“A discipline enters into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history, and theorizes its practices when something is unresolved,” writes Christopher S. Wood in his new book, A History of Art History. So it’s fitting that Wood’s study isn’t the only high-profile book examining the field of art history that appeared in the last year, says Rachel Wetzler in our January issue. She reviews A History of Art History alongside Éric Michaud’s The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art, first published in France in 2015 and recently released in English translation. For both authors, contemporary art presents a new set of anxiety-producing challenges to the discipline. Wood writes that the art of today “preempts historical reflection, because it already takes the stuff of contemporary culture as its manifest content.” Michaud identifies a physiognomic aspect of art history, Wetzler says, when he argues that the tendency to “ethnicize” non-Western contemporary art positions form as “an essential expression of race.”
Art history often appears in our pages as a subject of redefinition and debate. In 2016, after the passing of Linda Nochlin, we published remembrances reflecting on her work, which transformed the field by demonstrating how lived experience of present struggles can inform our understanding of the past. Last year, Mostafa Heddaya looked at Primary Documents, a series of books published by the Museum of Modern Art that anthologize international texts of art history and theory in English translation, asking how this project bends foreign intellectual traditions to the Anglo-American one.