Author Description

Exchanges between practices of art and visual culture, contemporary notions of history and subjectivity, and the writing of a cultural history of art and images have grown increasingly complex. The same is true of the interconnections between art history and cultural history as academic disciplines. Since the emergence within the last 25 years of new perspectives and paradigms in the methodology and theory of art and cultural history, a set of overlooked issues and potentials in 19th and early 20th century art historical writing has come to the fore. The first exponents of The Vienna School of Art History, the cultural theoreticians of the early Frankfurt School and the Warburg Library cultural historians, with all their problematic heritage from Hegel and Kant, still offer highly useful and timely interdisciplinary insights into the interrelations between on the one side art works and picture making and on the other cultural institutions and practices. The essays collected in "Images of Culture" address important questions regarding the prospects and pitfalls of an art historical discipline of the 21st century concerned with a cultural historical contextualisation of the production and reception of art. This involves not only a re-opening of the question of historical development -- beyond traditional philosophies of history - it involves as well a re-examination of a range of post-hermeneutical issues: How can art history writing be informed by contemporary artistic and cultural practices? In what way do subjectivity formations and academic approaches to history relate to each other?