I guess that with my background in social science the idea doesn’t really come to me as new that history is always somebody’s selective construction of the past. The story that you set out to tell inevitably and necessarily starts out from specific questions about the past….or perhaps, the present. It is one thing to entertain this idea as a general principle, but another when it comes to making a choice between competing stories. At the moment I find I’m in this situation.
I was working this morning on the task of putting some order into the notes I took during my recent visit to the Estorick Collection library, in London. (The talk I have to give in January on art and fascism in Italy is approaching with disconcerting rapidity.) As I read I was struck by the diversity of the accounts that I was reading, about this period. Artists who are treated as significant and central by one author end up as marginal to the account offered by others. The entry on “Italy” in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art is quite different from that provided by the authors represented in Emily Braun’s Italian Art in the Twentieth Century. Neither takes quite the same line as Mario Biondi and Alessandro Borsotti, in Cultura e fascismo, which differs also from Dawn Ades, Art and Power, or Marla Stone’s The Patron State.
I’m not so naive as to think that it should be possible to decide what “really” happened, and what is the historical truth; nevertheless, it is a tough job trying to thread my way through all of this stuff, to decide what I should say in response to my own questions.
It does make me pause for thought in relation to my contemporaries, some of whom are lauded in the art press today. In a hundred years’ time will anybody be celebrating Damien Hurst or Tracey Emin? If so, for what aspect of their art?
You never know: I might have been “discovered” by then!