Notes on James Elkins' 'Intuitive Stores', from Stories of Art, New York, 2002 Elkins explains the idea

of 'toy systems' in physics. He advocates for applying this system to individuals' own knowledge of art history, and create new 'maps'. The result would be as much about you as art history. They can be very personal, and may not refer to one another's at all. A constellation is a very free map to produce as it does not apply weight to history and value through scale or linkages. A bar chart can represent past, present and future as rows for example. Landscapes are a particularly interesting application of this technique. This process provides fantastic insights. For example, Chinese students more often than not don't include Dada and Surrealism, because when the Chinese visited france in the 1920's they were only considering conservative forms. Generally, modern (western) art is exotic to Chinese people. A Chinese student of Elkins used her map to express how Chinese art is seen to be in decline in the last century. For her modern art includes Chinese art. Her story, goes back to ancient Chinese art - a story which most modern text books leave out. Another of his students' maps intuited how Surrealism petered out in the 1940's, after its initial rise in the 1920's. This map reflected the diverse themes that are equally available under post-modernism. Elkins says of Gombrich that the central theme of 'The Story of Art' is the lineage of realistic depiction. These maps provides a subjective reflection of the way the past is felt, imagined and used. By producing such a map you are making your stake in this discourse; unlike not doing so whereby you are watching it go by