Art history

Okay

... is AP Art History.

Oh, I didn't even know-

Yeah

...

there was an AP Art History.

There is, and it was offered at our school, and I did not take it because junior high school Ruchi was like, "Math and science are the only things worth studying in this world," and-

Yep.

I enjoy what you say on your website about them being stylistically.

You say, stylistically, the sculptures loop fluidly across art history, blending decorative arts and high modernism.

And you can really feel that looking at the work, and I really enjoy that.

Maybe you could speak to that.

I'm still not sure where it lands on this show.

Is it like not rigorous enough? Did I go too far? But it was fun to open myself to kind of art historical reference.

I also studied art history.

So this is also like, you know, it's always been part of how I approach art is through an art historical lens.

So, uh, this was, uh, something that it was very interesting and also very surprising in a way for me.

Uh, so when I started to research the lantern, uh, I was hoping to find or I was expecting maybe to find a lot of art history, a lot of, uh, uh, more, um, uh, fancy, uh, uh, concert halls or, uh...

But there was a lot of, uh, uh, a lot of lantern lectures were actually happening in these rural, uh, pubs.

So, um, so, uh, Anne C. Cordes, uh, writes, uh, the botanist, uh, botanist, uh, the, in the, in the, um, the, the wonderful, uh, article.

But if you have a room full of 100 or so students, not everybody can pass by the microscope and have a look at it.

And here you could project it to everyone at the same time.

Uh, and the same goes for, uh, art history, for instance.

If you circulate an illustration, um, then, uh, the last person will get it when you are already at a complete and different point.

I'm Mike Montilla, and today we're talking with Glenn Pears about strange and familiar histories of Byzantine art, interpretation, risk, and empathy.

Glenn Pears has been a leading scholar in Byzantine or East Roman art history since his first book on representing angels, these kind of invisible things that show up everywhere in Christian art.

His second book, Sacred Shock, taught a lot of us how the frame or the place of art shapes the kind of encounters and meanings and experiences that evil people had with art.

He's had fellowships at places like Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

The real history that we want to know is made up of an infinite number of little realities.

And so when scholars ask, you know, is Byzantium a colonialist or an imperialist or a racist discipline? They're not really just asking, like, are we doing something immoral here? They're asking about the kind of, I don't know, contraction devices.

They're asking how has colonialism or imperialism or racism or sexism or whatever-ism, how have those kind of ideologies limited how we think about the past? And the question for the historian now isn't really like, can we know the past or not? The question is, how do we study the past when we know that the past is always overflowing, when it's always more that we can take in, when we know that we're going to need some kind of a frame? The question is, what kind of frames will help us recognize that strangeness and some of the similarities and the sufferings and the anxieties and the experiences of the past? What bridges, as Peirce puts it, can connect my Byzantine obsessions with my overdetermined self? And so this book, as Peirce writes, it lowers the tone of art history.

It almost kind of lets readers into the writing rooms where those doubts and those almost unconscious connections live large.

I'm Mike Montilla, and today we're talking with Glenn Pierce about strange and familiar histories of Byzantine art, interpretation, risk, and empathy.

Glenn Pierce has been a leading scholar in Byzantine or East Roman art history since his first book on representing angels, these kind of invisible things that show up everywhere in Christian art.

His second book, Sacred Shock, taught a lot of us how the frame or the place of art shapes the kind of encounters and meanings and experiences that evil people had with art.

He's had fellowships at places like Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

The real history that we want to know is made up of an infinite number of little realities.

And so when scholars ask, you know, is Byzantium a colonialist or an imperialist or a racist discipline? They're not really just asking, like, are we doing something immoral here? They're asking about the kind of, I don't know, contraction devices.

They're asking, how has colonialism or imperialism or racism or sexism or whatever-ism, how have those kind of ideologies limited how we think about the past? And the question for the historian now isn't really like, can we know the past or not? The question is, how do we study the past when we know that the past is always overflowing, when it's always more that we can take in, when we know that we're going to need some kind of a frame? The question is, what kind of frames will help us recognize that strangeness and some of the similarities and the sufferings and the anxieties and the experiences of the past? What bridges, as Piers puts it, can connect my Byzantine obsessions with my overdetermined self? And so this book, as Piers writes, it lowers the tone of art history.

It almost kind of lets readers into the writing rooms where those doubts and those almost unconscious connections live large.