"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's Fountain. But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased ...urgency during the 1970s, when new developments in critical theory and other intellectual projects dramatically transformed the discipline. The first edition of Critical Terms for Art History both mapped and contributed to those transformations, offering a spirited reassessment of the field's methods and terminology.Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, making a second edition of this book not just timely, but crucial. Like its predecessor, this new edition consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art. For example, Richard Shiff discusses "Originality" in Vija Celmins's To Fix the Image in Memory, a work made of eleven pairs of stones, each consisting of one "original" stone and one painted bronze replica.In addition to the twenty-two original essays, this edition includes nine new ones— performance, style, memory/monument, body, beauty, ugliness, identity, visual culture/visual studies, and social history of art —as well as new introductory material. All help expand the book's scope while retaining its central goal of stimulating discussion of theoretical issues in art history and making that discussion accessible to both beginning students and senior scholars.Contributors: Mark Antliff, Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Stephen Bann, Homi K. Bhabha, Suzanne Preston Blier, Michael Camille, David Carrier, Craig Clunas, Whitney Davis, Jas Elsner, Ivan Gaskell, Ann Gibson, Charles Harrison, James D. Herbert, Amelia Jones, Wolfgang Kemp, Joseph Leo Koerner, Patricia Leighten, Paul Mattick Jr., Richard Meyer, W. J. T. Mitchell, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, William Pietz, Alex Potts, Donald Preziosi, Lisbet Rausing, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Kristine Stiles, David Summers, Paul Wood, James E. Young
...it is very hard to understand: "seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable" (p. 11). ...no single testable theory emerges; Elkins-in this respect, unlike Gombrich-is interested less in ...proposing a quasi-scientific account of pictures than in providing the basis for a phenomenology of perception. Nothing is likely to be less productive than prolonged discussion by a reviewer who finds the assumptions of an author he admires absolutely implausible. Because I enjoy Crow's energy, originality, and persistence, I can only report my absolute inability to explain or understand why he makes this obviously futile attempt to divide artworks, or art journals, into those that are good because they are politically critical, and those others that, lacking that political meaning, are not good. Some students are taught to feel "free to pick and choose from the past at random," others "to parody tradition"; "most postmodern artists of both kinds . .are perfect products of art teaching in universities" (p. 47). Because students arrive at college with their minds filled with recycled images, survey courses in art history, de Duve argues, should "with a zest of humour" be "deliberately advertised as package deals in cultural tourism" (p. 54).
