Professionalizing the Senses: Art and Music History in Vienna, 1890–1920

Abstract

Since about 1880 there has been a significant change in the way we talk about art and music, and, in particular, the way art and music are spoken about in academic institutions. We now largely undertake studies of art and music under the rubric of historical style and use the category of style as a limiting concept, both temporal and technical, to explain, evaluate, and understand the work of art. One particular sense of style, which may be described as the structural-historical, came to prominence at the end of the last century as the result of attempts by art and music historians to carve out for themselves an interpretive, social, and institutional space atop that Olympus of academia, the German—here specifically the Viennese—Universität.