The word “classic” in the title of this special issue of Selva might seem to some a misnomer. Rather than consistently use any of the rich traditions of the concept from various sub-discplines of art history—say, Mesoamerican or Chinese—or address the contested self-identification of the academic field of “Classics” itself, I have thought about the operational role of this word in all the different art histories I have worked with. (I was for a few years responsible for creating and managing a non-Eurocentric introductory art history course with the help of colleagues and collaborators. My level of engagement in various ...

Aaron Gemmill and Dana Schutz

Ideology is the word that Marxists use to name divergences between cognition and reality that are more systematic than contingent error. The term has other meanings (most notably as a synonym for “worldview,” “set of beliefs,” or “political orientation”), but since it is the broadly Marxist or Marxian understanding of ideology that is at stake here, it seems right to linger with it and try to figure out how, or if, this concept might be relevant to the interpretation of artifacts such as paintings and sculptures. The possibility that cognition and reality may diverge implies that, potentially at least, they ...

This inaugural issue of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art is dedicated to the French artists’ group Supports/Surfaces and, more broadly, to theorizations of painting in the aftermath of the uprisings of May 1968. Supports/Surfaces only existed as a formal association from 1970 to 1972 (there were already scissions as early as 1971). Its impact on French art was out of proportion to its relatively short lifespan, however: the group lent a common name and, briefly, a common sense of purpose to a circle of about a dozen artists, most of them painters, in effect producing a shared horizon ...

This special issue of Selva is dedicated to examining “Reactionary Art Histories.” At a moment when global Far Right movements are once again turning to the history of Western art for their iconography, when avowed “respect” for both art and history provide rhetorical protection for the monuments of racial capitalism, when art museums in Poland are being purged of “neo-Marxism” and “gender ideology,” this collection aims to hold a disquieting mirror up to the discipline of art history, to reconsider its moments of complicity and outright collaboration. By no means a comprehensive survey of conservative art history nor strictly centered ...