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“Wittkower's response - which resonated for decades - to the manifest lack of robustness of modern civilization was to reassert the absolute difference between the past and the present: premodern societies were oriented, and they knew hierarchy. Wittkower argued, on the basis of the texts by Alberti and Palladio, that the architecture of the Italian Renaissance materialized a mathematical program: a system of ratios that pictured the invisible structure of the cosmos. Architecture placed the human body within this system. It is hard to see the difference between this and Sedlmayr's view except that the one believes that man's image was best framed by forms based on the divinely measured proportions of the human body, and the other believes that man's image was best framed by an image of divinity itself. Wittkower recovers a religious conception of architecture but detached from Christianity: the Renaissance church as a Hindu temple, as it were.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“The historical relativist is the one who adopts an eagle's-eye view on the past, lofty enough not to need to prefer one epoch to another. Warburg was no such relativist. For him the European Renaissance, Burckhardt's Renaissance, the fifteenth century, held the keys to the present. He was fully absorbed by the epic of Europe. The 'Orient' figured for Warburg only as a mystifying threat to Mediterranean reason, a passive source of fascination, coded as female. The non-Western here is the image of a hidden weakness within the West. America, meanwhile, sheltered the remnants of the archaic societies it destroyed and at the same time promised a telecommunicational future of 'instantaneous electric connection' where 'mythical and symbolic thinking.' which once formed 'spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection,' would no longer be needed.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“Historians, theorists, and critics of contemporary art do not directly study the proliferation of non-art images and things in contemporary society, nor do they examine from a sociological or anthropological point of view the interactions of modern people with art. They do not need to because advertising, fashion, celebrities, television, tattoos, toys, comics, pornography, politics, iPhones, and stuff in general, as well as all the many modes of beholding and possessing are already the content of so much elite contemporary art. The images, thing, and practices have already been filtered and framed by art, absorbed into artworks whose autonomy - unlike the autonomy of the premodern works - remains unchallenged. The main task of the art historian of the modern and the contemporary is to justify the value of those works. The paradoxical result is that the art history of the present has nothing to say about mass culture that art itself doesn't already tell us. So-called mass or popular culture ought to be art history's topic, but it proves too difficult to grasp. The image-surfaces enfolding us will not take on density; they melt or disintegrate too quickly, such that art is everywhere but nowhere. How should art history, with its specialized conceptual toolbox, solve the puzzle of entertainment, when society itself has two or more minds about everything, admiring, for example, Hollywood movies that break box-office records on their first weekend and at the same time revering Vincent van Gogh because he was unappreciated in his own time - and yet not knowing exactly what, if anything, differentiates a painting by van Gogh from a well-crafted movie.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“A discipline enter into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history and theorizes its practices, when something is unresolved. A prehistory of good empirical practices would be of limited interest, a chronicle of false starts, of trial and error. The practicing physician has no need to know the history of medicine. That history is valuable only when profiled against an alternative history: Asian medicine, for example. The art historians proceed by importing attitudes alien to them, provincializing their own scholarship as a hedge against the possibility of their fatal detachment from possession and beauty.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“Art's relation to form, to the image, to the monistic fantasy that provoked its defense of its own dividedness is today, as Klein predicted, intermittent and embarrassed. There are modes of art now that resemble activism or protest, pure and simple; modes of art characterized by a refusal to structure themselves around subject-object relations. The visual itself, the image, is questioned as the normative framework of art. Art is often not a product, not a precious trace, not a singularity, but rahter a dynamic, multipular interaction that creates temporary publics who are public to one another. Art does not have to add anything to the world. for technology and entrepreneurship already do that. Art is an irreality opened up inside the world. Art is the refusal of complicity in any form of domination. You are not trapped by the collectivity, but you are not entirely free either, for freedom, even the anarchic mode of the artwork, is suspected to be a mode of evasion of responsibility. Art is a quasi-event: it is not there all the time (like a book), but it is also not there only at an assigned time (like a theatrical play). This has become a comparative advantage of art over the other arts, which have more trouble intervening in reality. Much art today is coordinated with long-term eschatological or emancipatory projects, with projects as such. Art aims at such positive goals as synchrony, participation, inclusion, and sympathy, concepts hard to reconcile with the once-prized, exclusive qualities of art.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“The real reason that students and increasingly teachers of art history are ready to jettison the past, however, is that the refusal of the authority of the past is the very program of modern art. To invest in modern art existentially is to agree to carry out that program. The investment in modern art entails contempt for the past. The inverse is true as well, although some would deny it. I would maintain that it is only possible to say something insightful about contemporary art from a standpoint well inside the magic circle. The rest of us on the outside, who do not live but only look at contemporary art, always misrecognize it.”

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“The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“Klingender's book, striking notes both desperate and defiant, is not typical of the long British tradition of Marxist and Marxist-inspired histories of art that would extend into the 1980s. The so-called social history of art interpreted art as the expression of the interests of communities or classes. In the past, art was paid for and shaped by the elite and the powerful. In the future, art would express the vision and will of democratic collectivities. The reality that art delivered was the reality of economic relations. There was no need for any other origin.”

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“Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.”

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“Henry Adams, the reluctant tourist of 1860, pondering the forty-foot dynamos in the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, sensed with alarm their 'moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.' He saw 'only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.' Physics was occupied with a 'supersensual world' of 'chance collisions' - physics was 'stark mad in metaphysics.' The pragmatic and human-scaled thinking that had sustained the fond narratives of nineteenth-century historians seemed feckless, disoriented.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.”

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Book:A History of Art History
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“It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its ways in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm.”

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