In my senior year, D’Alleva begins to bring concepts ever so frustrating into sensible form. A relief.
My career in art history has had ups and downs when considering my feelings toward the field. Beginning with the excitement that comes with mastering formal analysis and then learning to intertwine this analysis with the use of deeper and more iconographical ideas felt like a radical achievement within the first courses of art history. But then, in the light of excitement around new found fluency in the discipline, it becomes easy to feel stuck. One may even feel as I did; unable to progress towards new and original thought, stuck appreciating deeper thinking but unsure how to form it. Possibly, this stems from a fear of failure (that at the time feels more like a lack of know-how), but more likely comes from a lack of process recognition. A misunderstanding that the field is in fact constantly at question, and even the greatest thinkers challenge themselves (and each other) to think in ways so abstract yet fundamentally basic.
D’Alleva surfaces questions many would scoff at “What is a theory?”, yet at the same time many (including D’Alleva), struggle to answer with confidence. I find this ever telling of the complexity within the discipline, and more-so encouraging. A justification to why I spent many semesters wondering why my understanding of art at a deeper level seemed stagnant. Now, feeling rejuvenated by just the beginning of this text, I can focus on the process of critical theory, rather than being concerned with finding a result that may not be more than an idea or slightly different way of asking a question.
Some of the earliest pages in the text had the largest impact on my understanding of theory, and how I may apply these techniques to my own thinking. Noting the difference between methodology and theory is an idea so basic yet not always intuitive in the field. D’Alleva, stressing the importance of this distinction while supporting it with real world practice, shows that progress in art historical thought is not only attainable, but to be done in many ways. Progressing through the reading illustrates just that (in many forms), and simply being taught (or reminded) of famous theoretical processes is an exciting way to begin thinking deeper about critical theory.