Craig is professor emeritus of the History of Art, here at Oxford.
And amongst his other important legacies, he's left us with a post teaching the History of Chinese Art here at Oxford,
which is a very important development in our department's history and profile.
So Craig, let me start by asking you what might be the obvious question.
How did a nice boy from Aberdeen get interested in art and its histories?
Well. I mean, there was art around when I was growing up, so Aberdeen in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties,
I left Aberdeen the year they struck oil, which kind of changed the city quite considerably.
But, you know, there was a distinguished kind of standard British provincial art gallery with kind of loads of interesting stuff in it.
And my parents were the kind of people who believe that, you know, introducing children to an art gallery was something that you ought to do.
And, you know, there are reproductions on the walls. I was at the Wallace collection last week to see the Franz Hals exhibition of, you know,
my grandmother had the Laughing Cavalier on the staircase, a big reproduction,
the laughing cavalier on the staircase in the nineteen sixties, which is not something that people would do now.
But that would that would have been a fairly kind of standard, standard way of carrying on.
And I mean, I suspect you've asked that question because you've read something that I sent you which says that
I'm fed up of people asking me why I got interested in China and nobody ever asks me what I mean.
But it's true. You know, people always ask me why I get interested, why did I get interested in China?
They don't ask me why I get interested in art, because I guess they think that's the sort of that's a kind of no brainer.
That's an obvious one. Why wouldn't you? But it is a perfectly legitimate question.
But I do think it has to do with the availability of art in a provincial city where, you know, the art gallery is something that you go to.
So I don't remember the first time I went into an art gallery because it must have been when I was like,
really quite little and quite frequently it just seemed to sort of a natural thing to do or a natural place to go,
either with parents when I was very little or kind of by myself when I was when I was a teenager.
And then there's the impact of things that happened at a certain age.
So I was exactly the right age to be kind of bowled over by the Kenneth Clark Civilisation series in
the late 1960s when David Attenborough needed something in colour to make people buy colour sets
when BBC two was new. So you get the kind of block civilisation series Hardaway's and then you get John Berger
Ways of Seeing immediately after it on the television
and I thought civilisation was kind of great, although actually even then this is something that I'm sure I'm right about,
but it suggests what a weird kid I might of been.
I can remember the very first episode in which Kenneth Clarke says, well,
basically there are things called civilisations in other parts of the world, but we're not going to talk about them because they don't count.
We're just going to talk about Europe. And I thought kind of - even as I must have had about 13 or something - thinking, hang on, that can't be right.
And then Berger comes along and looks kind of hip.
He's got the loon pants. And he's doing all this stuff about gender and how this picture shows that it's the ruling class and so on.
And and by that time, I'm, I don't know, 15 or whatever.
And this seems hot and exciting and stirring it up.
and I'm struck by the way that still, even in my last round of admissions interviews,
students wanting to study history of art would say that they've read Berger's Ways of with Seeing and thought it was exciting.
And I'm thinking this was on the television when I was younger than you, you know.
So I think those things, which are things that you have no control over,
stuff that's in your environment, I think that has to be a part of the story.
GB: Still, there is a bit of a jump from seeing provincial art in Aberdeen to deciding to study
the Chinese language and then ultimately becoming an expert in the History of China.
GB: So how did that jump actually occur? CC: So, yes, it's true that by my mid teens I had decided I wanted to learn Chinese.
There are numerous explanations for this, depending on whether it's at a dinner party
or I'm giving sort of official versions of this.
I mean, all of them are masks. All of them are, if you like, screen memory is designed to.
Well, I mean, the whole notion of a screen memory is that it's something that you don't want to think about or can't remember.
So I can't remember and I can't think about it.
But, you know, education heavy and long ago and far away, very good at history, good at languages, at school, dead languages, Latin, classical, Greek.
I mean, the way I've often thought about it is that in your teens,
when you're sort of interested in a whole range of things, for me the roulette wheel was spinning and the ball stopped at China,
but it might have stopped at something else that was long ago and far away, you know,
Arabic or the Byzantine world or something that was long ago and far away.
GB: So I wonder, I mean, when did Nixon go to China and was that kind of a little opening up?
CC: That is something that definitely wouldn't be part of it.
And I mean, I suppose in a way, the really curious thing about it is that I was really interested in China at a point when
you know, if we take the official date of the Cultural Revolution as being sixty six to seventy six,
the years when I'm really getting interested are the last four years of the nineteen sixties.
Now there's also the question about May sixty eight,
which I'm old enough to watch on television and see it happening, but far too young to take part in any way.
I'm in Aberdeen, not Paris. And so the Cultural Revolution is something that one is kind of aware of.
And I mean I'm not I'm not doing I was a teenage Maoist because, again, I wasn't formally involved then.
But my family background and my own dispositions predisposed me to find this kind of
interesting and exciting and so, you know I think like anything,
it's overdetermined and there are multiple reasons why I got interested in it,
because it certainly was if you could square the circle between long ago and far away and the Cultural Revolution.
And, of course,
that's a ridiculous squaring because the Cultural Revolution is all about saying that long ago is is rubbish and needs to be junked and the
whole lot should be should be smashed into smithereens with all the human fallout and misery and suffering that that entails.
But, you know, when you're 16, it's possible to be interested in completely incompatible things.
And I suppose those are two completely incompatible things that I was interested in when I was 16.
GB: So after you did study the Chinese language, you got a position of the V & A in fact you were there for 15 years,
CC: I think I didn't intend to be an artist historian
There was a bit of art history in our second year, undergraduate year studying Chinese language,
and it was a lecture series given by a man who had been a very distinguished
archaeologist of China in a particular vein and a particular kind of philosophy.
And I have this memory of lectures which consisted of innumerable numbers black and white slides, compare and contrast.
And I kind of came away from that with the sense that I wasn't interested in that.
That seemed to be completely uninteresting.
I was interested in Chinese literature and my doctoral work that I began immediately after I was an undergraduate because I'm
so old that you didn't have to do you didn't have to have a master's degree in those days.
You could move straight from an undergraduate degree to start again.
So I started a PhD. in nineteen seventy seven, which was on Chinese literature or other Chinese and Mongolian literature by 19th century fiction,
essentially the Mongolian 19th century romantic novel.
And the first grown up job that I ever applied for was a job teaching Chinese literature at Macquarie University in New South Wales,
which I didn't get and I didn't even get shortlisted for.
But had they offered me that job, I'd have taken it.
I would have gone to New South Wales and been a teacher of Chinese literature and felt like my life had worked out really well in the way I wanted.
So it's just that there are so few jobs, you know, there were so few opportunities that would pay you to be interested in China.
And I was two thirds of the way through this literature PhD when a sort of entry level
like officer. That kind of job that doesn't exist anymore it's a kind of entry level
but permanent curatorial, kind of officer could get a job at the V&A came up and I was fortunate enough to get that job in nineteen seventy nine.
And then part of my pitch for that job was that I had specialised in the
kinds of premodern Chinese literature that were crammed with descriptions of things material culture,
chairs, tables, clothes, what people wore for the what the rooms looked like.
A part of my pitch was that this knowledge of mine would be a valuable skill.
I did have a little museum experience because I had worked during my university vacations
as an unpaid intern in the Asian Department of what are now the National Museums of Scotland.
The National Museum of Scotland used to be called Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh.
I worked for them unpaid and then I got a little bit of paid work translating
inscriptions on objects because they didn't have anybody who read Chinese.
So that was the crucial. I had just enough experience to make me look like a plausible candidate, I guess, for this entry level job.
And that's how I was fortunate enough to to enter the V&A
One of the most valuable parts of that was that I could finish the doctorate.
It took me a very long time of getting up early in the morning because I was then working full time.
And it's a museum job. So it's like nine to five or six or you have to be in the office all day in those days.
But it meant that I had a secure job at the age of twenty five,
which I'm conscious it feels insulting to people nowadays, to young people nowadays,
to say this was what happened to me because it's so removed from what anybody
can expect from the regimes of employment that they have to deal with.
But I had the good fortune then and it meant that I've never published my doctoral thesis.
It's sitting on the shelves of SOAS, not doing anybody any harm.
I didn't need to parlay that into tenure or the next post or the next kind of step.
So it meant that I could kind of, not take it easy, but I could certainly, you know, there was a lot of slow learning
that went on In the beginning,
I felt I could take my time to learn certain skills and certain forms and technologies that I hadn't apart from formal education,
I could learn on the job with the with the collection around me.
GB: So I was wondering, Craig, whether this sort of dynamic between an immersion in literature,
Chinese literature and now a 15 year immersion in Chinese objects,
that is that is a relatively unusual way forward throughout art history.
But I wonder whether that exposure to objects and the sort of necessity as a
museum employee to be constantly writing about objects in their collections,
whether that you think has informed the kind of art history that you have gone on to do.
CC: Again, you know, I've often been asked that and it must do,
but not necessarily in ways that I can point to the kind of affiliations between
that experience and what's come out the other end once I seriously started writing.
But I do like to correct people when they say, you know, his first book was because they often name a book that was actually my
third book, because I'd written books in the V&A that were very closely focussed on things in the collection, and I had done that sort of,
you know, well, connoisseurship, that sort of is it is it mid 15th century or late 15th century?
I still remember one of the thrills of my career is the first time I held a volume of Chinese paintings up to the up to the light,
or I put them on a light box and I saw the watermark which showed that they were on a particular kind of very sturdy paper,
which was manufactured by a paper mill in England in the late 18th century for the East India
Company that was supposed to stand up to the rigours of the of the climate of Asia.
It was for writing ledgers and so on. But some of this paper had found its way into a painting workshop and it was this
Chinese artist using it so I could still remember, you know how fantastically exciting this was.
So I certainly did that. I think. I think also
I mean, even if we compare the fields of Chinese literature and Chinese art,
Chinese literature is definitely a field where there began to be through the proximity of people who taught Chinese
literature to people who taught other kinds of literature that began to be some kind of theoretical interests,
some kind of bleeding in of literary theory into that literature, literature that I was reading at a time when the literature on Chinese art
had a somewhat kind of narrower range of interests, just wasn't wasn't doing that sort of stuff.
So, again,
I think probably trying to square the circle between an interest in this watermark and then reading Said when it first came out or
reading stuff about Chinese fiction because it was Chinese fiction, premordern fiction that was my interest in literature.
It was trying to square that that must have fed into the set of ideas, the set of things that you think I'm most interested in.
GB: I was going to ask you about that because, not your first book, but perhaps the first academic
book was sort of about the discourse about things rather than about things themselves.
And I did wonder whether you like me, you're a bit of a product of the postmodern moment, I mean you mentioned Said
but I know you've mentioned other people in other interviews, for example Jim Clifford.
So I wonder whether this emphasis in your earliest academic work on the power of discourse and the importance
of looking at discursive formations did come out of this sort of postmodern moment of the 70s and early 80s?
CC: Sure. I think it must have. I mean, you know.
In real life people don't read things in the right order.
So I read Orientalism the minute it was published.
Because it was a big deal, you know, it was in the SOAS library and it was on the new bookshelf.
And I thought, well, this looks kind of interesting. And I kind of picked it up and I didn't understand large chunks of it.
And I was bored by bits of it, but there were bits of it that just kind of bothered me.
And I thought, this is kind of amazing. Now, at that point, I may have heard of, but I'd certainly never read Foucault.
And so I had no idea when I read Said that Said is kind of riffing on Foucault to a large extent.
But I then, you know, I was reading while I was working in the museum, the work kind of unsatisfied,
I mean, I think it's partly because my formal education was so devoid of any kind of theoretical perception.
I mean, I was at Cambridge at a time when people in literature, in French literature and English literature, you know,
friends of mine, people I knew are experiencing - in the 1970s - are experiencing the first impact of a kind of theory wave.
But there's like zero evidence of that in my education,
which was entirely about technical skills and linguistic competencies and abilities
to understand certain things about variant readings or all of that kind of stuff.
I was like zero. So in a way, I did slightly feel kind of starved of ideas while I was an undergraduate.
and I could remember one teacher saying, you ought to read this and handing me Braudel 'Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world'
The second blew my mind. I thought oh, this is fantastic. I wish I could write this kind of stuff
somebody should write this kind of stuff for China.
So you know, because I was never taught anything about theory
it has the sort of not forbidden fruit, but it has the allure of the unknown.
So I'm a kind of kid in the sweet shop where I don't really understand what it is I think
this looks interesting and what about this, you know. Now, there was a slightly more structure to that in that in the middle of the 80s, the V&A started up
a master's programme which still runs on the history of design and the then director hired Charles Saumarez Smith,
later director of the National Gallery and chief executive of the Royal Academy. They hired Charles.
and as you might think, this is going to sound like one of these absolute kind of established British establishment stitch ups.
But Charles and I were in the same year, the same College of Cambridge.
We weren't particularly chums at Cambridge, and I doubt if we'd exchanged a sentence or two.
But when he joined the V&A, we talked and we invented between us, and we really were making it up as we were along,
a kind of methodology, material culture, methodology, course.
And that's where we got the tools in to talk to the students.
And so we were looking for a methodology to talk about objects because art history wasn't a great deal of help, to be honest.
You know, if your interest is in chairs and tables, you know, Wölfflin and Panofsky and so on, they don't have much to say to you.
So we were kind of struggling, you know, we're stumbling around and we're finding stuff and we're bumping into things.
And one of the things that we bumped into was Arjun Appadurai's The Social Life of things
and that became part of the intellectual underpinning of what you refer to as my first academic book,
although I like to think that the earlier ones have good stuff in them, too.
But you mean Superfluous Things, which was published in 1991 and has this kind of underpinning.
And I think the experience of kind of trying to work with very bright students to create a kind of methodology course on design.
I mean the other thing is design history wasn't that helpful because design history as it was then
really, its interest only started with industrialisation and a lot of
the literature on that saw the great exhibition of 1851 as a kind of zero hour.
So again, if you want to help students to think about, I don't know,
16th century armour, students who are interested in kind of gloves. What can you read that will help them think about gloves?
And that took us and me towards this kind of anthropological literature.
But again, it's very unsystematic, but then
I've never had the benefits of any kind of methodological course, so it was just like picking stuff up and seeing what might work.
GB: But I do wonder if there is a benefit. We could debate that sometime because I was like you
I was taught Wöfflin and things like that, some sort of art history, but I never had to do
A compulsory theory class, the way I know I have insisted my students do it.
And just like you therefore came to it as a personal passion rather than as a requirement.
I do wonder whether forcing students to do it is a matter of academic requirement takes joy out of it.
CC: In fact, you know that sometimes you're going the other way to forbid them to read X or Y,
that students are going to be sneaking off to the library
GB: So let me ask, Craig, if you have to describe your own historical method where you fit within the continuum of practises,
is material culture how you would describe yourself as an academic or as a scholar?
Almost everybody you refer to - I realise it's still early in your career - but still this is a moment that very much shapes your identity as a scholar.
CC: I mean, it's interesting because, of course at the V&A, you know,
all of the V&A curators that I hung out with when I was one used to refer to kind of almost dismissively,
like a flat art was like paintings and drawings and photographs and so on.
And, you know, because I think we all had a kind of a bit of a chip on our shoulder about the decorative arts or whatever it was.
And so I think I certainly probably seized on material culture as a way of giving what seemed like
a new and slightly higher status to what had previously been called the decorative arts i.e. not real art.
It's only decorative. But at the same time, there's also the kind of visual cultural thing kind of going on,
because I have written books which are, you know, which are about canonical Chinese art
But I wanted to look at that in the same framework. I wanted to try and think of it in the same way as the chairs and tables.
People used to say to me:
What kind of art are you most interested in? And the answer I would give was, I'm interested in how it all fits together.
I mean, the V&A was a good school for thinking about discourse because the V&A
there's a Department of Ceramics and the Department of Sculpture and a Far Eastern department that I was in.
And the official V&A line was that this was a completely rational structure.
The first time I read Foucault and that stuff about things from a long way off
At the beginning, I thought this describes the structure. This is the structure of the V&A.
It makes absolutely no kind of logical or rational sense.
It's just, you know, sculpture has a higher status than ceramics
and Asia is a thing where linguistic expertise
GB: So let me ask about that, Craig, because you are making a reference to a fable,
as I remember it, about Chinese culture or Chinese attitudes or Chinese worldviews.
So, of course, the relationship between East and West must have been a constant tension that scholars like yourself must always have to negotiate.
And I was struck when I did read through your CV that your earliest writings were about things like
metalwork and jade and lacquer work and things that we Western art historians never even think about
let alone write about. You mentioned a minute ago that you have published books on Canonical Art
but I assume that you mean that art that is considered canonical in the West
CC: Oh no, no. GB: So I guess what I'm asking you is, in China
is there a hierarchy in which painting is higher than jade and metalwork and lacquerware, or are these categories that we've imposed from the West?
CC: Oh, no, there's an absolute Chinese hierarchy with calligraphy at the top painting next and everything else.
You everything comes lower than that.
So it's not a hierarchy we've imposed.
I mean there are hierarchies we imposed in the way Western museums rate some things higher than others.
But both in pre modern times and now there's definitely a kind of hierarchy within China that was well understood in the past.
And that hierarchy both affected the financial value of things
you know, calligraphy was always dearer than anything else.
And the cultural capital value, if you like, of those things as well.
One of the distinctive things I think about studying Chinese art is that, you know, there is a vast vast discourse.
There are named artists. There are biographies of artists.
For thousands of years there have been books about art theory and so on.
Baxandall famously had to invent a period eye because he was sent to work,
he was a V&A curator, he was sent to work on the Northern European sculpture.
And while 15th century Italy has a lot of art theory, 15th century Germany has no art theory at all.
So he had to go elsewhere and look at dance and calligraphy and other forms
and people have written about this, that for Baxandall, the period eye comes comes out of that.
But for China, you have to engage with what they said about themselves at the time because they said plenty.
GB: So let me ask a question that comes out of that: If there is indeed a voluminous literature within China about Chinese culture
does that mean we need to adopt - that is we scholars who are interested in writing about Chinese art -
a Chinese historiographic approach? I mean, is there such a thing that is somehow distinctive from the approach we might take from the West?
CC: Well, I think you need to know about it. You absolutely need to know about it.
And you absolutely need to understand it. Some people would say yes.
And indeed, this would be a very hot topic in China itself.
And if I was talking to a Chinese audience, one of the questions that would be sure to come up is, you know,
you should be using Chinese theory for Chinese art
I suppose my view would be, well, you know, if you're studying the art of the Italian renaissance, you need to know what Vasari said.
Right. And as I understand it - though there are people listening to this who know a lot more about this than I do.
So I might be about to say something stupid.
But one of one of the central lines of Vasari is that Florence is the greatest centre of all because God loves Florence more than he loves Venice.
Right. Well, you know, you don't need to believe that God loves Florence more than he loves Venice in order to work with Italian Renaissance art.
And nobody would ask a scholar of Italian renaissance whether they needed to believe that.
You know, ask do you actually believe that God loves Florence more than Venice?
But you need to know that that's what Vasari thought. And you need to know why these kind of ideas made sense.
But it doesn't stop you bringing other stuff in
So this is me now, this would be my view is that absolutely, you need to understand
how this stuff has been understood,
but I think the great risk of the Chinese approach is that it can come to seem kind of utterly timeless and static.
And a great deal of what we think of as the Chinese approach, in my view,
has its origins in a particular moment of Chinese culture and an early 20th century moment when, for utterly understandable reasons,
Chinese intellectuals felt the again completely understandable need to insist on the kind of separateness
and difference of abounded and more homogeneous thing called Chinese culture.
Now, if you go back to the very long historical process in China, it might not have look how it looked in 1920, might not be how it looked in 1520.
GB: when I was reading one of the reviews of your work, the reviewer made a distinction between picture and painting
the Chinese scholarship has a distinction there, which I couldn't even, I couldn't understand,
but maybe you could explain to us what is the distinction within Chinese thinking between picture and painting?
Is this the sort of difference that we in the West don't tend to hold or are even told about?
CC: I've got a whole book which is kind of about that. The Pictures and Visuality book is kind of very much based on that.
I could point you to specific sources from the 16th century in which somebody says painting and pictures and painting are different.
I'll get back to trying to explain that in a minute.
but whether that distinction was quite as pervasive or quite as widely held and quite as widespread,
I'm a bit more sceptical now. But to come back to it,
the distinction as it was made in the kind of media sources that I drew on for
that book would be that picture is the larger kind of category.
So any form of anything representational or mimetic could be a picture.
Right, but painting is about brushwork and is about the artist's touch and is a higher practice
I mean, it's almost Greenbergian stuff.
I mean, this is stuff from the 16th century. You'll read some of the stuff from the Europeans,
from the 20th century about how it's all about the artist's touch and so on.
But so every every painting is also a picture.
Right, but not every picture is also painting because it might be a woodblock print or a map or a kind of painting, which is to mimetic,
you know, too concerned with capturing the experience of the external world and not enough with capturing
the inner life of the artists and the artists inner life in the world, and again,
this sounds like stuff that people were arguing about in
France in the late 19th century about Pompier and academic art versus what Cezane's doing
I mean, in a way, it's Chinese engagements with that and that Cezane kind of moment in the early 20th century that elevate this distinction,
I think now to kind of a central thing of Chinese art and whether actually that was really the case in the 15th century or the 11th century.
But there's plenty of Chinese theory in which, from the 11th century onwards or even earlier,
people are saying if it's too mimetic, then it's not really art.
And it's not really painting. It's just kind of picture.
It's capturing the appearance of the external world.
And that's not what art does. Real art is not about capturing the appearance of the external world.
And we could say -and this is a conversation that would
be interesting to have in great length of time - which is that that's one of the reasons why
photography doesn't cause Chinese painting to have a nervous breakdown in the 19th century,
because, you know, yes, photography is fantastic at capturing that the external world.
But if that's not what art was meant to do anyway,
it doesn't provoke a kind of rethinking of central principles of what the artist is going to be doing.
GB: Let me ask you a broad question, Craig. I know you've written about the way museums collected,
Chinese artefacts and culture is very much framed by the history of imperialism.
But I'm wondering then what is mediating the way scholars like yourself in the field in general are dealing with China today,
now that China is an active part of the global economy and certainly the part of the world I come from considered to be an imperial power,
a threatening imperial power in its own right.
Are things shifting in the way that we're regarding China and its own position in the world?
I guess what I'm really asking is to what degree is art history, and your art history in particular
always addressing the present, always about the present and the present now is quite different than it was, say, when you started out in the field.
CC: Well, I think it's always addressing the present, whether you think about it or not.
I mean, I think there is a difference in that
I'm much more conscious now than I was when I started my career, that what I write may well be read in China,
because books are translated. I mean, a lot of the things I write about are very mainstream in China and
well, it might be kind of what is it, sixty three people who are interested in the in the West
Or I might give a lecture and fourteen people might come, you know,
I'm writing about some very mainstream and canonical stuff, that in a very big country like China,
even if only one percent of the population is interested in that, still is in absolute terms, an enormous number.
So I am much more conscious of a global audience, if you like,
even though I'm writing in English, I'm much more conscious of a global audience than ever
than of a purely Anglophone one.
I suppose maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because somebody like
me who started when China was really over there and nobody knew about it,
nobody ever went there. And people who were interested in it were a tiny minority of weirdos.
I'm marked by that, that's stamped on me.
So even if I'm kind of changing, that's essentially the point from which I came in.
I mean, it would be interesting to compare it with people who have, as it were, grown up with -
and I remember saying this almost the last time I taught the modern China course -
I remember saying to the undergraduates, look, you all have lived in a world in which for your entire lifetimes, in which China is powerful,
but if we're going to go back to the beginning of the 20th century,
we have to think about a period when Chinese intellectuals were really worried that China was going to disappear.
You know, it was going to be colonised, carved out.
You know, it was going to be like Poland, which would sort of cease to exist on the map of of the of the world.
And this seems incredible to you now because they've grown up in a hallway in the world.
But I didn't grow up in that world. I grew up in a world where China was kind of like nobody had ever been there.
Nobody knew anything about it and so on. So I'm still probably stamped by that, even as the conscious part of it changes to think
I'm not only interested in addressing a Chinese audience which already knows a great deal about Chinese art
I am interested in trying to bring people who don't think: 'Oh I don't know anything
about China' to give them some material or ideas or just images or things to think with,
GB: Yeah, I might just pause for a moment and remind people if they'd like to ask a question themselves,
they can just write one into the chat function and I'll read it out to him in a minute.
I was thinking similarly, Craig, whenever I have to show Warhol portraits of Mao students, I have to remind them what that meant when Warhol made them.
We look back at Mao now as a kind of pop culture figure, in part because because of Warhol.
But at the time those would have been seen as quite threatening and quite strategic choice of image. CC: They are quite in your face images.
GB: But when I was looking I was noticing that in your most recent writings,
words like transnational and contact and exchange seem to be the key words,
and that seems to be informed by this sort of new globalism that we're all living in.
Now, as you say, China is now a major player and completely different from the situation when you first came into the field.
So, I mean, let's talk about global art histories.
Is this a desirable aim or something in fact, we should be arguing against? What is a global art history?
Well, let's put it this way. What would be a good global art history from your point of view?
CC: I mean, what I'm going to say kind of really
well, it sounds like Warholian fake naive, but, you know, I do think it's a good idea for people to know stuff about a range of different stuff and,
you know, just to be curious about or to be interested in a bigger range of things and to seek out stuff that they don't already know about.
I suppose I'm not really interested in those claims to a global art history, which is here is one key that will work for it all.
You know, I'm more interested in
knowing about a bunch of different things and thinking about what is the appropriate way to think about those different things,
I suppose I'm interested in comparison. Comparison has to start -
I suppose if you think that everything is the same, then you're not really comparing it because it's kind of the same.
GB: But you can only compare like with unlike. And so therefore, if you have a comparative global history, of course, you'd begin from your own culture
the West and you put China in second place, don't you.
CC: Well, there's a book on Artemisia Gentileschi
that made a big impact on me because it's a book which argues for forms of - I agree with you
that by and large comparison tends to take a norm and then a deviation from it.
And so here is the norm and here's the deviation.
And indeed, most of the history of China written in European languages from the 19th century to the late 20th century,
implicitly or explicitly does that. And I suppose I am very aware of that.
I'm conscious of that. I've tried to not do that. It's not for me to say whether I've succeeded in doing that or not.
But I have been aware of that kind of norm and deviation - we do this, but they do that.
You know, with they are that, being implicitly kind of -
But a number of people have tried to think about ways of: we do this and they do this,
you know, and that don't start from the norm,
that don't start from one of those being the norm for which the other one has to be the deviation.
Now, maybe, again, that's naive, but it's what is what I believed in.
I haven't always believed in the execution of it.
Or put it this way
I've wanted to believe in the possibility of that. GB: There's a couple of people with hands up.
But it would be easier, I think, if you put a question in the chat, write it out, and then I can read it out to Craig as we go along.
So I think, I notice, if you wouldn't mind putting your question in the chat function, that would be helpful.
Thanks. I was wondering about that because,
you know, we in the West, we like to think we can know,
and that indeed we come out of this enlightenment model where knowledge for its own sake, all knowledge should be available to us.
But isn't it politically strategic that some knowledges are not available to us?
Shouldn't any global history be telling the reader from the West that there's just parts of other
cultures that you cannot know and you should not seek to know?
You know, why can't we leave some knowledge within Chinese hands, if you know what I mean?
CC: Well, I mean, I'm not kidding myself.
It remains within Chinese hands whether I address it or not.
Right. I mean, you know, where where is the bulk of the art history of China?
Where and in what language is the bulk of the art history of China written?
It's written in Chinese in China. Where are the critical mass of doctoral student scholars, museums, museum curators? In China.
GB: That's a very recent development, though, isn't it?
CC: Well, it's a 50 year development now, I mean, it's arguably one hundred year development.
I mean, art history only has one hundred years.
I'm not counting Vasari and Winckelman and all of that.
I mean, those are those are kind of ancestral totems.
If we count our history as the point at which you could get an art history degree,
It's maybe a hundred and fifty years.
So in China, you know, in Japan, it's easily as long as that.
And in China, it's easily one hundred years.
So I hope I've never been so arrogant to think that, um, you know,
that I could take it out of Chinese hands even if I wanted to, because that's just,
you know, given where the activity is and where the thinking is and where the right thing is,
that's just preposterous. You know, it's just it's just not viable.
Now, I think people did think that. I mean, I think
when I went through the faculty of Oriental Studies in the early 1970s, at the point when China was over there, you know,
the professor of Chinese, the head of the Chinese department at Cambridge, when I was there, had never been to China.
Now in a way that wasn't really his fault, because, I mean, it was the geopolitics of the Cold War that stopped him from going to China.
But he'd never been there, he couldn't have ordered a beer in Chinese spoken Chinese to save his life.
So that was different then. There was a period when the West thought that it had taken it out of the hands of China.
And certainly institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum kind of believed that as well.
But that probably only seemed true then and it's certainly not true now and hasn't been true for, you know, most of my career.
GB: I've got a question it is a general question about art history in general.
He was wondering, Craig, how important do you think Canonicity or fundamental texts are for the study of history of art?
He was talking to some younger history of art students who never had a Riegl's Dutch group portrait.
And he's wondering whether you think these 19th century canonical texts are important going forward,
even if what is not, as I do, going to specialise in the history of German art history.
Let's just quickly say we do discuss that regularly in the history of courses here,
CC: Well. I do think it's important if it helps critical thinking,
which I hope we would all agree is a good thing if people know where certain ideas come from.
Otherwise, they just take them as kind of fallen from the heavens.
Now, I mean, Riegl's Dutch forefronts is a good one, because
I don't think I've ever read it. No, I'm pretty sure I've never read it.
I kind of vaguely know what's in it
I've read stuff. I mean, I have read some of the Western canonical
although it's true to say that when I started teaching art history at Sussex, I had literally never read the Western Canon texts.
I hadn't read Panofsky, I hadn't read Wofflin and I had to teach this stuff - absolutely terrifying.
I was like one page ahead of the students, literally. GB: It's a great learning experience actually
CC: It was great. You know, my colleagues said sink or swim.
Well, maybe I sank, but I'm sure some days the students thought I sank, but but so
What is the canon? Is that is that a Riegl thing? Part of the canon? Is that one of the things that you absolutely have to kind of know about?
Would you. Is it interesting? Yes, quite probably. Did it have an impact on, you know, the way more recent people have written?
But I think, you know
one of the things that struck me about working in museums was that these supposedly logical structures had changed massively over time.
So the British Museum and the V&A, if you study the structures, they keep changing them, there was a big hoo-haa at the V&A
last year about changing the departmental structure. They've always changed the departmental structure.
I mean, I happen to think that the change proposed was a bad one.
But the fact of changing happens all the time.
And I think the same is true of the canon, you know, I mean, James Elkins has done these kind of graphs of who gets mentioned.
And I mean, Riegl's an interesting one, because Riegl falls off a cliff in about 1950, you know, in the Gombrich Panofsky era,
Riegl was like the oldest old hat and nobody read him
And then in the last 20 years, Riegl becomes hip again.
And then actually there's probably more people reading Riegl now than they were in the golden age of art history,
which, of course, as we all know, did not ever actually exist. So what is the canon?
If it shifts and it changes.
And institutions make cannons and the cannons make the institutions.
And we all kind of understand them.
But I don't think we can say this is the list that's carved in stone that everybody has to have read
One: everybody should read as widely as possible. Two: Nobody,
and that includes me and you has read enough.
GB: I of course think of the golden age of art history as your tenancy here at Oxford but we'll talk about that another time.
Someone has a question for you. She wants to follow up on my question about global history,
Could you elaborate on the differences between shared history and connected history and why have you cautioned against focussing only on the connected?
CC: Because I think focussing only on the connected does risk leaving out things that are extremely important but aren't connected.
So, I mean, China, I suppose the canonical example would be, as I mentioned earlier,
you know, in Premodern, China, the well understood system of the art has at its apex the art of calligraphy,
the writing of Chinese characters with a brush.
These are the most valued works, the most expensive works, the works people want to own, want to know about, want to write about.
There are many, many more people. In the Ming period,
not being interested in painting was not a career break.
You didn't have to be interested in painting. A lot of the elite were interested in painting, but a very large number of them were not.
But being utterly uninterested in calligraphy or even worse, yourself,
writing a hand which looked uneducated and crude, that melted your social capital
but that is not connected.
In the sense that until the 20th century, with the exception of Japan,
obviously in Japan and Korea and elsewhere in what some people have called and I know this term is controversial,
but some people call a sign of a sphere that is those parts of the world where
written Chinese is being used as a language of kind of status in addition.
and that would include Korea and Vietnam and Japan. you know, porcelain
the first global brand, it's being treated all over the world. there are fragments on the beach in Australia and in Brazil.
And then some. But then calligraphy, no, it doesn't make it outside of China.
One of the reasons it doesn't make it outside China is that, you know, it's too valuable to leave,
Even when China is kind of on its uppers in the early 20th century, important works of art don't leave.
So, for example, there's no flow of calligraphy into Western museums.
very few Western museums have a collection of calligraphy that anybody who's really interested in this subject would cross the road to look at.
I mean, certainly no European museum, the Met maybe saw a couple of bits and other major North American museums.
But, it's not an art form that's connected, but it's importance is in inverse ratio to its connectedness.
I mean, can't we agree that it's valuable to both study those things that are connected and to look for connexions where it exists,
but also to pay attention to those things which aren't connected and are valued kind of within the culture,
Within the cultural record of a particular place itself.
GB: OK, sounds like a cogent argument to me, Craig, we've just about run out of time.
I just wanted to, of course, remind people that you continue to publish and that your work can be sold out,
but also that you're in the process of curating an exhibition for the Freud Museum in London.
Do you want to say quickly something about that and more particularly when it will actually open?
CC: So this exhibition called Sigmund Freud and China will open at the Freud Museum
in Meresfield Gardens in London on the twenty sixth of January next year,
and it will go on until June. And let me urge a visit to the museum on anybody who's never been, because it's a very wonderful place.
This is Sigmund Freud's last home when he came to England as a refugee from the Nazis in 1938.
But Freud's status and powerful political protection meant that he was able to bring his entire library and his entire collection of antiquities,
not to mention his famous couch to London with it.
And although Chinese antiquities are only a relatively small part of Freud's collection,
they are a part that he turned to very significantly in the very last decade of his life.
And so the exhibition focuses on the Chinese objects in its collection,
but also looks at some of the ways in which Freud's reading about Chinese culture and particularly
his misunderstandings of the Chinese language fed into his ideas about the interpretation of dreams,
which is obviously one of the kind of central Freudian ideas.
So this is a very small exhibition because the museum is just a house and and it's very small, but there will be a small publication to go with it.
And whether you see it then or see it some other time before the exhibition,
the Freud Museum is, in my view, a very kind of magical and wonderful place.
And everybody should visit it at least once
GB: Very good, well that obviously should be in January. Twenty twenty two. Great.
Thanks so much for chatting to us. It's wonderful to hear you speak and to get some small moments for insights into the
complexities of the Chinese culture that you study. On behalf of all of our listeners
I want to thank you for your time and for your expertise. And I hope everybody - people are clapping -
I hope everybody will join us next week at 5:00 pm for another round of the art history Radio Hour.
Thanks, everybody, and thanks again Craig.
CC: Just wishing that all colleagues and students and everybody, wishing everybody a safe and healthy and successful time.
GB: Thanks very much. CC: Thank you.