Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2012)
The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches’, in Benoît Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber and Gerhard Wolf, eds, Islamic Art and the Museum, London: Saqi, 2012. Reproduced by permission of the author and publishers
Abstract
The article examines the shift in the field, since the 1970s, from a predominant focus on the early period of Islamic art and architecture in the ‘central zone’ of the Fertile Crescent to a broader chronological and geographical scope. This shift has contributed, among other things, to a change of emphasis from artistic unity to variety, accompanied by an increasing diversification of concepts and approaches including dynastic, regional, media-based, textual, theoretical, critical, and historiographical inquiries. The article seeks to address the unresolved methodological tensions arising from the expanded scope of the field, along with concomitant anxieties over the fragmentation of its traditional ‘universalism’. It begins by outlining the premises of still prevalent approaches inherited from the construction of the field during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a field rooted in the entangled legacies of Orientalism, nationalism, and dilletantism. The article then reviews the statements of some scholars on the state and future of the field before turning to personal reflections on challenges posed by its expanding horizons and its relationship to the Museum.
