“What does art do?” The question is asked – twice in fact – but there is no answer. Instead, this latest book on Visual Culture restricts itself to the ‘new field’ within academe. The ‘study’ of the title means academic study and, Visual Culture as a ‘new field,’ is either supplanting or expanding the older ‘discipline’ of Art History.

Should we engage with Visual Studies? This volume is an offshoot of the author’s PhD thesis and, as such, it falls foul of too much synthesis and a pedantically employed methodology. Incredibly, over half the book consists of an appendix and therein lies much of the interest. It is a series of interviews with academics working mostly in the United States. The interviewees are familiar names in art-related discourse: Crimp, Joselit, Mitchell, and Wolff, to name but a few.

The core concept throughout the book is ‘vision’ or ‘visuality’. While these terms are not viewed as either the same or as stable, I have to admit scepticism. As David Joselit will be well aware it was Duchamp who, almost a century ago, pointed out that vision was a somewhat overrated faculty in respect to both the production and consumption of visual art. And, while the interviewees for this volume are not so silly as to essentialise vision, it is not at all clear that vision can be sustained as the distinguishing property or quality for the ‘new field’. It makes little sense to privilege vision when it is neither the object of study nor even a process that can be distinguished from other processes (thinking, drawing, etc.).

But it is elsewhere that my real problems with Visual Culture arise. Dikovitskaya’s interviews highlight the rejection of Art History’s elitist concentration on high art. Visual Culture involves a shift away from Art History’s exclusion of other visual aspects of culture. While it might seem right and proper that at long last study of art should follow art itself with an embrace of the contemporary world beyond the museum it does so, according to the author, with the same constraints of discipline and methodology. It is perceived to sit alongside the university disciplines, and as such, there is a denial of the open-endedness of what in theory remains necessary to the field: art. ‘Art’ involves studio practice.

“What does art do?” Dikovitskaya’s single attempt to identify art is that it is a “category.” It is at least recognition that to reduce art to something like a discipline is not acceptable. If art can be conceived as a category, it is possible to envisage art as a category in process. The study of art, and even Visual Culture, should be satellites in such a constellation. For decades, the development of relevant study of art for art students, that is to say, study that works with and through art practices, has been shamefully neglected by those involved.

However, the desire for disciplinary hegemony may be already a thing of the past within the arts and humanities. This book is (inadvertently) a testament to the way in which Visual Culture started out as interdisciplinary, and how this was appropriated by university technocrats as a way of downsizing departments. The ‘broadening’ of degree courses is in reality the flattening out of education. This is indeed the egalitarianism of a technocratic age. The early signs are that the current ‘rationalisation’ of the universities in the Republic of Ireland is even worse than the experience in the United States and the United Kingdom. Any introduction of Visual Studies in Ireland must come with a health warning.

Joan Fowler teaches atthe National College of Art and Design, Dublin.