Graphs, charts, maps: plotting the global history of modern art

Abstract

Many new philosophical tendencies incite us to renew the methodologies of art history in order to decolonize her foremost narrative: the modernist canon. To this end, this paper explores how quantitative, cartographic, and statistical approaches, combined with more traditional modes of inquiry, can help us to reconsider existing hierarchies in the art historical field. Used to analyze large bodies of similar sources, namely exhibition catalogues and journals, over long time spans and at global scales, “distant reading” is useful in the construction of a coherent and global historical narrative of the geopolitics of modernities and their social dimensions, where complexity is restored and where the agency of artistic circulation finds a place.