Colloque

Virtual (Art) History

Donald Preziosi

Membre a labase

Donald Preziosi

Résumé du colloque

From its beginnings in the European Enlightenment, art history was a facet of a system of social practices which in concert worked to make the past synoptically visible so that it might function in and on the present; so that the present might be seen as the demonstrable product of the specifically delineated and 'represented' past; and so that the past so staged might be framed as an object of historical and genealogical desire in its own right, (con)figured as that from which a properly socialized modern subject might desire descent. Art history cannot be properly understood apart from this amalgam of practices within which it is embedded, and on which it is functionally dependent. These include the historically co-constructed and theoretically co-implicative professions and institutions of art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the pedagogy and practice of art, museology, connoisseurship and consumerism, and the tourist and heritage industries. Understanding art history's "disciplinary" history also entails taking into account the paradoxical and contradictory nature of that virtual object created by art history's purview - its "art" - which was invented in the 18th century as a (civilized) foil to its co-constructed complement, the (primitive) fetish. Art history's objects were instruments for thinking historically; for imagining a certain kind of historicity which brought into alignment individual and national identities. Art's principal function, as an agency of modernity, was to be a powerful instrument, measure, and frame for staging the social, cognitive, and ethical histories of all peoples, thereby further naturalizing "art" as a supposedly "universal" human phenomenon. This paper explores these issues as part of the contemporary impasse of disciplinarity, and discusses possible futures - should there be any - for art history in the 21st century.