Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts
Subtitle: Art History As Writing
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: January 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 300
ISBN-13: 9780271016306
Subjects: Historiography; History Of Art / Art & Design Styles; Theory of art; Criticism; History - General; History Of Fine Arts; Art & Art Instruction; Art
Description: How do psychoanalytic, semiotic, deconstructive, and other interpretations represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? In Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, Elkins suggests that the philosophic problems posed by these questions are essentially insuperable because philosophy makes demands of visual artifacts that they can answer only by becoming mirror images of philosophic discourse.

Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection.

Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or as objective discovery and reporting.