Critical Terms for Art History, Second EditionRobert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff "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 |
Contents
| 49 | |
HISTORIES | 143 |
SOCIAL RELATIONS | 249 |
SOCIETIES | 359 |
Figuration | 479 |
List of Contributors | 487 |
Index | 493 |
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Critical Terms for Art History, Second Edition Robert S. Nelson,Richard Shiff No preview available - 2003 |
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action aesthetic analysis appears appropriation argued art history artists associated avant-garde beauty become body called Cambridge century Chicago claim collective commodity concept contemporary context critical culture defined desire difference discourse distinction early economic edited effect essay example experience expression fact fetishism figure first function gaze gender historians history of art human idea identity imagination important individual interest interpretation issues Italy kind language London look Marxism material meaning memory mode modern modernist monuments museum narrative nature object original painting particular past performance photograph picture political position possible practice present production question reference relation representation represented ritual seems seen sense sexual significance social society space specific structure studies style suggests theory things tion tradition Translated turn understanding University Press visual Western women writing York
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Page 64 - And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, "I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned." And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush and said, "Moses, Moses!
Page 65 - And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face ; for he was afraid to look upon God.
Page 389 - In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race.
Page xiii - ANECDOTE OF THE JAR I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Page 65 - And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their task-masters; for I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey...
Page 191 - The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself— not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
Page 389 - A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
Page 364 - In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic — in short, ideological — forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Page 9 - Lastly, there are Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theatre; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage- ' plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.
Page 40 - It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself, that is.