Annual Stenton lecture to examine cultural wars

Tuesday, 01 November 2011

Jonathan Horowitz: Official Portrait of George W. Bush hung upside down

The Department of History's prestigious annual Stenton lecture is to be given this year by John Howard, Professor of American Studies, King's College London, documentary artist, and cultural critic.

The lecture will explore what is meant by democratic art and examine how art has been used as a weapon by elites to maintain the prevailing social order of the day. It will also explore how during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, art photography began to overtake painting and sculpture in major museums and galleries.

This period followed the victories of second-wave feminism, black freedom struggles, and queer movements for social change, when easily-reproduced photographic images documented new participants in the world of art who chose to use the camera to make art.

Inexpensive art processes, activist art collectives, and large print-runs of exhibition catalogues and photobooks insured that art was more widely disseminated, helping to demystify and diversify the works on display.

However, elites fought back, insisting on older ideas about the artist's individual genius. They resisted cultural outsiders, championing instead more conservative photographers, whose themes, they claimed, were universal.

They pushed back against the sixties and seventies revolutions, relying on trickery and deceit, such that even the work of William Eggleston, the so-called father of colour art photography, could be labelled democratic.

The Stenton Lectures are held annually in honour of Sir Frank Stenton, Professor of History at the University from 1926-1946 and subsequently Vice-Chancellor from 1946-1950.

On the Limits of Democratic Art

John Howard, Professor of American Studies, King's College London

17 November, 7.00pm

Henley Business School, Whiteknights campus

Please contact: events@reading.ac.uk  / 0118 378 4313