The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology New Edition Oxford History of Art Donald Preziosi is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and former Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He was educated in art history, classics, and linguistics at Harvard, and has taught at Yale, SUNY, MIT, UCLA, and Oxford. He has lectured and conducted seminars on the history of art history and museology in the North America, Europe, and Australia. Among his books are Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science; and Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (the 2001 Oxford Slade Lectures). He is co-author with Louise Hitchcock of the Oxford University Press volume Aegean Art and Architecture, and co-author and co-editor with Claire Farago of Grasping the World: Th e Idea of the Museum. Oxford History of Art Titles in the Oxford History of Art series are up-to-date, fully illustrated introductions to a wide variety of subjects written by leading experts in their fi eld. Th ey will appear regularly, building into an interlocking and comprehensive series. In the list below, published titles appear in bold. WESTERN ART Archaic and Classical Greek Art Robin Osborne Classical Art From Greece to Rome Mary Beard & John Henderson Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph Jas Elsner Early Medieval Art Lawrence Nees Medieval Art Veronica Sekules Art in Renaissance Italy Evelyn Welch Northern Renaissance Art Susie Nash Art in Europe 1700–1830 Matthew Craske Modern Art 1851–1929 Richard Brettell After Modern Art 1945–2000 David Hopkins WESTERN ARCHITECTURE Roman Architecture Janet Delaine Early Medieval Architecture Roger Stalley Medieval Architecture Nicola Coldstream Renaissance Architecture Christy Anderson Baroque and Rococo Architecture Hilary Ballon European Architecture 1750–1890 Barry Bergdoll Modern Architecture Alan Colquhoun Contemporary Architecture Anthony Vidler Architecture in the United States Dell Upton WORLD ART Aegean Art and Architecture Donald Preziosi & Louise Hitchcock Early Art and Architecture of Africa Peter Garlake African-American Art Sharon F. Patton Nineteenth-Century American Art Barbara Groseclose Twentieth-Century American Art Erika Doss Australian Art Andrew Sayers Byzantine Art Robin Cormack Art in China Craig Clunas East European Art Jeremy Howard Indian Art Partha Mitter Islamic Art Irene Bierman Japanese Art Karen Brock Native North American Art Janet Berlo & Ruth Phillips Polynesian and Micronesian Art Adrienne Kaeppler WESTERN DESIGN Twentieth-Century Design Jonathan Woodham Design in the USA Jeff rey L. Meikle Fashion Christopher Breward PHOTOGRAPHY The Photograph Graham Clarke American Photography Miles Orvell WESTERN SCULPTURE Sculpture 1900–1945 Penelope Curtis Sculpture Since 1945 Andrew Causey THEMES AND GENRES Landscape and Western Art Malcolm Andrews Portraiture Shearer West Eroticism and Art Alyce Mahon Beauty and Art Elizabeth Prettejohn REFERENCE BOOKS The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology Donald Preziosi (ed.) Oxford History of Art Th e Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology New Edition Edited by Donald Preziosi Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Ltd ISBN 978-0-19-922984-0 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Contents Introduction 1 Donald Preziosi, Art History: Making the Visible Legible 7 Chapter 1 Art as History Introduction 13 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects 22 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Refl ections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture 27 Whitney Davis, Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History 35 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention 45 Chapter 2 Aesthetics Introduction 55 Immanuel Kant, Th e Critique of Judgement 62 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art 80 D. N. Rodowick, Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic 89 William Pietz, Fetish 109 Chapter 3 Form, Content, Style Introduction 115 Heinrich Wölffl in, Principles of Art History 119 Ernst Gombrich, Style 129 David Summers, ‘Form’, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description 141 David Summers, Style 144 vi contents Chapter 4 Anthropology and/as Art History Introduction 151 Alois Riegl, Leading Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen 155 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America 162 Edgar Wind, Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics 189 Claire Farago, Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic Subject from the Discourse of Art History 195 Chapter 5 Mechanisms of Meaning Introduction 215 Erwin Panofsky, Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art 220 Hubert Damisch, Semiotics and Iconography 236 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders 243 Stephen Bann, Meaning/ Interpretation 256 Chapter 6 Deconstruction and the Limits of Interpretation Introduction 271 Stephen Melville, Th e Temptation of New Perspectives 274 Martin Heidegger, Th e Origin of the Work of Art 284 Meyer Schapiro, Th e Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh 296 Jacques Derrida, Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure] 301 Chapter 7 Authorship and Identity Introduction 317 Michel Foucault, What is an Author? 321 Craig Owens, Th e Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism 335 Mary Kelly, Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism 352 Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Th eory 356 Rey Chow, Postmodern Automatons 367 Amelia Jones, ‘Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure’: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics 375 Jennifer Doyle, Queer Wallpaper 391 Chapter 8 Globalization and its Discontents Introduction 403 Timothy Mitchell, Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order 409 Carol Duncan, Th e Art Museum as Ritual 424 Walter Benjamin, Th e Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility 435 Satya P. Mohanty, Can Our Values be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics 443 Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies: Questions of History, Th eory, and Practice 455 María Fernández, ‘Life-like’: Historicizing Process and Responsiveness in Digital Art 468 Donald Preziosi, Epilogue: Th e Art of Art History 488 Coda, Plato’s Dilemma and the Tasks of the Art Historian Today 504 Notes 510 List of Texts 564 List of Illustrations 566 Biographical Notes 569 Glossary 572 Index 580 contents vii This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Th e Art of Art History is a collection of resources for constructing a critical history of art history. It is not organized as a conventional ‘history of art his- tory’ in its own right, nor is it a historical novel with a beginning, middle, and end. It is rather more of an assemblage, or a cabinet of provocative things to think with, each of which has multiple connections to others, both within this anthology and elsewhere. It is also an ‘anthology’ in the older sense of the word—an accounting of things which in their variety and allure might resemble a garden of fl owers; a collection of texts that, in some cases, have been appreciated as fi ne works of art in their own right. Th e volume is made up of essays and excerpts from books written on a number of interrelated themes over the past four centuries. Each of these in its own time (and diff erently at other times) has either sparked, engaged with, or been used by other writers for their own engagements with a wide variety of intensive and in many cases ongoing debates. Th e arguments of some directly address those of essays juxtaposed with them. Th ere are several alternate per- spectives on the same issue or artwork. All of them deal with the nature and fate of the phenomenon of ‘art’ in modern times, with diff ering articulations of artistic ‘histories’, with diff erent visions on the social roles of art history and criticism, and with the enterprises of modernity more broadly. Th e collected texts are treated not as isolated monuments, however per- sistently infl uential some of them have been—in some cases seeming to have lives of their own. Nor are they arranged to simulate a single mainstream evolutionary path. Th ey are not assembled here disingenuously to ‘speak for themselves’, as if they were paintings hung on the bare walls of a modernist art gallery. Th ere are few blank walls in Th e Art of Art History. Its walls are covered with writing, signposts, an occasional bit of graffi ti, and punctuated by open- ings onto other spaces, with invitations and provocations guiding the visitor towards more specimens, diff erent resources, and other possible worlds. All of the texts in this collection were originally produced within often highly charged environments of controversy and debate in various places around the world over the past two hundred years, having themselves often sparked such controversies. Th ey are deployed here within a series of discus- sions, commentaries, and critiques whose aim is to foster an understanding of important aspects of their critical and historical situations, and to allow the reader to engage with them in a dialogic and interrogative manner. Th e texts, in short, are embedded in a dense series of overwritings or palimpsests. Th e 2 introduction collection may thus be walked through from a variety of directions, and along several intersecting paths, and issues or themes elicited through and around one text will often re-emerge elsewhere in a similar or transformed manner. Th e accompanying commentaries both link and mark diff erences between texts, and serve as catalysts and workpoints for discussion. Th ey also indicate alternative paths through this thicket of texts and overwritings. Organization In format, Th e Art of Art History is organized around groups of major debates and themes that have characterized the literature of the discipline since the eighteenth century’s articulation of the ‘aesthetic’ as a distinct object of study connected with the production of knowledge about human nature and cogni- tion. Th e volume attends to the diverse ways in which art history may be seen as constituting a social and epistemological technology which has been essential to the conception, fabrication, and maintenance of (originally European, subse- quently all) modern nation-states, and of the individual and collective iden tities that are staged as the supports and justifi cations for these political entities. Th e readings deal with many familiar subjects of art, aesthetics, history, style, meaning, protocols of explanation, perception, identity, gender, and ethnicity. Th e selections are organized according to these themes, and the texts included follow a roughly chronological order from the late eighteenth to late twentieth centuries. Included in each chapter is a bibliography of related readings recommended for further study. In each section, the texts presented as well as those recommended are pertinent to an understanding of the history of art history and to the complementary development of museums and museological practice. Th eir aim is to foreground some of the fun- damental issues that lie deeper than recent academic debates over competing theories and methodologies. As already noted, the selections and the trajectory of readings are not meant to chart an imaginary singular narrative history of art history. It will become clear that any such narrative is not a little problematical given the diversity of the fi eld, its disparate missions and motivations, as well as the often contrary social, political, or ideological uses to which such singular genealogies and narrative stories have been put in the past and at present. Th e Art of Art History has an explicitly diff erent aim: to provide the reader with what in the writer’s experience have proven to be productive and useful resources and points of departure in the continuing debates about the state—and possible fate—of the art of art history, in both senses of the phrase. Two framing essays by the editor are included. Th e fi rst, ‘Art History: Mak- ing the Visible Legible’, is intended as a general overview of the subject—and the objectives—of art history, and may be imagined as a belvedere, providing an overview or synopsis of the issues taken up in the collection. A second, the Epilogue ‘Th e Art of Art History’, is a hindsight meditation on the preceding texts and discussions, including the fi rst essay itself: a palimpsest on the whole, and a crossroads leading to other journeys and other worlds. Both essays might function as anamorphic patches in the overall collection, like the odd shape in Hans Holbein’s Th e Ambassadors (1533), the slantwise focus upon which reveals otherwise hidden perspectives on, and diff erent readings of, a larger assemblage [1]. In this case, the two texts ‘read’ the overall introduction 3 collection otherwise. Relative to each other, and seen in the same frame, the fi rst and last essays comprise the alternating co-present faces or fronts of an ‘optical illusion’; an oscillating and enigmatic double image—a simulation (as it may become clear) of the artifi ce that historically set art history in play, and of the tensions that have kept it in motion. Th e new edition Since its fi rst appearance in 1998, Th e Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology has remained one of the most widely used English-language introductions to the historiography of the academic discipline of art history. Its extensive international distribution and use was a catalyst for what has since become a veritable industry of art historical and visual studies readers, anthologies, and guides published and widely marketed in many countries, many aimed at specialized readerships. Th is second edition introduces some strategic changes both to the original collection of texts as well as to the editor- 1 Hans Holbein the Younger The Ambassadors, 1533. 4 introduction ial introductions and critical commentaries. It consequently rethinks the methods and goals of the entire project, engaging with ongoing disciplin ary and extra-disciplinary changes and turns our attention to issues and problems both new and newly rethought. It continues the book’s original concern with promoting active engagement with understanding the artifi ce, polit- ical and social mediatedness, and the historical and regional specifi cities of the institutions and professions of art history and visual culture studies. As with the fi rst edition, this is not a ‘history of art history’ nor a historiog- raphy of ‘visual culture studies’; rather, it is a critical interrogation of the arti- fi ce itself of those histories. It maintains its original pragmatic commitment to aff ording and encouraging critique rather than promoting hagiography or celebrating one or another sectarian academic consensus, thereby necessarily working against the grain of disciplinary commodifi cation. Rather than articulating a singular historiography, Th e Art of Art History continues to aff ord multiple opportunities for understanding what has made disciplinary beliefs about the humanly made and appropriated visual environment and its modes of analysis possible or persuasive. Its basic aim is to foster the critical study of the production of art historical knowledge from diff erent and not necessarily compatible perspectives. As with the fi rst edition, the book juxtaposes diverse and divergent per- spectives on similar and common critical issues, foregrounding the fabricat- edness of what the academic discipline has both naturalized and marginalized in the course of its historical evolution. It continues to be concerned with the exposure from within of what is frequently concealed in institutional and professional practice: an ambivalence and amnesia about what has produced and maintained institutional beliefs about art and artistry in the fi rst place. It off ers some of the means to give body to the ghosts in the machinery of disciplinary theories, methods, dogmas, and doctrines. Working as a historian, critic, or museologist of artistry in the contempor- ary world demands increasingly explicit attention to the ethical dimension of one’s practice and its inescapable political and economic resonances, along with an acknowledgement that one’s intellectual and professional labour implicates and fosters enterprises devoted to the fabrication, maintenance, and political transformation of social life. Th e close but often easily masked connection between ethics and aesthetics in disciplinary education, both within and outside the professional boundaries of art history, art criticism, art practice, and museology, has itself come under increasing scrutiny, as some of the texts in this second edition attest. All of the aforementioned marks a situation rather diff erent from the period of ‘disciplinary crisis’ of a generation ago, the latter characterized by premature and perfunctory announcements of an ‘end’ of art history and by coincident attempts to assimilate art history into warmed-over versions of post-war visual anthropology or formalist semiology. Th ere is today a newly re-emergent acknowledgement of art history’s debt to earlier discursive prac- tices which the nineteenth century institutionalization of art history sup- pressed or rendered illegible—namely, the fundamentally religious nature of European (and many other) artistic practices, and the markedly diff erent pre-modern and early modern distinctions amongst what came to be pro- fessionally compartmentalized in Europe in the post-Enlightenment era as introduction 5 art, religion, science, and philosophy. Th ere is a growing awareness refl ected in the readings below of what art history as a ‘coy science’ had repressed or rendered invisible. In the fi rst edition of Th e Art of Art History and elsewhere, I discussed the discipline’s uneasy and ambivalent relation to religion as art history’s largely covert ‘secular theologism’, arguing that the discipline as such is defi ned precisely as this ambivalence in its epistemological investments. Th e fi eld’s coy scientism has long been coeval with its coy spiritualism, a point explicitly addressed in the new Coda to this volume. Th is second edition furthers the critical explication of that ambivalence, emblematized in the earlier edition by attention to the anamorphism of Holbein’s Ambassadors. As that cover image [1] was an emblem of the fi rst edition’s attentiveness to the manufacture of disciplinary artifi ce, the image here [2] is a hauntingly poignant reminder—continuing the fi rst edition’s attentiveness to artifi ce—of the sacral centrality of art in the contemporary world. Th e secular theologism of the discipline of art history is rarely so power- fully epitomized as it is here, in the cut-away façade of Yoshio Taniguchi’s Rockefeller annexe to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, seen from the late modernist sculpture garden behind the museum’s original building. Virtually a re-enactment of the European medieval cathedral’s stained glass window, with resonances of high-end multistorey shop windows, Taniguchi’s MOMA façade off ers a tableau illuminating the sacred hierarchies of modern aesthetic 2 Yoshio Taniguchi: Museum of Modern Art, New York: Rockefeller Annex. 6 introduction fetishism, idolatry, and hagiography. Seen here in its actual urban context, the building stages a dialogic interaction with all that is hidden and presumed to reside in all the buildings around it. And all that is obscured in that wider view—the street-level world of commerce and commodifi cation, hidden by the museum’s own walls—is here hidden in full view in the museum itself. Th e fundamental entailment of what are distinguished in modernity as art and religion is discussed in some detail in the framing commentaries of this new edition of Th e Art of Art History. Th e very fact of art (however defi ned) has long been seen as a fundamental challenge to our most cherished beliefs about the nature of reality; indeed to our very being as human. Despite the largely modernity-specifi c reifi cation and fetishization of fi ne art, the world created by artistry is not some marginal ‘second (aesthetic) world’ alongside the everyday world in which we live; the world of art or artifi ce is that very world. If what we may still wish to term ‘art history’ is to have not only academic but broader critical relevance and social force at the present time, it will be in its capacity to reckon with the challenge and promise of art in all that it does, in all the ways it does so in human soci- eties around the world now and the past. To do anything less today would be to ignore the brilliantly rich diversity of art’s histories, the poignancy of art’s ironies and paradoxes, and the inherent strength of art’s promise to being: a promise that exists and changes in our dialogic interactions and recreations of the world we weave around ourselves, with art. Oxford, 2008