Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition

Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff, Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780226571683, 9780226571669
• eBook ISBN: 9780226571690
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

"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

Index

abjection, 290, 291–93

Abramovic, Marina, 86

Abrams, Maida and George, 269, 270, 271

abstract art: commodity and, 396, 400; conservative avantgarde and, 213; genealogy of, 118,119; modernist task of, 201; of Mondrian, 119, 120, 124; Mondrian on, 119, 122, 123,126; of monuments, 239; Nazi abhorrence of, 238; resemblance and, 56; signifying power of, 27, 57; simulacral reading of, 45

abstract expressionism: com-modification and, 400, 403; Greenberg on, 183, 254; male agency in, 211; native North American artists and, 230; nineteenth-century art theory and, 318; Rosenberg on, 254

academic artists, 146–47, 151, 191

Acconci, Vito, 86

Accursed Share (Bataille), 432

Ackerman, James S., 98

action paintings, 85

action theory, 68–70

ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 93

Adoration of the Shepherds, The (Bloemaert), 269

Adorno, Theodor, 205, 206; Benjamin's essay and, 398–99; on commodified culture, 390, 430; on fetishizing impact of culture, 312; on ugliness, 281–82, 283, 285, 290, 293

advertising: appropriation in, 164; gaze in, 326; mass-production modernity and, 377; photomontage and, 165, 166; self-conscious style in, 107; in visual studies, 453

Aesthetica (Baumgarten), 306, 422

aestheticism: abject art as critique of, 293; art historical viewpoint and, 182–87; vs. historical avant-garde, 206; Pater's historicist reading of, 186–87; value and, 422, 428

aesthetics: abstract painting and, 45; art history and, 112–13, 114–15, 116–17, 182–87, 267–68, 269–72; commodity production and, 405; cultural universals in, 278; disciplinary origin of, 306–7, 419, 420, 422; ethics and, 409; Eurocentric standards in, 454; fetish and, 306–7, 313; historical categories and, 112–13, 114, 424; interpretation and, 128; Kantian (see Kantian aesthetics); Marx on, 429; modern art and, 422, 440; modernism and, 191–92, 195–96; multicultural, 449; museums and, 408, 411, 417; pleasure and, 432, 433; postmodernism and, 272–73, 438, 439, 444–45, 451; social dimension of, 274–75; vs. social function of art, 267, 473; of ugliness, 286–88; of visual artifacts, 453. See also beauty; taste; value

Aesthetics (Hegel), 424, 425

Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 312

Aesthetik des Häs...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Mediation / Robert S. Nelson
• At the Place of a Foreword: Someone Looking, Reading, and Writing / Robert S. Nelson
• Operations
• Communications
• Histories
• Social Relations
• Societies
• Afterword: Figuration / Richard Shiff
• List of Contributors
• Index