Tuesday, October 12 at 11:00 AM to 12:05 PM (MST)
Lecture: "Defining an Ecological Approach to Art History: On the History of Human Exceptionalism"
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About the lecture: The responsibility of intellectuals to society has changed as awareness has grown that human-induced degradation of the ecosystem poses an imminent existential threat to life as we know it on planet earth. The flipside of the smooth flow of goods is the relentless precarization of workers and destruction of the planetary ecosystem. The task today is to grasp the brutal reality of planetary interdependency and its emancipatory possibility. Art History potentially has a significant role to play in raising awareness and advancing the public's interconnectedness with the planetary life-support system that so urgently needs to be restored. At the center of ongoing theoretical efforts across a wide span of methodologies, subjects, and scales of research a central issue has been whether a global history of art inevitably follows the logic of economic globalization, or whether it can offer an alternative vision that equally respects the multiple subjectivities of the actors involved. I will argue that the intellectual and social history of the European concept of humanness deserves far more scrutiny than it has yet received if the goal is to transcend the thought structures that enable and maintain the present crisis.
Claire Farago (PhD, University of Virginia; Professor Emerita, University of Colorado Boulder; Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professor of Renaissance Studies, Smith College, 2021) has published widely on Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts. Most recently, The Fabrication ofLeonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura 1651(2018), is the fruit of a decade-long international collaboration. Farago is also an active contributor to the discourse on cultural interaction, beginning with the groundbreaking anthology, Reframing the Renaissance (1995). Since 2017, her efforts to articulate decolonial strategies have focused on the climate emergency. Borderless Histories of Art: The Future of Cultural Memory in the Era of Climate Disruption, is forthcoming from Routledge Press next year.
