Passing on Stories: Collective Memories and the Canon

What are we subjected to when presented with stories about art's past in the context of classrooms or collections? In order to prepare students for a profession in the humanities or in the field of artistic production and reception at large, art history courses in higher education are obliged to provide them with an understanding for the collection of texts, debates or works of art that are considered particularly important or characteristic to account for, for example, a particular time, place or cultural development. At the same time, the continuous repetition of certain dominant stories about art's history oversimplifies complex cultural developments, often privileges white, Western, or male individuals, and contains a tendency to "pass on" biased models for interpretation and artistic value over generations. One common strategy to tackle the problem of canons is to first provide students with knowledge about central artworks, persons, debates, or texts of art history and then problematize these dominant narratives by introducing students to (also canonized) texts that criticizes these dominant stories of the discipline's past. Inspired by influential suggestions on how to tackle the problem of canons differently in classroom settings, such as affective engagements with works of art, this session invites papers that contemplates on novel approaches to work with dominant cultural canons in the setting of undergraduate art history courses, curatorial practices, or guided tours in museums.