Can there be an ‘Art History’ in the South?

Abstract

The rise of media art has largely been inclined to media rather than art, in its academic, often elitist too, terms. The mode of production as well as consumption of the contemporary media art penetrated into the long-established stature of what can arguably named as ‘high art’. Eventually it opened up the avenues of alternative and subversive expressions in the artistic genre – a fact that is widely accepted in the global scholarship. This paper, conceptually, questions the assumptions about the relatively newly-perceived media art. Positing in Southern situations, the queries are: if there is any significant meaning of ‘history of art’ as such; and then if there is an upcoming end of the ‘history of art’ in classical terms, what it supposedly mean to the struggle for, and claiming of, an independent history [of art] in the South? The paper, where relevant, would refer to the colonial history and processes in engineering modern art and, thus, reducing the local art into a dismal mimicry of its engineers’ one. Not a history-writing attempt, this paper would instead tend to problematize the challenge of approaching art history in a Southern condition – hence Bangladesh.