artbull-argument-development

Argument Development (artbull-argument-development)

The heart of an Art Bulletin article is a thesis about works of art that is fresh, consequential, and demonstrated. This skill turns positioning (artbull-scholarly-positioning) and looking (artbull-visual-analysis) into a sustained argument. The closely related visual and evidentiary work lives in its own skills; here you build the claim and its warrant.

When to trigger

• Crystallizing the thesis and what is at stake in it
• The draft "describes beautifully" but reviewers cannot find the argument
• Linking formal observations and documents into an interpretation
• Defining the scope conditions and counter-readings you must answer

Building the argument

1. State the thesis as a claim, not a topic. "This altarpiece reframes X" — something that could be wrong, that a reader could dispute. A topic ("the altarpiece's iconography") is not a thesis.
2. Make the stakes explicit. Why does the claim matter for how the field understands this art, this period, or this method? Tie back to the gap you named in positioning.
3. Warrant every interpretive leap. Each move from what we see / what the document says to what it means needs a reason. Name the inference; do not smuggle it in with adjectives.
4. Integrate the visual and the documentary. The strongest Art Bulletin arguments interlock close looking (artbull-visual-analysis) with archival/provenance evidence (artbull-evidence-and-sources).
5. Anticipate the counter-reading. Art-historical claims are contestable; state the most serious rival interpretation and show why yours accounts for the evidence better.
6. Set scope conditions. Be candid about what the argument does and does not establish; modest, defensible claims beat sweeping ones reviewers can puncture.

Anti-patterns

• Description dressed as argument — vivid prose with no contestable claim
• Connoisseurial assertion ("clearly by the master's hand") with no warranted reasoning
• Over-claiming beyond what the objects and documents can bear
• Ignoring the obvious rival interpretation a reviewer will raise
• An argument that does not actually need the images it reproduces

What an Art Bulletin referee looks for in the claim

Referees at the College Art Association's flagship quarterly read for whether a contestable art-historical thesis is carried by looking and documents, not gestured at.

Argument move	Strong (publishable)	Weak (referee will flag)	The venue-specific fix
Thesis form	A claim about meaning, making, or attribution that could be wrong	A topic "deserving attention"	Recast the topic as a disputable proposition about the work
Warrant	Each inference from object/document to meaning is named	Adjectives carry the leap	Replace the adjective with a reason a reader could check
Rival reading	The strongest interpretation is answered	The obvious counter-reading is ignored	State the rival; show your account fits the evidence better

Worked vignette: an attribution argument under the magnifying glass

Suppose a draft argues that a small, unsigned Lamentation panel, long catalogued as "workshop of" a named master, is an autograph early work. The thesis becomes contestable — not "this neglected panel merits study" but "this panel is the master's earliest autograph work, and dating it so revises the accepted sequence of his style." The warrant is named at each link: underdrawing in infrared reflectography matches the master's documented practice (a technical inference, not connoisseurial intuition); a 1470s inventory placing a "Lamentation, small" in the patron's collection is a documentary inference, its silence noted. The rival reading — a close follower — is answered, and the scope stays honest: autograph status and a probable date, not the lost commission.

Where reviewers push back, and the move that answers it

• "This is connoisseurship asserting, not arguing." Convert each "by his hand" assertion into a named, checkable inference — technical, comparative, or documentary — a skeptic could test.
• "The contribution is local." Re-anchor the stakes in a problem art historians of other periods recognize: workshop practice or the limits of attribution method.

Calibration anchors (hedge where uncertain)

• A typical article sustains one governing thesis across a long span (roughly 16,000 words including endnotes — confirm against the journal's current submission guidelines); the image plate is evidence, so a claim uncheckable against a numbered figure reads as assertion here.

Output format

【Thesis】one contestable sentence
【Stakes】why it matters to the field
【Evidence chain】visual + documentary → interpretation (warrants named)
【Rival reading】strongest counter + why yours wins
【Scope】what it does / does not establish
【Next】artbull-visual-analysis

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — archives, provenance, and technical-art-history sources
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — scope and contribution expectations