The Art of Art History

A Critical Anthology

Donald Preziosi | 3.94 | 430 ratings and reviews

Here is a new edition of Donald Preziosi's masterful selection of the most influential and innovative writing on art history of the past two centuries. The book includes over thirty pieces by seminal thinkers and writers from Winckelmann, Kant, and Hegel to Foucault, Carol Duncan, and Mary Kelly on such subjects as aesthetics and anthropology, postmodern automatons, semiotics and iconography, performative acts, the museum as ritual, digital art, and many others. Each of the book's eight thematic sections offers an introduction providing background information, further reading, and critical commentary on the issues at stake. This edition has been updated and expanded to include sixteen new selections by key figures from Giorgio Vasari to Walter Benjamin and Satya Mohanty, a new concluding essay from Donald Preziosi on the tasks of the art historian today, and an entirely new section on Globalization and Its Discontents. For students and teachers, artists and historians, and anyone interested in the evolution and purpose of art history, this anthology offers many fascinating insights.

Contents:

1. Art as history
Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects by Giorgio Vasari
Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Winckelmann divided : mourning the death of art history by Whitney Davis
Patterns of intention by Michael Baxandall
2. Aesthetics
The critique of judgement by Immanuel Kant
Philosophy of fine art by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Impure mimesis, or, the ends of the aesthetic by D. N. Rodowick
Fetish by William Pietz
3. Form, content, style
Principles of art history by Heinrich Wölfflin
Style by Ernst Gombrich
'Form', nineteenth-century metaphysics, and the problem of art historical description by David Summers
Style by David Summers
4. Anthropology andbyas art history. Leading characteristics of the late Roman Kunstwollen by Alois Riegl
Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America by Aby Warburg
Warburg's concept of kulturwissenschaft and its meaning for aesthetics by Edgar Wind
Silent moves : on excluding the ethnographic subject from the discourse of art history by Claire Farago
5. Mechanisms of meaning
Iconography and iconology : an introduction to the study of Renaissance art by Erwin Panofsky
Semiotics and iconography by Hubert Damisch
Semiotics and art history : a discussion of context and senders by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson
Meaningbyinterpretation by Stephen Bann
6. Deconstruction and the limits to interpretation
The temptation of new perspectives by Stephen Melville
The origin of the work of art by Martin Heidegger
The still life as a personal object : a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh by Meyer Schapiro
Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure] by Jacques Derrida
7. Authorship and identity
What is an author? by Michel Foucault
The discourse of others : feminists and postmodernism by Craig Owens
Re-viewing modernist criticism by Mary Kelly
Performative acts and gender constitution : an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory by Judith Butler
Postmodern automatons by Rey Chow
'Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure' : beauty discourse and the logic of aesthetics by Amelia Jones
Queer wallpaper by Jennifer Doyle
8. Globalization and its discontents
Orientalism and the exhibitionary order by Timothy Mitchell
The art museum as ritual by Carol Duncan
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility by Walter Benjamin
Can our values be objective? : on ethics, aesthetics and progressive politics by Satya P. Mohanty
Visual culture studies : questions of history, theory, and practice by Marquard Smith
'Life-like' : historicizing process and responsiveness in digital art by María Fernández
Epilogue : the art of art history by Donald Preziosi
Plato's dilemma and the tasks of the art historian today less

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