The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology / Edition 2

by Donald Preziosi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199229840
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2009
Series:	Oxford History of Art
Edition description:	New
Pages:	600
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Donald Preziosi is a member of the History Faculty at Oxford University and Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA. He is the author of many books, including In the Aftermath of Art and Rethinking Art History.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Donald Preziosi, Art History: Making the Visible Legible

Chapter 1: Art as History
Introduction
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture
Whitney Davis, Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History

Chapter 2: Aesthetics
Introduction
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art
D.N. Rodowick, Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic
William Pietz, Fetish

Chapter 3: Form, Content, Style
Introduction
Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History
Ernst Gombrich, Style
David Summers, 'Form', Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the problem of Art Historical Description
David Summers, Style

Chapter 4: Anthropology and/as 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 Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics
Claire Farago, Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic Subject from the Discourse of Art History

Chapter 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 Context and Senders
Stephen Bann, Meaning/Interpretation

Chapter 6: Deconstruction and 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]

Chapter 7: Authorship and Identity
Introduction
Michael 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
Jennifer Doyle, Queer Wallpaper

Chapter 8: Globalization and its Discontents
Introduction
Timothy Mitchell, Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order
Carol Duncan, The Art Museum as Ritual
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
Satya P. Mohanty, Can Our Values be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics
Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Theory, and Practice
María Fernández, 'Life-like': Historicizing Process and Responsiveness in Digital Art
Donald Preziosi, Epilogue: The Art of Art History
Coda, Plato's Dilemma and the Tasks of the Art Historian Today

Notes
List of Texts
List of Illustrations
Biographical Notes
Glossary
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Definitely the best introduction to art history currently available."—Professor Norman Bryson, University of San Diego

"What makes this anthology more than an arresting assemblage is the author's critical stance towards what he has wrought."—Professor Robert S. Nelson, Yale University

"Vivid and inspiring...a flamboyant book."—Professor Johanne Lamoureux, University of Montreal

From the Publisher

This masterly collection of texts interrogates the raging academic question, What is art history? Editor Preziosi, who directs ground-breaking critical studies of art history and museology, provides introductions to 35 challenging readings gathered in nine chapters. This plethora of alternatives is curiously complicated, even obfuscating. Covered here are the most current and relevant approaches to aesthetics, style, iconography and semiology, feminism, gender studies, formalism, postmodernism, deconstruction, museography, hybridity, and multiculturalism; those offering critical analysis range from Winckelmann, Kant, Wolfflin, Panofsky, Schapiro, Gombrich, and Derrida to Rosalind Krauss and Carol Duncan. Ultimately, this book is best suited to upper- and graduate-level collections and to the reference shelf of specialized art collections, as it proposes the discipline of art history itself as an art.Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD

Library Journal