EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Me! Me! Me! and the Identity Museum

“Me! Me! Me! That is the cry, now often heard, as history is retold. Tell my story, in my way!” That’s how The New York Times begins an account of a new phenomenon, the “identity museum”.¹ An “identity museum”, according to Edward Rothstein, is one in which the subject is told from a differing viewpoint than that of the traditional Establishment and, in so doing, distorts the truth. He uses as his examples a recent exhibition on Islamic science in New York and a show on slavery in Philadelphia, both of which he says bend history and exaggerate to make their claims. All this, he implies, is in contrast to the traditional museums that are the gold standard by which all else is judged. Hedging his bets, of course, he criticizes the grand institutions for reflecting “the power and grandeur of their creators” but that is all. He completely fails to note that the conventional account of art history – as revealed on this website - is rotten to the core, controlled by art historians who believe (or rather, “know”) that art is an early form of photography!

Nor am I alone in pointing this out. Heinrich Wolfflin said so decades ago in his classic book The Principles of Art History. He dismissed the idea that artists were interested in the same issues as art historians and was particularly critical of the tendency to find differences between one artist and another when it is the similarities that matter:

‘Artists are certainly not interested in historical questions of style........art historians who, on the other hand, take the differences between the finished products as their point of departure have always been exposed to the scorn of artists: they have taken the detail for the essence. They cling to the non-artistic side in man in wishing to understand art as expression only. We can very well analyse the temperament of an artist and still not explain how the work came into being, and the differences between Raphael and Rembrandt is merely an evasion of the main problem, because the important point is not to show the difference between the two but how both, in different ways, produced the same thing - namely, great art'.²

The great museums of the world, run by academic art historians, are so mistaken and so wrong that they make the little exhibitions Edward Rothstein picks on seem saintly in comparison.

1. Edward Rothstein, "To Each His Own Museum, As Identity Goes On Display", New York Times, December 29th 2010, (publ. online: [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/arts/design/29identity.html?ref=arts]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/arts/design/29identity.html?ref=arts[/url])  

2. Heinrich Wollflin, Principles of Art History (Dover) 1950, p. 11