‘The quill is my plough’: Art History, Art Historians, and Labour

Art History was founded in 1978 as a forum for art historians who wished to treat ‘art according to a wider definition’. For John Onians, its founding editor, this meant attending ‘to areas more remote in place and time’, and to the ‘political, social and economic pressures’ that bore upon artistic production.1 Under the leadership of Onians and his immediate successors, the journal grew into ‘the engine of what came to be known as “the New Art History”’,2 a constellation of critical approaches fuelled by the conviction that the hard work of making art and art history really matters.3 For its partisans and practitioners, the concept of labour offered a powerful critical weapon with which to attack the mythos of artistic genius and the scholarly habitus of disinterested connoisseurship then in the mainstream of the discipline. By reconceptualising artistic creation as a form of labour, they reframed the work of the artist as a social and economic practice riven through by structures of power. Likewise, by repositioning art history as an ideological discourse, they rethought the work of the art historian as being the fabrication of representations of the past which might subtend or subvert ideologies in the present.