From nations to networks : an analysis of North American world art historical discourse during the transcultural turn, and the rise of the museum as agent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation offers an analysis of the emergent English-language discourse of World Art History in North America during the transcultural turn in art history. It inquiries into what World Art History is by examining how the proposal for World Art History is impacting twenty-first century North American art historical theory and scholarship, and assesses the relevance of World Art Historical discourse for scholars of global contemporary art. With a targeted focus on the museum as a site leading in the development of World Art Historical research principles—including an original Canadian case study examining the National Gallery of Canada’s biennial exhibition series—it also assesses whether, and to what degree, a turn to World Art History effectively responds to the criticism of persistent Eurocentrism in the discipline. I argue that World Art History encompasses a series of moves that elasticize and often collapse the political borders, cultural boundaries, and racializations that have long bound together the European nation-state as the (artificial) construct upon which Western art history as a discipline—and the project of Western self-hood itself—is built. Further, I argue that in its challenge to the nation-state, World Art History questions not only the discipline’s ideological roots but also its signature methodologies and theoretical frameworks to reimagine the current Western-facing disciplinary frame in ways that re-orient and widen it according to a new global perspective. While many critics view these widening moves as creating an epistemological break with the discipline of art history and as presenting a serious and substantial threat, I argue that World Art History can be reconciled with the discipline. World Art History, currently a set of research principles corresponding with notions of networks of connection and exchange, signals a paradigm shift within the discipline of art history: by shifting parts of the discipline away from national histories and area studies towards modes that foreground connection and exchange, World Art History frames new types of inquiries around the historical reality of the interconnectedness of art and its history, and establishes the fundamental basis for evaluating research findings generated from these newly-mapped and now visible connections.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".