ArtHistoryGate

It
is a bipartisan moment to be cherished. Rick Santorum called the
President a snob for wanting everyone in
America to go to college, and now Obama has come around to Santorum’s side. As
the President said to a General
Electric plant in Wisconsin this year: “I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with
skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art
history degree. You can make a really good living and
have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as
you get the skills and the training that you need.”

And
yet, Obama’s perfectly warranted comment—now supplemented with a reassertion
disguised as an
apology
letter
—has sent my discipline into a flurry of self-justification, some of
which is far more threatening to art history than any politician’s offhand
remarks. The career path we art historians have chosen is not
chiefly “practical,” and attempting to
justify it as a potentially money-making venture is misleading, comparable to
advising someone
to pursue an accounting degree as
preparation for theoretical mathematics. To be sure, the complexity of modern economies ensures that
art
history majors have a place in it
, those who suggest that arts majors doom themselves
to joblessness need to
review the census data, and stereotypically sure
bets are now
anything but sure. Still, the more my
discipline defends itself on the grounds of presumed financial payoff, the more
pathetic it appears.

It has taken three centuries or so, but art history has
earned its place among the liberal arts. Aristotle defined ‘liberal’ as “that
which tends to enjoyment . . . where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the
using.” Such
an impractical pleasure is what the discipline of art history has to give. The
discipline may indirectly teach the kind of critical thinking that will
facilitate a heavy-hitting career in finance, but there are far more immediate
avenues of developing such powers of discernment than reveling in how Chardin rendered
turnips. (For the record, he did so ineffably.)

What is more, art historians used to teach, and some still
do, that aboriginal beauty, not the contest for power, constitutes reality at
its most basic level, and such knowledge might genuinely hinder professional
progress in a variety of “practical” fields. If cash value is the measure of
art history, one might as well replace the Edward Hoppers just
mounted
in the President’s office
with their price tags.

In his inaugural lecture at the Cambridge School of Art, John
Ruskin put it this way: “There’s no way of getting good Art, I repeat,
but one, at once the most difficult and the most simple—namely, to enjoy it.” Barack Obama seems to have
learned this lesson even while some art historians scrambling for
self-justification, and seduced by the academic culture of unalloyed critique,
have not: “Art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school,”
he wrote in that hand-written follow up, “and it has helped me take in a great
deal of joy in my life that I might otherwise have missed.”

It
is perfectly true, furthermore, that—in the
President’s words—“you can make a really good living and have a great career
without getting a four-year college education.” I recently learned that a cousin of mine, as a unionized operator of a construction machine, easily exceeds my salary. But were he to win the
lottery, he would—by his own admission—never see that machine again. Were I to
win it, I would pursue art history without interruption. The ability to operate
a machine is what John
Henry Newman called “Useful Knowledge . . . the possession of truth as
powerful.” But “Liberal Knowledge,” which is arguably most perfectly realized
in the history of art, “is the apprehension of it as beautiful.”

Faced with the cultural splendor of pre-Revolutionary France,
a different President—John Adams—prophesied American art history majors to
come:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study
Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and
Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation,
Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study
Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

To major in art history is therefore the destiny of a mature nation—a
rare and precious possibility literally dependent upon generations of costly sacrifice. To observe how the diffused light of historical events and
intellectual forces is refracted by the magnifying glass of art history into the
intensified beams of distinct works of art, is of itself useless, and its
impracticality is its very splendor. But
such liberal pursuits are also, according to Cicero, a condition
of our happiness, and a refusal to cultivate such skills invites the
revenge of hideous places. Obama and Santorum, consequently, are right to tell
machine operators that they need not pursue an art history degree. They can
pursue a perfectly honorable career in machinery, so that their children can
major in the history of art.

And that art history major, if she knows what’s good for
her, will visit home and take her retired union father to
what’s
left of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and help him to see with ancient eyes.

Matthew J. Milliner is
Assistant Professor of art history at Wheaton College. 

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