7 Questions with Josh Ellenbogen, Art Historian and Intellectual Historian

 

Josh Ellenbogen trained as an art historian and intellectual historian. He teaches in an art history department at a research university in the United States. He focuses on the nineteenth century, the history of photography, scientific imaging, and historiography. His scholarship—of which Reasoned and Unreasoned Images and Idol Anxiety exist as books—principally concerns these areas. You can follow him on Instagram at rue.chemin.vert

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

For good or ill, it’s been this way my whole life. When I was a kid, my dad had a very large pre-Columbian art collection—Teotihuacan, Mayan, Aztec, et cetera. I have a vivid recollection from when I was around 9 of looking at one of the pieces, an Olmec object that consisted in the top half of a broken clay figurine, where only the head and arms and upper part of the torso remained (I still have the figurine). And I remember my dad commenting that it was 3,000 years old, and me feeling in awe of the thing for its sheer age. The fact it was a fragment only made the piece more powerful and evocative—it really looked like the trace of a lost world to me. Also, because of my dad’s interest in Pre-Columbian history and civilization, we went down to Mexico a lot when I was a kid, and clambered about the pyramids and visited the museums and such. I don’t want to overstate the importance of all this, of course. I didn’t focus on Pre-Columbian civilization at any point in my training, for instance, and I suspect my interest in history partly derives from more deep-seated sources (a therapist once told me that something like 90% of historians are oldest children, as is the case with me). But certainly, growing up surrounded by objects from ancient and alien cultures catalyzed my interest in history. 

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

Well, it’s destroyed a few relationships… Beyond that, because I’m an art historian, it has obviously contributed a lot to my ability to take aesthetic satisfaction in many things in the world. It also makes me travel a good deal, so I can see as much as possible of the things that people made and left behind. Before Covid, even though my research is all European and American, I was spending Summers in Shanghai mostly for this reason, so I could learn about China, and also travel around to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, etc. These are some of the best places that there are, by the way, and I feel very lucky to get to go see them. I would like to die in Laos.

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

I’m an art history professor. It is my professional life/career.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

It depends on what matters to you. If you want to produce some species of practical effect in the world—if you want to make money, or improve people’s lives in a material sense, or create new and better napalm—it’s not actually that useful. I know that “defenders of history” often try to contrive various sorts of instrumental justifications for studying the past, but that is mostly nonsense. The practical pay-offs are either non-existent, or could be as easily obtained without studying history, or are so marginal and indirect that they do not justify the existence of the endeavor. In the end, and I would insist on this point for all of the humanities, the study serves no external purpose at all, and is fundamentally its own end (some people will also tell you, incidentally, that this description applies to all the highest forms of knowing). To be blunt: you either find the story of the different ways in which humans have made the world meaningful for themselves—that is, the different ways in which humans have realized their humanity—interesting, or you don’t. I think the humans who don’t find this study interesting (the “new and better napalm” crowd) tend to be less successful humans, and my earlier comment about learning to take aesthetic satisfaction in things was meant to wave at this idea. But even here, that desirable outcome is not something separable from the activity of studying history, though I suppose I really mean “humanistic study most broadly”—it’s central and intrinsic to it.

  

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

As is the case with good men everywhere, the 19th century remains my favorite period. This was the period of time when humans were most fully and completely human. I can either write several pages on this idea, or you can trust me on this... I think you should trust me on this. 

6. You’ve studied in both the historical and art historical disciplines. How do they compare to each other?

Great question. In principle, there doesn’t need to be much difference between them, if we define both as centering on the study of how the world has become meaningful for humans. In that case, you would get to similar places, albeit by different means. Of course, both disciplines tend to fall pretty well short of the more lofty goals I ascribe to them, and so, as in most things academic, the real differences between the disciplines tend to the petty and squalid.

7. What do you hope readers take away from your Instagram account?

To never let their own lives fall into such a deplorable condition!