Integrated Interdisciplinarity

The primary discipline and focal subject of my degree plan is art history. Elizabeth Mansfield defines the profession in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline: “In practice, art history combines the authenticating and valuating mission of the connoisseur, the hagiographic indulgences of the biographer, the cataloguing impulse of the botanist, the alternately reflective and reflexive tendencies of the historian, and the philosopher’s willingness to calibrate aesthetic transcendence.”[1] In the same text the Mansfield explains that the exact inception of art history as a professional discipline is unknown but definitively associated with the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. The methodology of art history is akin to those of other history professions as it is a skillful procurement of recorded information and inference. Art historians take account of artifacts and analyze them through anthropological and sociological observation; thus, these conclusions are imbued with the inherent biases of the historians themselves. In understanding the imperfect nature of this methodology, Elizabeth Mansfield suggests correcting for this by “treating texts, methods, and policies as the realization of our institutional history…the stories we write about art may in fact be read as myths insofar as they carry reassuring references to our disciplinary purpose and history.”[2] Through this disillusionment of the authoritative quality of historical documentation, we are equipped with an essential nuanced lens to consume the historic without total submission to the author’s impression or experience of history. Aside from this threat of bias, art history’s greatest strength is the formal documentation of human creations, and the objective record of the period and place of said creations. Through the immortalization of visual works, a discourse can form; Beginning from a first-hand assessment of an object, continued through infinite derivative observations, hopefully thoughtfully informed by a contextualization of the previous sources. The inclusive and expansive quality of this discipline contributes a rich cultural well that is remarkably collaborative and infinite.

My secondary discipline is business management. Within the Oxford Dictionary of Business and Management the subject description reads “Management in the verbal sense concerns the act of managing an organization or a part of it in order to make most effective use of available resources, and management in the substantive sense concerns the people involved in these types of managerial activities, i.e. the directing, planning and running of the business operations”[3]. The origins of commerce, and subsequent commerce management, span from ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley[4], but the educational discipline began much later in the twentieth century at Harvard Business School with studies of Business History taught by Norman Scott Brien Gras in 1920.[5] The methodology of this discipline has historically lacked a formal attachment to social sciences until recent developments. The discipline is now under transformation as many professionals seek to acknowledge and define its unifying philosophical theory. In acceptance of the profession’s direct relation and influence by the humanities, under the view of Shoubo Xu and Lie Da Xu[6], its methodology are those of reason sourced through corporate: philosophy, natural science, engineering technology, and social science, each exerted to control and direct a company toward their achievement objectives. A common critique of the discipline of business management can be the lack of consistency and substance behind model business leadership. The strengths of this twenty-first century modernization of the discipline are to both humanize the relationship between the leader and faculty and ground the practice with sound reason and holisticness.

My final integrated discipline is philosophy. With texts originating like Abraham Grau’s “Historia Philosophica”[7] as early as the sixteenth century it is remarked that the documentation of ancient theories and logic patterns were to establish a foundation of thought for later generations of philosophers to further develop and embellish with contemporary methods of reasoning. Philosophy is defined by Britannica as “the rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience. Philosophical inquiry is a central element in the intellectual history of many civilizations.”[8]  In The History of Philosophy as a Discipline, Margaret D. Wilson distinguishes the contrast of philosophy’s disciplinary function and methodology against that of the history of philosophy, defining its aim with inquiries such as “Is the view true, reasonable, plausible, possible, or not? Are the reasons offered for it adequate or even conclusive? Which other reasons could one advance in favor of the view, which ones do speak against it?”[9]. I believe the strengths of this discipline within academia are to prime students for ingesting and critiquing thought through an extensive sequence of our most ancient, recorded theories of reason. The discipline itself upholds a broad spectrum of rigidity and absurdity that dissects the very formation of human logic wholly. However, a weakness of the discipline within Western academia is the concentration of non-diverse historical representation, which directly opposes the broad and inclusive nature of the discipline.

Over the course of the semester, I have begun to take an interest in the professional career of art law. Essentially, this career path demands the knowledge of many disciplines from its practitioners in order to form thorough, comprehensive, and analytical arguments. Although it is not explicitly required, the aims of my interdisciplinary education are: to form extensive fundamental knowledge of the subject itself, art,; the economy in which art inhabits; and the legal methods with which to protect it. In combination, the three disciplines of art history, business management, and philosophy within my degree provide me with an ideal foundation of knowledge to create a competitive edge. Art law itself is an intersection of historical art knowledge and consultation, business and legal knowledge, and the comprehension and application of logic and theory. Therefore, my undergraduate education is perfectly priming me to gather the breadth of knowledge required to perform art law with a thorough understanding of its mechanics, each from the art’s point of creation, first sale, and lastly toward its final repossession.

[1] Mansfield, “Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, 1.

[2] Mansfield, “Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, 4.

[3] Law, “Oxford Dictionary of Business and Management”, 1.

[4] Cochran, “Gras, Norman Scott Brien (1884-1956)”, 2.

[5] Xu & Xu, “Information Technology and Management”, 1.

[7] Grau, “Historia Philisophica”, (16th century).

[8] Britannica, “Philosophy” (2025).

[9] Wilson, “The History of Philosophy as a Discipline”, 3.