"Beginning the History of Art"

Professor Whitney Davis opens his argument by criticizing Art History textbooks and their frequent use of cave paintings from Lascaux or Altamira to represent the beginning of the history of art and its designation as "Figure 1." He writes that "the textbooks never really address the problem of [the images'] historical origins." (32) In the Gombrich reading, we examined what is art, and now we come to the question of when did the history of art begin?

I believe he puts up a good argument when he discusses the debate about whether pre-art-historic art began in the Middle Paleolithic... he writes: "Once identified, these will institute regress all over again, ensuring that the beginning of art-histocricity cannot be identified." (43) After a long discourse on how art-historians have come to label "pre-historic art" as such, he ends up writing about what qualifies an object as art. It seems as if the beginning of the history of art is tied to finding when exactly humans (or their predecessors) began learning how to communicate with each other. Which begs the question again, what is considered art? How do we even know that the cave paintings in Lascaux IS art? What if it was just some form of communication?

What I basically got from our first two readings is that art is very subjective and it's hard to define the parameters of what it is, what it is not, when, and why. If there was a way to communicate with the makers of any art period, would they even classify themselves to their "period?"