Iconoclast Art History

Caro Fowler and Christophe Koné examine the relationship between fashion and the museum, asking what is gained—and lost—when garments become museum objects. Their conversation explores the history of fashion exhibitions, the transformation of couture into cultural heritage, the decline of home sewing and pattern culture, and the changing relationship between clothing, the body, and materiality. Moving between the Met's new fashion galleries, archival practices, and contemporary museum displays, they consider how museums shape the ways we understand fashion as both a historical artifact and a living cultural practice.

In this episode, Caro Fowler and former RAP fellow Sora Han revisit Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and his frequently invoked concept of "the right to opacity." Beginning with Glissant's dedication to the murdered Jamaican poet Michael Smith, they explore the relationship between poetry, sound, and performance, asking what becomes possible when we return to foundational texts with fresh eyes and ears.

After visiting Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caro Fowler emerged with a transformed understanding of Raphael. In this episode, she speaks with curator Carmen Bambach about the exhibition’s moving reframing of Raphael’s Madonna and Child paintings through the lens of maternal and infant mortality in Renaissance Italy. Together they explore the role of biography in art history, Raphael’s extraordinary drawings, and what becomes visible when we take the female body seriously—not as an object of desire, but as a force that makes life, art, and the world itself. 

Caro Fowler and Will Schmenner investigate the museum as a recurring cinematic space. Moving from Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Vertigo to Ghostbusters and Dressed to Kill, the conversation explores how films use museums as sites of attention, transgression, desire, and institutional critique. Fowler and Schmenner consider the relationship between cinema and painting, the politics of conservation and display, and the enduring tension between popular culture and “high” art, asking what happens when museums become spaces not only for education, but also for fantasy, memory, and social encounter.

Caro Fowler speaks with Joost Keizer about the consequential environmental histories embedded within seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Moving beyond celebratory narratives of realism and national identity, the conversation explores how war, deforestation, land reclamation, and colonial expansion reshaped both the Dutch environment and artistic representations of nature. Together, Fowler and Keizer consider whether landscape painting emerged not simply from an admiration of nature, but from experiences of ecological loss, environmental control, and human concepts of making. 

Caro Fowler and Scott Nethersole discuss the evolving stakes of Renaissance art history amid the rise of “global” approaches. Rather than assuming seamless networks of exchange, Nethersole questions whether such frameworks can obscure the uneven, often disjointed nature of historical encounters, particularly in early European-African contact zones. The conversation revisits foundational disciplinary tools such as comparison and periodization, while considering how attention to moments of disconnection might reframe familiar narratives. Together, they reflect on the methodological and ethical challenges of writing art history that resists totalizing claims without abandoning interpretive ambition.

In this episode, Caro Fowler and Rob Slifkin discuss the paradox of the artist biopic, a genre Hollywood keeps returning to despite its frequent critical and commercial struggles. Drawing on films from Pollock to Basquiat and Final Portrait, they explore why these movies often feel constrained by historical accuracy, struggle to depict artistic genius, and lean into romantic myths of the solitary, suffering artist. Along the way, they unpack recurring themes like patronage, gender dynamics, and the tension between storytelling and education, ultimately asking what these films reveal not just about artists, but about Hollywood’s own aspirations, limitations, and fascination with the idea of art itself.

In this episode, Caroline Fowler speaks with Judith Noorman on the category of the “woman artist,” examining its limits within feminist art history while acknowledging its strategic value. Noorman’s research on the 17th-century Dutch art market challenges entrenched assumptions by demonstrating the central role of women not only as artists but as patrons and consumers, notably through a re-evaluation of archival evidence surrounding Johannes Vermeer and his likely patron Maria de Knuijt. By exposing gendered biases in the interpretation of documents such as wills and probate inventories, the episode highlights how historiography has systematically obscured women’s agency.

In this episode, Caroline Fowler is joined by former Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow Darius Bost to unpack the enduring impact of Hortense Spillers’s 1987 landmark essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”  The conversation situates the essay within its historical context, including its critique of the Moynihan Report and its intervention in Black feminist and Black Studies discourse. They also reflect on why the essay continues to be widely cited—yet sometimes insufficiently understood—within art history and beyond. The episode considers how Spillers’s ideas open up possibilities for reimagining visual culture, embodiment, and Black queer futures today.

In this episode, Caroline Fowler engages former RAP fellow David Scott in a reflective conversation on generational consciousness, intellectual inheritance, and the shifting horizons of political and artistic imagination. What begins as an observation of a quiet rupture between senior scholars and emerging voices unfolds into a rich dialogue about the languages we inherit—and the ones we fail to share. Drawing on Scott’s formative experiences in post-independence Jamaica and his work founding the Caribbean journal of criticism Small Axe, the episode probes how different generations inhabit distinct temporalities shaped by hope, disillusionment, and the afterlives of historical transformation. This conversation invites listeners to reconsider what it means to belong to a generation, to inherit a past, and to imagine futures that remain, however tenuously, within reach.