Yours is actually less insane than what's written now.

5. Historians cannot be restrained by the rigidity of citation management software

There's so much to pull out of this text, but the closing discussion of Harney County's High Desert Partnership is such a powerful articulation what happens when federal power and local democracy work together in service of collaboration and care.

It just feels insufficient to me to deconstruct the term in isolation without examining the institutions that define the term in the first place.

How has an institution drawn boundaries around its collection across its history? What types of works would transgress these boundaries? Has a museum collected in ways that contradict the stories that they tell themselves about what constitutes "American"? These are useful grounding questions.

What constitutes American art at the Met is going to differ from what constitutes American art at MoMA, the Carter, or wherever else. Efforts to expand the horizon of interpretive possibility should start by attempting to work within and against specific collections and their histories.

But to merely focus on the shortcomings of definitions themselves in isolation is too limited. Cultural institutions, museums in particular, set these terms, and definitions of "American art" vary from institution to institution.

Every definition or categorization of what "American art" does or does not encompass involves drawing some sort of boundary around the concept. This is often exclusionary in harmful ways, either by marginalizing some or by narrowing the horizon of scholarly inquiry.

It's maybe the only artwork I've ever seen that receives basically universal acclaim, and honestly it exceeds the hype. I just wish it was more widely accessible.

The ideological assumptions of this scholarship are so strong that they often gloss over the fact that the evidence itself often points in a different direction, toward a more productive way of looking at these pictures and the cultural environment from which they emerged.

As an aside, I think there's something aspirational about a good Substack: To not only write well, which Dan certainly does, but to write regularly (and on time).