Gardens and the death of art: Robert Irwin's Getty Garden

摘要

It is with some trepidation that, as an art historian, I speak to the Australian Garden History Society. Art historians like to approach gardens through images, and such an approach to garden history is not always looked upon favourably. For example,Charles Quest-Ritson, in his recent The English Garden: A Social History, asserts that: Garden history has been abducted by the art historians . . . too much garden history has been concerned with when gardens were made, what they looked like, who made them and how they changed. As his title indicates, he is concerned with a social history of gardens; an admirable aim, although in Quest-Ritson's reductive conception it often seems to boil down to being an account of the snob-factor in gardens.