Periodization of the Arts - What Is A Period?, Periodization And Globalization: Mesoamerica As A Case Study, Feminism And Periodization
periods visual intellectual centuries
Notions of boundaries, categories, and periods frame discussions of art and visual culture. The desire to organize visual information and material into clearly defined, manageable units has provided an irresistible impetus for periodization since the emergence of art historical and critical studies in the Renaissance. The application of periods to art and visual culture was extended in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when philosophers, historians, and critics of the arts searched for objective ways to explore their world. Their search for objectivity resulted in their conceptualization of periods as a metalanguage rooted in empiricism through which to communicate ideas. Centuries of scholarship have produced a multiplicity of periods underscoring diverse perspectives and serving diverse ends. For some observers, the study of periodization is an exercise in disillusionment. The absence of any single, consistent system of periodization is construed as a symptom of the failure of the intellectual disciplines surrounding the arts. For other observers, the study of periodization is an affirmative endeavor. The existence of alternative schemas for periodization indicates that intellectual discourse about the arts is open to debate, reconsideration, reorganization, and reinterpretation.
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Art historians and aesthetic philosophers employ a number of ways to group world arts into systems of classification, known as periods. Periodization subdivides the continuous flow of artworks through time and space into groupings. Period groupings are defined by the perception that the artworks within them share a single quality or a set of qualities that are significant. Significant qualities ca…
It was not until the nineteenth century that scholars took an interest in analyzing the aesthetic qualities of the arts of the ancient Americas. An early system of periodization was designed by Wendell Bennett and Junius Bird to classify the great variety of artifacts from the central Andean region of South America. Bennett and Bird consciously addressed theoretical issues involved with the creati…
Voiced principally by women, radically new questions about artists and artistic canons emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminist artists and writers, particularly Linda Nochlin (b. 1931), vigorously probed the history of art in order to understand why female artists were not celebrated in Western history and in contemporary culture. Deep within the internal structures of the discipli…
No single system of periodization has emerged. Some observers regard the existence of multiple systems based on varying criteria as a symptom of the arbitrariness and illogicality of
period schemes, while others interpret the same multiplicity as a positive result of the study of history. In this view, each periodization offers a possible strategy for the study of art, which encompasses widely di…
Ackerman, James S. "Style." In Problems in Aesthetics: An Introductory Book of Readings, edited by Morris Weitz, 308–324. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Bennett, Wendell C., and Junius B. Bird. Andean Culture History. New York: Natural History Press, 1964. Buszek, Maria Elena. "Waving not Drowning: Thinking about Third-Wave Feminism in the U.S." Make: The Mag…
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