engleski

Current Challenges and Future Prospects of Digital Art History. Lessons Learned at the Project ARTNET

In February 2017, the Getty Foundation issued a report on the symposium “Art History in Digital Dimensions”, held in October 2016 at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the University of Maryland. Subtitled as “White paper”, it summarizes the three-day discussions “on the current state of digital art history (DAH)”, led by the international, multigenerational group of professionals from different strands of art history. Discussions resulted with “a roadmap for the future practice in the field” – a rather interesting document intended to identify and articulate the most important challenges facing DAH, but also to provide possible responses and future solutions to these issues. Referring to the standpoints, projections and propositions elaborated in the report, in this paper we shall try to provide a somewhat different view of DAH and its problems, based on the multi-disciplinary research project ARNET, conducted in the last four years at the Institute of Art History, and supported by the Croatian Science Foundation. The objective of the project was to identify, describe, and explain organizational models from the background of modern and contemporary artists’ and architects’ networks, using custom-made digital tools for network visualization, spatial data visualization and collaborative research, developed parallel to the historiographical and methodological project investigations. Using a brief description of ARTNET’s working procedures, methods, results and conclusions, as the framework for the response to Getty’s DAH roadmap, we shall also question the notion of digital art history as yet another in a range of recent methodological turns in the recent history of art history, advocating for its understanding in terms of paradigmatic shift, symptomatic for the profound transformation of the entire field of humanities.

digital art history, methodology of digital art history, epistemology of digital art history

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