The Art of Art History: A critical anthology

Critical readings from the field´s most innovative and influential texts over the last 200 years. What is art history? Why, how and where did it originate, and how have its aims and 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 a critical reading of the field´s most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology.
Contents * Donald Preziosi: Making the Visible Legible * Chapter 1. Art as History * Introduction * 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 * Chapter 2. Aesthetics * Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? * Immanuel Kant: The Critique of Judgement * G. W. F. Hegel: Philosophy of Fine Art * Chapter 3. Style * Heinrich Wölfflin: Principles in Art History * David Summers: "Form", Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description * Meyer Schapiro: Style * Ernst Gombrich: Style * Chapter 4. History as an Art * Alois Riegl: Leading Characteristics of the Later Roman Kunstwollen * A. Warburg: Images from the Regions of the Pueblo Indians * Edgar Wind: Warburg´s Concept of Kunstwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics * Margaret Iversen: Retrieving Warburg´s Tradition * Chapter 5. Mechanisms of Meaning: Iconography and Semiology * Hubert Damisch: Semiotics and Iconography * Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson: Semiotics and Art History * E. Panofsky: Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition * Louis Marin: Toward A Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin´s The Arcadian Shepherds * Chapter 6. Modernity and its Discontents * Rosalind Krauss: Sculpture in the Expanded Field * Michel Foucault: What Is an Author? * Craig Owens: The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism * Andreas Huyssen: Mapping the Postmodern * Chapter 7. The Gendered Subject * Nanette Salomon: The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission * Lisa Tickner: Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists * Mary Kelly and Paul Smith: No Essential Femininity * Amelia Jones: Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art * Chapter 8. Deconstruction and the Limits of Interpretation * 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 * Jacques Derrida: Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure] * Chapter 9. The Other: Art History and/as Museology * Timothy Mitchell: Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order * Carol Duncan: Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums * Annie E. Coombes: The Recalcitrant Object: Culture Contact and the Question of Hybridity * Nestor Garcia Canclini * Donald Preziosi * Afterword, Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Biographical Notes.