By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text.
In re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author's own introduction, mirroring the multiple interpretations within the essays themselves.

First published in 2004, this volume recognises that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This landmark anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place over the last fifty years. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, two considerable critics, who write with the edge and enthusiasm of art historians who have spent their lives working with museums. Grasping the World is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of art history and museum studies.

First published in 2004, this volume recognises that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This landmark anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place over the last fifty years. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, two considerable critics, who write with the edge and enthusiasm of art historians who have spent their lives working with museums. Grasping the World is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of art history and museum studies.

Art, Religion, Amnesia addresses the relationship between art and religion in contemporary culture, directly challenging contemporary notions of art and religion as distinct social phenomena and explaining how such Western terms represent alternative and even antithetical modes of world-making. In this new book, Professor Preziosi offers a critique of the main thrust of writing in recent years on the subjects of art, religion, and their interconnections, outlining in detail a perspective which redefines the basic terms in which recent debates and discussions have been articulated both in the scholarly and popular literature, and in artistic, political and religious practice. Art, Religion and Amnesia proposes an alternative to the two conventional traditions of writing on the subject which have been devoted on the one hand to the 'spiritual' dimensions of artistry, and on the other hand to the (equally spurious) 'aesthetic' aspects of religion. The book interrogates the fundamental assumptions fuelling many current controversies over representation, idolatry, blasphemy, and political culture. Drawing on debates from Plato's proposal to banish representational art from his ideal city-state to the Danish cartoons of Mohamed, Preziosi argues that recent debates have echoed a number of very ancient controversies in political philosophy, theology, and art history over the problem of representation and its functions in individual and social life. This book is a unique re-evaluation of the essential indeterminacy of meaning-making, marking a radically new approach to understanding the inextricability of aesthetics and theology and will be of interest to students and researchers in art history, philosophy and religion and cultural theory.

Art, Religion, Amnesia addresses the relationship between art and religion in contemporary culture, directly challenging contemporary notions of art and religion as distinct social phenomena and explaining how such Western terms represent alternative and even antithetical modes of world-making.

In this new book, Professor Preziosi offers a critique of the main thrust of writing in recent years on the subjects of art, religion, and their interconnections, outlining in detail a perspective which redefines the basic terms in which recent debates and discussions have been articulated both in the scholarly and popular literature, and in artistic, political and religious practice. "Art, Religion and Amnesia" proposes an alternative to the two conventional traditions of writing on the subject which have been devoted on the one hand to the spiritual dimensions of artistry, and on the other hand to the (equally spurious) aesthetic aspects of religion.

The book interrogates the fundamental assumptions fuelling many current controversies over representation, idolatry, blasphemy, and political culture. Drawing on debates from Plato s proposal to banish representational art from his ideal city-state to the Danish cartoons of Mohamed, Preziosi argues that recent debates have echoed a number of very ancient controversies in political philosophy, theology, and art history over the problem of representation and its functions in individual and social life.

This book is a unique re-evaluation of the essential indeterminacy of meaning-making, marking a radically new approach to understanding the inextricability of aesthetics and theology and will be of interest to students and researchers in art history, philosophy and religion and cultural theory.

What begins as a meditation on "the museum" by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into "ethnically marked" aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the "brain of the earth's body." Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the "secular theologisms" of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history,museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms--and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.

Essays exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, with worldwide examples and from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Museums and biographies both tell the stories of lives. This innovative collection examines for the first time biography - of individuals, objects and institutions - in relationship to the museum, casting new light on the many facets of museum history and theory, from the lives of prominent curators, to the context of museums of biography and autobiography. Separate sections cover individual biography and museum history, problematising individual biographies, institutional biographies, object biographies, and museums as biographies/autobiographies. These articles offer new ways of thinking about museums and museum history, exploring how biography in and of the museum enrichesmuseum stories by stressing the inter-related nature of lives of people, objects and institutions as part of a dense web of relationships. Through their widely ranging research, the contributors demonstrate the value of thinkingabout the stories told in and by museums, and the relationships which make up museums; and suggest new ways of undertaking and understanding museum biographies. Dr Kate Hill is Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Lincoln. Contributors: Jeffrey Abt, Felicity Bodenstein, Alison Booth, Stuart Burch, Lucie Carreau, Elizabeth Crooke, Steffi de Jong, Mark Elliott, Sophie Forgan, Mariana Francozo, Laura Gray, Kate Hill, Suzanne MacLeod, Wallis Miller, Belinda Nemec, Donald Preziosi, Helen Rees Leahy, Linda Sandino, Julie Sheldon, Alexandra Stara, Louise Tythacott, Chris Whitehead, Anne Whitelaw

Essays exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, with worldwide examples and from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Museums and biographies both tell the stories of lives. This innovative collection examines for the first time biography - of individuals, objects and institutions - in relationship to the museum, casting new light on the many facets of museum history and theory, from the lives of prominent curators, to the context of museums of biography and autobiography. Separate sections cover individual biography and museum history, problematising individual biographies, institutional biographies, object biographies, and museums as biographies/autobiographies. These articles offer new ways of thinking about museums and museum history, exploring how biography in and of the museum enrichesmuseum stories by stressing the inter-related nature of lives of people, objects and institutions as part of a dense web of relationships. Through their widely ranging research, the contributors demonstrate the value of thinkingabout the stories told in and by museums, and the relationships which make up museums; and suggest new ways of undertaking and understanding museum biographies. Dr Kate Hill is Principal Lecturer in History at the University of Lincoln. Contributors: Jeffrey Abt, Felicity Bodenstein, Alison Booth, Stuart Burch, Lucie Carreau, Elizabeth Crooke, Steffi de Jong, Mark Elliott, Sophie Forgan, Mariana Francozo, Laura Gray, Kate Hill, Suzanne MacLeod, Wallis Miller, Belinda Nemec, Donald Preziosi, Helen Rees Leahy, Linda Sandino, Julie Sheldon, Alexandra Stara, Louise Tythacott, Chris Whitehead, Anne Whitelaw

What is art history? Why, how, and where did it originate, and how have its methods changed over time? The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be. This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts, focusing on the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: art as history; aesthetics; form, content, and style; anthropology; meaning and interpretation; authorship and identity; and the phenomenon of globalization. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Mary Kelly, and Michel Foucault are brought together, with editorial introductions to each topic providing background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. This updated and expanded edition contains sixteen newly included extracts from key thinkers in the history of art, from Giorgio Vasari to Walter Benjamin and Satya Mohanty; a new section on globalization; and also a new concluding essay from Donald Preziosi on the tasks of the art historian today.

An overview of the theoretical and institutional history of the discipline of art history which refutes the image of art history as in crisis, asserting rather that many of the dilemmas of the discipline today can be traced back to its founding, institutionalization and expansion since the 1870s.

The discoveries in Crete, Greece, and the Aegean islands that began a century ago were nothing less than stunning, and seemed to give shape and substance to tales of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, of Theseus and Ariadne, of Minos and Icarus. Ancient Aegean Art is the first comprehensive historical introduction to the art and architecture Crete, mainland Greece, and the Cycladic islands in the Aegean, beginning with the Neolithic period, before 3000 BCE, and ending at the close of the Bronze Age and the transition to the Iron Age of Hellenic Greece (c.1000 BCE).

Covering a broad range of objects and artefacts, from sealstones to pots to buildings and settlements, Preziosi and Hitchcock discuss both the historiography of the field of ancient art history and explain the artefacts original intentions and functions. In chronologically organized chapters, the authors emphasize the more widely known images and structures, with a glimpse at the lesser-known but important discoveries, explaining their design, uses, meanings, and formal developments. Ancient Aegean Art incorporates the latest archeological discoveries and theoretical and methodological developments, in the only volume to examine both Crete and the mainland.

During the nineteenth century, Cairo witnessed one of its most dramatic periods of transformation. Well on its way to becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city, by the end of the century, a 'medieval' Cairo had somehow come into being. While many Europeans in the nineteenth century viewed Cairo as a fundamentally dual city--physically and psychically split between East/West and modern/medieval--the contributors to the provocative collection demonstrate that, in fact, this process of inscription was the result of restoration practices, museology, and tourism initiated by colonial occupiers. The first edited volume to address nineteenth-century Cairo both in terms of its history and the perception of its achievements, this book will be an essential text for courses in architectural and art history dealing with the Islamic world.

By juxtaposing issues and problems, Donald Preziosi's latest collection of essays, In the Aftermath of Art, opens up multiple interpretive possibilities by bringing to the surface hidden resonances in the implications of each text.
In re-reading his own writings, Preziosi opens up alternatives to contemporary discourses on art history and visual culture. A critical commentary by critic, historian, and theorist Johanne Lamoureux complements the author's own introduction, mirroring the multiple interpretations within the essays themselves.