num_pages: 256
description:  Faced with an increasingly media-saturated globalized culture art historians have begun to ask themselves challenging and provocative questions about the nature of their discipline. Why did the history of art come into being? Is it now in danger of slipping into obsolescence? And if so should we care? In Writing Art History Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville address these questions by exploring some assumptions at the disciplines foundation. Their project is to excavate the lost continuities between philosophical aesthetics contemporary theory and art history through close readings of figures as various as Michael Baxandall Martin Heidegger Jacques Lacan and Alois Riegl. Ultimately the authors propose that we might reframe the questions concerning art history by asking what kind of writing might help the discipline to better imagine its actual practicesand its potential futures.
language: English
title: Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures
publisher: University of Chicago Press