2025/03/21 by Jakub Stejskal · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy #Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation #Religious Tourism and Spaces
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/hith.12382
openalex publication_date 2025/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/03/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
ABSTRACT Can past agents deliberately influence our historical awareness by designing objects’ appearances and sending them to us down the stream of time? We know they have certainly tried to do so by raising monuments. But according to an influential narrative, the efforts of the “monumentalists” are destined to fail: no monument can keep a legacy alive in perpetuity. In this article, I argue that this narrative misrepresents the nature of the monumentalists’ mission, and I set out to show that monumentality should be understood as a means of addressing what I term “art‐historical awareness.” This mode of historical awareness attends to artifacts’ appearances in search of visual manifestations of relevance that can survive the loss of context. Those who raise monuments aim to produce such artifacts, or what amount to intentional art‐historical documents, and they do so in order to overcome the tension between the monuments’ nature as public art and their commemorative function. By visually manifesting a transcendent relevance, monuments ideally appeal to both present and distant audiences, insofar as these audiences are able to appreciate the monuments’ potential to sustain at least a semblance of relevance beyond their immediate contexts.