The reader Art and its global histories represents an invaluable teaching tool, offering content ranging from academic essays and excerpts, new translations, interviews with curators and artists, to art criticism. The introduction sets out the state of art history today as it undergoes the profound shift of a 'global turn'. Particular focus is given to British India, which represents a shift from the usual attention paid to Orientalism and French art in this period. The sources and debates on this topic have never before been brought together in a satisfactory way and this book will represent a particularly significant and valuable contribution for postgraduate and undergraduate art history teaching. -- .

Fifty Key Texts in Art History is an anthology of critical commentaries selected from the classical period to the late modern. It explores some of the central and emerging themes, issues and debates within Art History as an increasingly expansive and globalised discipline. It features an international range of contributors , including art historians, artists, curators and gallerists. Arranged chronologically, each entry includes a bibliography for further reading and a key word index for easy reference. Text selections range across issues including artistic value, cultural identity, modernism, gender, psychoanalysis, photographic theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Old Mistresses, Women, Art & Ideology (1981) Victor Burgin's The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986) Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture: Hybridity, Liminal Spaces and Borders (1994) Geeta Kapur When was Modernism in Indian Art? (1995) Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1999) Georges Didi Huberman Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (2004)

Now in its second edition, this volume is an accessible introduction to the history of art. Using an international range of examples, it provides the reader with a toolkit of concepts, ideas and methods relevant to understanding art history. This new edition is fully updated with colour illustrations, increased coverage of non-western art and extended discussions of contemporary art theory. It introduces key ideas, issues and debates, exploring questions such as: What is art and what is meant by art history? What approaches and methodologies are used to interpret and evaluate art? How have ideas regarding medium, gender, identity and difference informed representation? What perspectives can psychoanalysis, semiotics and social art histories bring to the study of the discipline? How are the processes of postcolonialism, decolonisation and globalisation changing approaches to art history? Complete with helpful subject summaries, a glossary, suggestions for future reading and guidance on relevant image archives, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone studying art history as well as general readers with an interest in the subject.

Now in its second edition, this volume is an accessible introduction to the history of art. Using an international range of examples, it provides the reader with a toolkit of concepts, ideas and methods relevant to understanding art history.

This new edition is fully updated with colour illustrations, increased coverage of non-western art and extended discussions of contemporary art theory. It introduces key ideas, issues and debates, exploring questions such as:

What is art and what is meant by art history?

What approaches and methodologies are used to interpret and evaluate art?

How have ideas regarding medium, gender, identity and difference informed representation?

What perspectives can psychoanalysis, semiotics and social art histories bring to the study of the discipline?

How are the processes of postcolonialism, decolonisation and globalisation changing approaches to art history?

Complete with helpful subject summaries, a glossary, suggestions for future reading and guidance on relevant image archives, this bookis an ideal starting point for anyone studying art history as well as general readers with an interest in the subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the second edition

1 Art histories and art theories

Introduction

What is art?

What is art history?

The classical concept of ‘art’

Plato’s idea of mimesis

Issues arising from art as imitation

Medieval art and its interpretation

Art as imitation in the Renaissance

Giorgio Vasari and the origins of western art history

Early writing on art

Academies and the ‘Hierarchy of Genres’

Winckelmann, art history and the western Enlightenment

Art as an expression of the ‘will to create’

Aesthetic comparison and contrast

Connoisseurship and art history

The limits of connoisseurship

Bell’s theory of ‘significant form’

The theory of art as expression

Objections to Collingwood’s theory

Art as abstraction or idea

Art understood as ‘family resemblance’

The Institutional Theory of Art

Art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Art history and the 1930s diaspora

British Art History, the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes

The ‘New Art History’

Beyond the ‘New Art History’

Summary

Further reading

2 Formalism, modernism and modernity

Introduction

Formalist art theories and the avant-garde

The formal components of painting and design

Abstraction as process

Formal language, abstraction and sculpture

Observations on formal analysis

Formalism as art practice and art theory

Roger Fry and a British formalist tradition

Avant-garde art and ‘the crisis of taste’

Greenberg and the dominance of modernist theory

Modernism and the White Cube hang

Objections to Greenberg’s modernism

Art after Greenberg

Summary

Further reading

3 Marxist and social art histories

Introduction

Who was Karl Marx?

Art as ideology

Contextual analyses

David and the Paris Salon

Reactions and responses to the Horatii

The Horatii as political metaphor

Iconography and iconology

Iconology and ‘intrinsic meaning’

Art, alienation and ‘species being’

Art as commodity and a ‘deposit of a social relationship’

Superstructure and infrastructure

Art and agency – ‘life creates consciousness, not consciousness life’

David’s Horatii as a revolutionary manifesto

The Horatii as a canonical painting of the French Revolution

Tendency and social commitment – what should art and artists do?

Malevich’s Black Square and the ‘zero of forms’

Social interpretation and meaning

Art and the ‘social command’: Soviet Socialist Realism and its legacies

Social realism in Europe

Critical theory, the ‘Frankfurt School’ and Gerhard Richter

T. J. Clark and a British Marxist tradition

New social and political constellations

Summary

Further reading

4 Semiotics and poststructuralism

Introduction

Introducing language and linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure

Charles Sanders Peirce

Developments of semiosis

Art and semiotics

Signs and representations of reality

Modalities of the sign

Challenging ‘reality’

Whose ‘reality’?

Structural analysis

Syntagmatic analysis of images

Discourse and power

Discourse and ‘metanarratives’

Paradigmatic oppositions

Binary oppositions and art

Markedness

Figurative language

Social semiotics

Poststructuralism and its critics

Summary

Further reading

5 Psychoanalysis, art and the fractured self

Introduction

Freud, psychoanalysis and psycho-sexual development

The Oedipus complex

The psyche’s tripartite structure

Instinctual energies, creativity and sublimation

Surrealism and psychoanalysis

Gombrich and psychoanalysis

Klein, Stokes, Fuller and the ‘Infant–Mother’ paradigm

Lacan: the mirror stage; the symbolic, the imaginary and the real

Feminist challenges to the Freudian and Lacanian psyche

Creativity, sadism and perversion

A Freudian postscript: from symptoms to symbols

Art and abjection

Abjection, ambivalence and contemporary art

Summary

Further reading

6 Representations of gender, sex and sexualities

Introduction

Defining sex, gender and sexuality

Classical representation of the human form

Visualising gender difference

Gender, status and power

Challenges to gender boundaries

Viewing the nude

The gaze: the pleasure of looking

Mary Cassatt’s challenge to the male gaze

Caught in the act: subverting the pleasure of the gaze

Feminism and art history

Feminist interventions in art

Expanding feminism

Contemporary art history and feminism

Gender perspectives on contemporary art

Developments in gender studies

New paradigms of gender, sex and sexuality

Queer theory and LGBTQIA+

Beyond gender: the body as sensorium and spectacle

Summary

Further reading

7 Art and art histories since the 1960s

Introduction

Art and ‘paradigm shifts’

Duchamp’s readymades

American hegemony and a new order

Death of the author

Art, objecthood and theatricality

Art as commodity and concept

The Institutional Theory of Art

Limitations of the Institutional Theory

Lyotard and the death of the ‘metanarratives’

New countercultures for the 1960s and 1970s

Photography, cultural reproduction and oppositional postmodern cultures

Approaching the postmodern and late modern: how soon is now?

The contemporary as ‘critical pluralism’

Visual cultures and ‘double-coding’

Baudrillard and the four orders of the simulacra

‘The End of History’?

Relational Aesthetics

Summary

Further Reading

8 Postcolonialism, globalisation and art histories

Introduction

Western-centrism within art history

Global cultural and artistic interactions

Western artistic appropriations and ‘Primitivism’

The struggle for independence and decolonisation

Edward Said and Orientalism

Postcolonialism and postcolonial studies

Globalisation

Legacies and continuities: empire, coloniality and the subaltern

Interpreting cultural interaction and exchange

Identity, agency and place

Globalising art history and global contemporary art

Afterword from Oceania

Summary

Further reading

　

Resources

Glossary of Terms

Fifty Key Texts in Art History is an anthology of critical commentaries selected from the classical period to the late modern. It explores some of the central and emerging themes, issues and debates within Art History as an increasingly expansive and globalised discipline. It features an international range of contributors , including art historians, artists, curators and gallerists. Arranged chronologically, each entry includes a bibliography for further reading and a key word index for easy reference. Text selections range across issues including artistic value, cultural identity, modernism, gender, psychoanalysis, photographic theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Old Mistresses, Women, Art & Ideology (1981) Victor Burgin's The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986) Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture: Hybridity, Liminal Spaces and Borders (1994) Geeta Kapur When was Modernism in Indian Art? (1995) Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1999) Georges Didi Huberman Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (2004)