Art historian Svetlana Alpers believes that “distance is an essential part in the viewer’s attention to art,” because temporal (historical) and physical (spatial) distances help us to see anew, and to realize “the curiosity and the strangeness of things.”
Alpers’s book Is Art History? is her tenth. It comes four decades after The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century established her credentials as a blue-chip art historian. Yet those who were around in the 1980s might remember her name from Hilton Kramer’s searing review of her subsequent monograph, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, which was so ferocious that the discussion of the review takes up the entire “critical responses” section of Alpers’s Wikipedia page. Appalled by what he perceived as the equal treatment given to the great Dutch master and the self-described “business artist” Andy Warhol, Kramer portrayed Alpers’s monograph as an embodiment of “the dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern” and “an emblematic event” that encapsulated everything wrong with art history as an academic field. In the critic’s view, Alpers was culpable for “the catastrophe that has overtaken not only the study of art history but much else that we prize in the life of the mind.”