by Jon Lackman | 13 April 2009 | Books, Theory
A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and “The Gendered Subject” have disappeared. In their place, we find a new section on “Authorship and Identity” and an expanded section on “Globalization and its Discontents” (formerly titled “The Other: Art History and/as Museology”).
Several authors have been added: Vasari, D.N. Rodowick, William Pietz, David Summers, Claire Farago, Stephen Bann, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Jennifer Doyle, Walter Benjamin, Satya P. Mohanty, Marquard Smith, and María Fernández. Several others have been dropped: Margaret Iversen, Louis Marin, Rosalind Krauss, Andreas Huyssen, Nanette Solomon, Lisa Tickner, Paul Smith, Annie E. Coombes, and Nestor García Canclini, as well as Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (Also, new texts have been chosen for Erwin Panofsky, Craig Owens, Amelia Jones, and Mary Kelly.) Incidentally, three of the new texts come from the 2006 volume A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones.
The whole comes with a new introduction and conclusion by Preziosi, in which he writes:
As with the first edition, this is not a ‘history of art history’ nor a historiography of ‘visual culture studies’; rather, it is a critical interrogation of the artifice itself of those histories … Working as a historian, critic, or museologist of artistry in the contemporary world demands increasingly explicit attention to the ethical dimension of one’s practice and its inescapable political and economic resonances … The field’s coy scientism has long been coeval with its coy spiritualism.
