The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology

by Donald Preziosi (Editor)

Here is a new edition of Donald Preziosi's masterful selection of the most influential and innovative writing on art history of the past two centuries. The book includes over thirty pieces by seminal thinkers and writers from Winckelmann, Kant, and Hegel to Foucault, Carol Duncan, and Mary Kelly on such subjects as aesthetics and anthropology, postmodern automatons, semiotics and iconography, performative acts, the museum as ritual, digital art, and many others. Each of the book's eight thematic sections offers an introduction providing background information, further reading, and critical commentary on the issues at stake. This edition has been updated and expanded to include sixteen new selections by key figures from Giorgio Vasari to Walter Benjamin and Satya Mohanty, a new concluding essay from Donald Preziosi on the tasks of the art historian today, and an entirely new section on Globalization and Its Discontents. For students and teachers, artists and historians, and anyone interested in the evolution and purpose of art history, this anthology offers many fascinating insights.

Contents:

1. Art as history
Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects by Giorgio Vasari
Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Winckelmann divided : mourning the death of art history by Whitney Davis
Patterns of intention by Michael Baxandall
2. Aesthetics
The critique of judgement by Immanuel Kant
Philosophy of fine art by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Impure mimesis, or, the ends of the aesthetic by D. N. Rodowick
Fetish by William Pietz
3. Form, content, style
Principles of art history by Heinrich Wölfflin
Style by Ernst Gombrich
'Form', nineteenth-century metaphysics, and the problem of art historical description by David Summers
Style by David Summers
4. Anthropology andbyas art history. Leading characteristics of the late Roman Kunstwollen by Alois Riegl
Images from the region of the Pueblo Indians of North America by Aby Warburg
Warburg's concept of kulturwissenschaft and its meaning for aesthetics by Edgar Wind
Silent moves : on excluding the ethnographic subject from the discourse of art history by Claire Farago
5. Mechanisms of meaning
Iconography and iconology : an introduction to the study of Renaissance art by Erwin Panofsky
Semiotics and iconography by Hubert Damisch
Semiotics and art history : a discussion of context and senders by Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson
Meaningbyinterpretation by Stephen Bann
6. Deconstruction and the limits to interpretation
The temptation of new perspectives by Stephen Melville
The origin of the work of art by Martin Heidegger
The still life as a personal object : a note on Heidegger and Van Gogh by Meyer Schapiro
Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure] by Jacques Derrida
7. Authorship and identity
What is an author? by Michel Foucault
The discourse of others : feminists and postmodernism by Craig Owens
Re-viewing modernist criticism by Mary Kelly
Performative acts and gender constitution : an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory by Judith Butler
Postmodern automatons by Rey Chow
'Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure' : beauty discourse and the logic of aesthetics by Amelia Jones
Queer wallpaper by Jennifer Doyle
8. Globalization and its discontents
Orientalism and the exhibitionary order by Timothy Mitchell
The art museum as ritual by Carol Duncan
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility by Walter Benjamin
Can our values be objective? : on ethics, aesthetics and progressive politics by Satya P. Mohanty
Visual culture studies : questions of history, theory, and practice by Marquard Smith
'Life-like' : historicizing process and responsiveness in digital art by María Fernández
Epilogue : the art of art history by Donald Preziosi
Plato's dilemma and the tasks of the art historian today

Genres: Art, Art History, History, Nonfiction, Academic, Reference, Textbooks

591 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1998

Reviews

[Ciro · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good project, essential really, and one I haven't seen sourced so well or comprehensively before — a historiographic narrative of the field. The primary sources are mostly comprehensive, with a lot of essentials, and Preziosi's running commentary puts them all in a compelling framework. It would be an excellent basis for a foundational course in an AH major.

I'd like to see more in a later edition about how the traditional methods of art history are breaking down in the face of new media, but I suppose the discourse on new media would have to improve dramatically before that sort of thing would be possible.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in my Art Criticism class this past semester, and it's definitely not a book that you can just read cover to cover. At least not in my opinion. It's more suited for using as a reference. The way it's arranged is clever, though, because each chapter contains a certain amount of articles, and they build upon each other and relate to each other depending on the topic of the chapter. I could give it a higher rating, but it wasn't really enjoyable for me. On a scholarly level, I am sure it would receive 5 stars. Certainly you should have this on your bookshelf if you're studying art history.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will want to read this in a class. The essays included in this anthology are what crafted the study of art since the 18th century. Preziosi accomplished the purpose of creating a somewhat chronological progression of art historical writing while simultaneously grouping essays by methodology. This means that one might find themselves comparing essays from the 18th century, turn of the 20th century, and the 1990s. Yet, it is effective at allowing the reader to see the progression of the study of art and, I would say, essential for the understanding of art and art history from a post-modern perspective.

[AskHistorians]

Great for an introduction to written art history and its many theoretical forms. Starts off with Vasari and his biographical approach, and covers ideas including formalism, connoisseurship, iconography, and postmodernism. For a much more in-depth review of the area, the Art in Theory trilogy edited by Harrison and Wood is fantastic, but Preziosi's is a more digestible text, especially if you don't have an art history background.

[Penelope · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very dense text. We read the entire book cover to cover in my Art Historical Theories and Methods class, and it would have been difficult to grasp all of the concepts without the professor's explications during lectures/discussions.
There is no discussion of psychoanalysis or marxism. Otherwise it covers quite a variety of art historical theories/methods.

[Martin Ridgway · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another reader, it's actually not a bad one and was a set book for the first year of the Open University's art history MA. As usual for a reader, there are good and bad extracts (all fairly long, there are no half-page nibbles) but overall it gives some useful background to how people have thought about a range of topics.

[Mark]

The best anthology of art history methodologies currently available.

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great and comprehensive collection of texts relevant in art history. The author groups the texts by themes in chapters. Each chapter is introduced with a text by Preziosi reflecting on the choice of texts, the connections between the texts within the chapter as well as between this and other chapters, and the relevance of them in a greater art historical context. These introductions are well-written, thoughtful and a great way to provide context.
The choice of texts within a chapter often reads like a discussion of a chosen topic, and Preziosi made choices that provide different perspectives and critique of earlier texts.

A very interesting read and very useful for an art history student who wants to get a comprehensive entrance into art theory. The book can serve as a stepping stone to the original texts, which for this publication have been mostly shortened and edited.

[Kirra · Rating 3 out of 5]

70-year-old white men's take on churches, shoes, and boobs.

[Jayme Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great guide to help you understand art history and the avenues one can explore to investigate it more deeply.

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like the selection of essays could have been better.

[Katie Lees]

i am both a man and a woman according to Whitney Davis...

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing this book felt like getting to the top of a particularly difficult mountain.

[Julianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

tough to get through, but worth it in the end