The Scenographing Art Historian

10.09.2018

Day 25. "What Sweden needs? More art historians." This was stated in the daily paper Dagens industri August 10, 2018. Source: https://www.di.se/ledare/arvid-ahlund-vad-sverige-behover-fler-konstvetare/. Of, course, this felt wonderful. Instead of the constant nagging about humanities education being useless, in particular if you want a real job, here it was stated that for example art historians are needed. Why? In short: thay can handle complexity, ambiguity, mess and fuss in time and space. I am thinking about adding this argumentation to the Introduction to Scenography and Art History that I am currently working on. One way of thinking about art historians capable of handling complexity, ambiguity, mobilisation of multimodal resources, affective athmospheres and so for is that they need the concept of scenography, and they need to think scenographically. Here the creature comes: the scenographing art historian. 

Photo credit: Astrid von Rosen
Photo credit: Astrid von Rosen