close Looking and Conviction’, Art History 40 (February 2017): 156-77
This article analyses the processes involved in description and ‘close looking’ in relation to works of art. Aspects discussed include the often-unspoken appeal to a limited form of artistic intention, the use of ‘context’, and the way that pictorial features are manipulated in the service of interpretation. Ultimately the article shows how great a role the writers’ overarching assumptions (such as about the history of modernism) are likely to play in apparently object-focused analysis, and as such why we should be suspicious of claims that artworks might ‘determine their own interpretation’. Artists discussed along the way include Albrecht Dürer, Luke Fildes, Henri Matisse, John Singleton Copley, and Jackson Pollock.
‘The Significance of Form’, nonsite.org 20 (January 2017): www.nonsite.org/feature/the-significance-of-form
Formalism in the visual arts won’t quite go away. Attacked by many as a solipsistic ‘aestheticist’ position, it is just as often countered that any true attention to the way that works of art ‘work’ is impossible without an appeal to form. This article examines both sides, attempting to explain why this divide has come about and to contribute to an explanation of what’s at stake in the latter (more positive) appeal to form. Literature on the historicist claims of formalism is discussed, with a unifying aspect of many formalisms found in form’s role - as the element in between producing artist and consuming viewer - in a very limited sense of communication. The article concludes with reflections on the practicalities and consequences of ‘form’ when taken to be the basis of the ability to recreate or recuperate the original functioning of the work.
‘“With an Almost Pathetic Fatality Doing What is Right”: Late Sickert and his Critics’, Art History 27 (February 2014): 126-47
This article is both a re-examination of Walter Sickert’s post-1910s work, and a study in artist versus critic (or word versus image) rivalries. The later work of Walter Sickert has often been a problem for critics and historians, with many writing off its oddities as a result of flippancy or even madness. The article uses Sickert’s lifelong dialogue with Roger Fry to show how Sickert’s work and actions in the 1920s and 1930s can be seen as deliberate and highly significant, defending his own vision of modern art through writing, prints, and portraiture in a way that in fact brought him unprecedented popular success. Fry’s rival account of artistic production nonetheless allowed the critic to cast Sickert as an artist ‘in spite of himself’ whose writing and claims about his own work should be ignored, a view adopted by subsequent historians who paid little or no attention Sickert’s own views and the success of his strategies.
‘The Visual Arts in the BBC’s ‘The Listener’, 1929-1939’, The Burlington Magazine 155 (September 2013): 606-11
As a high circulation publication with a well-preserved archive The BBC’s Listener magazine offers a rare opportunity to examine the details of publishing and taste in visual art in the interwar period. This article examines the surprising variety of writers and broadcasters involved with the BBC’s visual arts coverage, the views they held, and the attempts made to analyse and mould ‘popular’ taste that eventually led into the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Book chapters and other
‘Final Years and Echoes’ / , in Walter Sickert, exh. cat., Tate and Petit Palais (forthcoming)
‘Perception’ (with Bence Nanay), The Blackwell Companion to Arthur Danto, ed., Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Gilmore (Oxford: Blackwell, 2022)
Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles.
‘Being Ironic with Style’, in Figuring out Figurative Art: Contemporary Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings, ed., Damien Freeman and Derek Matravers (Routledge, 2015), pp. 73-85
‘Formalism in Art Criticism’, in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed., Michael Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2014), vol. II, pp. 213-6
Nine book reviews (2013-) in Apollo (1), Art History (2), The Burlington Magazine (2), and the Times Literary Supplement (4)
Edited collection
‘Postwar American Art between Provincialism and Transnationalism’ (edited with Alistair Rider), Tate Papers 32 (Autumn 2019)
Interpreting Art (UCL Press, 2022)
Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (Penn State University Press, 2019)
Journal articles
‘Post-Impressionism: Universal, British, Global’, Art History (2022)
‘Peer Review in Art History’, The Burlington Magazine 161 (August 2019): 621-5
The history and practice of peer review in the humanities has received little attention relative to the sciences. With art history as its main focus, this article gives historical background to peer review in the Anglo-American university system, followed by discussion of the state and consequences of peer review in the present.
‘The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory’, New Literary History 48 (Spring 2017): 223-44
Can 'aesthetics' now meet the accusations often levelled against it? This article examines three of the most common ways in which art and literary theorists have attacked aesthetics, along with counters to each of these. 1) that aesthetics is based around overly narrow conceptions of "art" and "the aesthetic" (or that aesthetics and formalism are synonymous). 2) that aesthetics is politically disengaged. 3) That aesthetics fails to engage with actual art objects and their histories.
‘Close Looking and Conviction’, Art History 40 (February 2017): 156-77
This article analyses the processes involved in description and ‘close looking’ in relation to works of art. Aspects discussed include the often-unspoken appeal to a limited form of artistic intention, the use of ‘context’, and the way that pictorial features are manipulated in the service of interpretation. Ultimately the article shows how great a role the writers’ overarching assumptions (such as about the history of modernism) are likely to play in apparently object-focused analysis, and as such why we should be suspicious of claims that artworks might ‘determine their own interpretation’. Artists discussed along the way include Albrecht Dürer, Luke Fildes, Henri Matisse, John Singleton Copley, and Jackson Pollock.
‘The Significance of Form’, nonsite.org 20 (January 2017): www.nonsite.org/feature/the-significance-of-form
Formalism in the visual arts won’t quite go away. Attacked by many as a solipsistic ‘aestheticist’ position, it is just as often countered that any true attention to the way that works of art ‘work’ is impossible without an appeal to form. This article examines both sides, attempting to explain why this divide has come about and to contribute to an explanation of what’s at stake in the latter (more positive) appeal to form. Literature on the historicist claims of formalism is discussed, with a unifying aspect of many formalisms found in form’s role - as the element in between producing artist and consuming viewer - in a very limited sense of communication. The article concludes with reflections on the practicalities and consequences of ‘form’ when taken to be the basis of the ability to recreate or recuperate the original functioning of the work.
‘“With an Almost Pathetic Fatality Doing What is Right”: Late Sickert and his Critics’, Art History 27 (February 2014): 126-47
This article is both a re-examination of Walter Sickert’s post-1910s work, and a study in artist versus critic (or word versus image) rivalries. The later work of Walter Sickert has often been a problem for critics and historians, with many writing off its oddities as a result of flippancy or even madness. The article uses Sickert’s lifelong dialogue with Roger Fry to show how Sickert’s work and actions in the 1920s and 1930s can be seen as deliberate and highly significant, defending his own vision of modern art through writing, prints, and portraiture in a way that in fact brought him unprecedented popular success. Fry’s rival account of artistic production nonetheless allowed the critic to cast Sickert as an artist ‘in spite of himself’ whose writing and claims about his own work should be ignored, a view adopted by subsequent historians who paid little or no attention Sickert’s own views and the success of his strategies.
‘The Visual Arts in the BBC’s ‘The Listener’, 1929-1939’, The Burlington Magazine 155 (September 2013): 606-11
As a high circulation publication with a well-preserved archive The BBC’s Listener magazine offers a rare opportunity to examine the details of publishing and taste in visual art in the interwar period. This article examines the surprising variety of writers and broadcasters involved with the BBC’s visual arts coverage, the views they held, and the attempts made to analyse and mould ‘popular’ taste that eventually led into the formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Book chapters and other
‘Final Years and Echoes’ / , in Walter Sickert, exh. cat., Tate and Petit Palais (forthcoming)
‘Perception’ (with Bence Nanay), The Blackwell Companion to Arthur Danto, ed., Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Gilmore (Oxford: Blackwell, 2022)
Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles.
‘Being Ironic with Style’, in Figuring out Figurative Art: Contemporary Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings, ed., Damien Freeman and Derek Matravers (Routledge, 2015), pp. 73-85
‘Formalism in Art Criticism’, in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed., Michael Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2014), vol. II, pp. 213-6
Nine book reviews (2013-) in Apollo (1), Art History (2), The Burlington Magazine (2), and the Times Literary Supplement (4)
Edited collection
‘Postwar American Art between Provincialism and Transnationalism’ (edited with Alistair Rider), Tate Papers 32 (Autumn 2019)