The social history of art in the Age of Deconstruction

The social history of art as it was theorized and practiced by such authors as T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow has been subjected to a number of criticisms in recent years. Most notable perhaps is the feminist critique offered by Griselda Pollock which drew attention to an important limitation, namely the failure of the social history of art to take into consideration issues of gender. Her critique (Pollock, 1988) was informed by post-structural critical theory, and the type of Marxist-feminist criticism Pollock has become identified with makes use of semiotic theory and notions of authorship colored by the work of Barthes and Foucault as well as by a conception of human subjectivity that is indebted to Lacan. Pollock’s work affords an analysis of the way in which works of art are marked by issues of both class and gender with a new set of coordinates. Much of what follows is entirely congruent with the basic principles of Pollock’s approach. The occasion for rehearsing the need for a new theoretical basis for the social history of art, one that finds its origins in post-structural theory, is the publication of recent attacks on social history from a deconstructiv