Summers, David. "World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism." Compression vs. expression : containing and explaining the world's art. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.

This brief article is a summary and response to criticism of Summers' book, Summers, David. Real Spaces. 2003, New York : Phaidon.

He begins with his largest and overarching premise, that the visual arts have been subsumed by what he calls the "spatial arts":

Post-formalist art history replaces the "visual arts" with the "spatial arts", the former having been relegated to the modern Western history of representationalism. Given this change, there is a further distinction between real space and virtual space. Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and in these terms, sculpture is the art of personal space, fundamentally significant relative to the conditions of our own physicality. [222]

This construction is helpful in reconsidering the effects of spatial and societal context on the interpretation of a work of art.

He supports the recontextualization of the discourse of artwork as a progressive evolution from existing modes of thought rather than an evolution *towards* some ideal objectivity. In so doing, he introduces the concept of facture:

Facture is the evidence in a work of its having been made, and it is insistence on this principle that makes the fundamental intepretative change from quasi-symbolic interpretation based on the analogy of texts to indexical reference. [223]

This powerful concept is precisely how we as an audience infuse non-durational artworks with the concept of time. We know that they are made, that they carry general intentionality, and that their form respects their temporal progressive creation.

Moreover, he continues, their physicality (ontic nature) is precisely that which is unambiguous. While we can consider and reconsider our interpretations of the objects, and any distinctions we can draw within them or between them and other social constructs, we are tightly bound by the presented material truth.

Stonehenge may or may not be an elaborate observatory, and it may or may not have been used for one or another purpose, but it does tell us unambiguously that stone was quarried (that is, cut squared) and transported, and that more or less specialized and collective labor was necessary in order for the site to have been made and remade, from which we may infer certain general kinds of social arrangements.[223]

We infer these arrangements, he implies, by the social construction of architecture:

Artifacts are integral with their first spaces of use. [224]

This approach, of course, when extended into the modern painting apparatus, helps to show the extent to which paintings are defined by their galleries and the commerciality of their distribution infrastructure. This argument is drawn out in John Berger's "Ways of Seeing".

Summers ends by encapsulating the more global conception of the art world as a secondary persuit, encouraging a reconsideration based on the pervasive use of the visual as a distinguishing characteristic.

[The standard Western attitude] obscures or conceals the absolute importance of ornament for the definition and distinction of persons, artifacts, and places in major traditions, including our own. [224]

After all, without distinction there could be no individuation, and in this attitude, then, the West finds itself ultimately masochistic.