Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Art history, aesthetics, and visual studies today find themselves in contested new philosophical and institutional circumstances. This fascinating and challenging volume explores the connections and differences among these three methods of investigating visual representation.
What are the dominant aesthetic assumptions underlying art historical inquiry? How have these assumptions been challenged by visual studies? Are questions of quality, form, content, meaning, and spectatorship culturally specific? Can we still define the parameters of what should properly constitute the objects of the history of art? Fifteen distinguished scholars answer these and other questions, critically examining the relationships among these three scholarly fields from their founding moments through their contemporary practices.
Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Table of Contents
Defining "aesthetics" for non-western studies: the case of ancient Mesopotamia / Irene J. Winter -- Romare Bearden: African American modernism at mid-century / Kobena Mercer -- Chaos and cosmos: points of view in art history and aesthetics / Karen Long -- National stereotypes, prejudice, and aesthetic judgments in the historiography of art / Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann -- Darkness and the demand for time in art / Philip Fisher -- Censorship, autonomy, and artistic form / Jonathan Gilmore -- Danto and Krauss on Cindy Sherman / Michael Kelly -- The aesthetics of difference / Griselda Pollock -- Recollections of Rembrandt's Jeremiah / Ivan Gaskell -- Ghostwriting: working out visual culture / Nicholas Mirzoeff -- "Theory," discipline, and institution / Stephen Melville -- Dialectics of seeing / Hal Foster -- Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture / W.J.T. Mitchell -- Current issues in art history, aesthetics, and visual studies / David Carrier -- Mixing metaphors and talking about art / Janet Wolff.