The Art of Art History A Critical Anthology

New edition of this key guide to art history, which takes a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries, including the most important new writing on the most recent work in a variety of new media.

What is art history? Why, how, and where did it originate, and how have its methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts, focusing on the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: art as history; aesthetics; form, content, and style; anthropology; meaning and interpretation; authorship and identity; and the phenomenon of globalization. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Mary Kelly, and Michel Foucault are brought together, with editorial introductions to each topic providing background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. This updated and expanded edition contains sixteen newly included extracts from key thinkers in the history of art, from Giorgio Vasari to Walter Benjamin and Satya Mohanty; a new section on globalization; and also a new concluding essay from Donald Preziosi on the tasks of the art historian today.

Donald Preziosi: Introduction to the New Edition; Donald Preziosi: Art History: Making the Visible Legible; 1. Art as History; Introduction; Giorgio Vasari: Preface to Part III of 'The Lives'; Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture; Whitney Davis: Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History; Michael Baxandall: Patterns of Intention; 2. Aesthetics; Introduction; Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment?; G.W.F. Hegel: Philosophy of Fine Art; D. N. Rodowick: Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic; Wilhelm Pietz: Fetish; 3. Form, Content, and Style; Introduction; Heinrich W?lfflin: Principles of Art History; Ernst Gombrich: Style; David Summers: 'Form', Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description; David Summers: 'Style'; 4. Anthropology and/or Art History; Introduction; Alois Riegl: Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman 'Kunstwollen'; Aby Warburg: Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America; Edgar Wind: Warburg's Concept of 'Kunstwissenschaft' and its Meaning for Aesthetics; Claire Farago: Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic Subject from the Discourse of Art History; 5. Mechanisms of Meaning; Introduction; Erwin Panofsky: Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art; Hubert Damisch: Semiotics and Iconography; Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson: Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Contexts and Senders; Stephen Bann: Meaning/Interpretation; 6. The Limits of Interpretation; Introduction; Stephen Melville: The Temptation of New Perspectives; Martin Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art; Meyer Schapiro: The Still Life as a Personal Object - a Note on Heidegger and van Gogh; Jacques Derrida: Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [ Pointure]; 7. Authorship and Identity; Introduction; Michel Foucault: What is an Author?; Craig Owens: The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism; Mary Kelly: Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism; Judith Butler: Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory; Rey Chow: Postmodern Automatons; Amelia Jones: 'Every Man Knows How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure': Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics; Jennifer Doyle: Queer Wallpaper; 8. Globalization and its Discontents; Introduction; Timothy Mitchell: Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order; Carol Duncan: The Museum as Ritual; Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version); Satya Mohanty: Can Our Values be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progessive Politics; Marquard Smith: Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice; Maria Fernandez: 'Life-Like': Historicizing Process in Digital Art; Donald Preziosi: Epilogue: The Art of Art History; Coda: Plato's Dilemma and the Tasks of the Art Historian Today

Author of a dozen books on art, architecture, museology, and critical and cultural theory, Donald Preziosi received his doctorate in art history from Harvard and has been a professor of art history at Yale, MIT, UCLA, and Oxford, where he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art in 2000-2001. He is a member of the History Faculty at Oxford University and Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA. In 2005-2006 he was an Andrew Mellon Foundation Distinguished Emeritus Faculty Fellow and in 2007 a MacGeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently working on a study of the complex relations between art and religion in the Western tradition.