Shadows in the Cave: Seeing as knowing in the history of art
About the lecture
Since the High Renaissance, in works such as Giorgione’s The Three Philosophers (1505-9), artists have been drawn to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a way of visualising what it is to understand the world through seeing it.
Through the decades, artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Edward Hopper, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Louis Bourgeois, Robert Smithson, Juan Downey, Mike Kelley, Jeffrey Shaw, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Kara Walker, have used this allegory to represent their visualisation of the world.
In a fascinating parallel, this allegorical method has inspired several thinkers with a marked interest in art, among them Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Kaja Silverman. Meanwhile, the association between caves, visibility and sacred knowledge remains intense in several Indigenous cultures, not least those of First Nations peoples in Australia. Both kinds of allegory resonate in the work of city-based artists such as Gordon Bennett and Daniel Boyd.
This lecture will explore these parallels and differences.
Professor Terry Smith’s visit is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest, the Australian Institute of Art History and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
About the speaker
Professor Terry Smith
Professor Terry Smith is an Australian art historian, art critic, and artist who has lived and worked in Sydney, New York City, and Pittsburgh. Since 2001 and as of 2025 he is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, Faculty at Large in the Curatorial Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York, and for the academic year 2025-6 is Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University. From 2011 to 2014 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Other positions of note include Clark Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in 2014; GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre in 2007-2008; Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute 2001-2002; Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, 1994-2001. He was a member of the Art & Language group (New York) and a founder of Union Media Services (Sydney). During the 1970s he was art critic at these Australian newspapers: Weekend Australian, Nation Review, Times on Sunday; he continues to write for art journals and magazines throughout the world. Smith has authored a number of books, including titles such as Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993), Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (2019). A foundation Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and from 2004 to 2014 Board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, he is currently a member of the Board of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and of the Biennial Foundation, New York. His awards include the Franklin Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 2010, the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award in 2011, and inaugural Georgia O'Keefe Museum Prize 2009.
Further information
Professor Terry Smith will also be presenting a talk at the National Gallery of Victoria on Saturday 10 October titled World Picturing by Contemporary Artists: Perceiving the Polycrisis with Professor Terry Smith. For more information, click here.
Image: Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, c. 1505-1509. Public domain.
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