Widely used art history textbooks such as Gardner’s Art through the Ages present a distorted narrative of visual art from the early twentieth century on. They focus on countless modernist and postmodernist inventions—from “abstract art” to “conceptual art” and “performance art”—at the expense of traditionally representational painting and sculpture. The result is an utterly incoherent view of this culturally significant mode of expression.
For a detailed account of major errors and omissions involved in that false narrative—which dominates thought about art in education and the culture at large—see my article “Art History Gone Amuck,” published in the Fall 2020 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.
