Book Reviews

HANS BELTING developed a "historical anthropology" that their nightmares. Every German art historian, finds and structural in me- it would in has been Bild-Anthropologie:Entwiirfe fur eine symbolic patterns seem, every subfield, dieval or early modern societies. American compelled to deal with the concept of media, Bildwissenschaft historians like Robert Darnton, Natalie Ze- one way or another, over the last ten years. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001. 280 pp.; mon Davis, and Caroline Bynum have con- Perhaps this has something to do with the 180 b/w ills. 25.20 Euros tributed to this paradigm. Points of conver- pressure to justify scholarship in the arts gence with art history are rare. Exceptions are within a state-controlled university system. Hans Belting's recent collection of essays on usually in the medieval field, where the work Perhaps scholars have been convinced that effigies, masks, mummies, ancestor portraits, of anthropologically minded historians like Medienwissenschaftis the last hope for the hu- cult statues, tattoos, anatomical models, pho- Bynum or Jean-Claude Schmitt can closely manities to connect with the weightier issues tography, film, video art, and digital art is also resemble work done by guild art historians. of technology, communication, and globaliza- a manifesto, a set of "drafts for a science The complex scholarly project of Aby War- tion. In the German-speaking world, modern- [Wissenschaft] of the image," as the subtitle burg must also be mentioned here. Warburg, ists are not alone in worrying about apparatus has it. The revisionist rhetoric is sharp a contemporary of the pioneering anthropol- theory, digitality, and cybernetics. Medieval- throughout the book. Belting is dismissive of ogists, sought much as Belting does to pry a ists have adapted their material to the new "the current discourse" (p. 30), "art history" transhistorical constant out of the grip of the mesh of terminology.4 Media-consciousness (p. 26), "today's theories" (p. 87), and "to- art historians, in his case, the representation now permeates the programs and publica- day's debates" (p. 90). The book is Belting's of gesture. The often-cited book by David tions of major museums.5 The bibliography at response to the question he himself posed in Freedberg, The Power of Images (1989), must the back of Belting's volume lists dozens of 1983, namely: What happens when the history also be mentioned. Freedberg, without espe- recent titles containing the words Medium or of art comes to an end?1 By that he meant: cially engaging anthropological theory, sur- Medien, few of them known to American art Whither art once it no longer believes in the veyed a vast range of mostly nonartistic cul- historians.6 narratives that have sustained it since the Re- tural uses of pictures and statues, flattening The new constellation of media studies in naissance? He also meant: What will the aca- the historical landscape in favor of a universal Europe, I think, cannot easily be mapped demic discipline of art history do now that the model of almost instinctual "response" to the onto the discourse on "medium" and "media" final pages of art's once-suspenseful plot have image. within American art history. Continental art been written? The answers are condensed Art historians might have even more to historians, for example, are no longer so trou- into this book's title. The idea of art, accord- learn from the German paradigm of "literary bled by the theoretical problem of medium ing to Belting, must give way to the concept of anthropology," as invoked in the subtitle of specificity within modernism, as Americans Bild (best translated, for the time being, as Wolfgang Iser's book The Fictive and the Imag- still are.7 In this country, meanwhile, scholars "image"), and history writing must give way to inary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993).2 in the humanities are more likely to hear in an anthropological approach. By this term Iser means not the empirical the discourse of media an echo of commer- What does Belting mean by "anthropol- study of the bookmaking and bookselling in- cial and governmental techno-optimism. At a ogy"? In the English-speaking world, anthro- dustries or structural analysis of the ritualized recent academic conference on the medium pology is an exceptionally self-sufficient, one behavior of literary subcultures, but some- and media in art history, the New Media the- might even say self-absorbed, academic disci- thing like speculative analysis of the deep orist Lev Manovich was invited to speak along- pline that deals with symbolic behavior, clas- psychological and social functions of storytell- side a group of well-known art historians, sification systems, and power sharing within ing and listening, writing and reading in hu- mostly specialists in the modern fields. I had the framework of social life-an aggregation man life. Literary anthropology tries to ac- the sense-perhaps I was mistaken-that of structures and practices described as "cul- count for the historical indispensability of Manovich was looked on by the art historians ture." Early anthropologists conducted re- textual fictions, not only in their rudimentary as at best an eccentric outsider and at worst a search almost exclusively among "incom- or "precivilized" forms but also in their most naive and dangerous spokesman for invisible pletely" civilized peoples, and later ones have complex and aestheticized forms. Belting's forces of globalization and rationalization. spent a great deal of energy extricating their title opens up the wide prospect of a compa- Manovich's references to random access, in- field from the conceptual trouble such a rable inquiry into the social and psychological teractivity, and software and his polite but project invited. That discipline's monopoly meaning of the pictorial arts. profoundly disrespectful observations on the on the word anthropology,which simply means The foregoing only begins to describe the discipline of art history and its obsolete mod- "study of man," is widely accepted. It has be- original context and, as it were, illocutionary els of representation and meaning were as come difficult in the English-speaking world force of this book in Germany. Bild-Anthro- unintelligible as the strange speech of the to use the term anthropologywithout rousing pologie is presented as a program statement Trojan priestess Cassandra in the house of the household gods of the academic disci- for an interdisciplinary research project that Atreus-mere birdlike twitterings to the ears pline that bears it as a name. Art history's Belting, along with nine colleagues, initiated of the doomed. openings onto anthropology are limited in the fall of 2000 at the Hochschule fur The "existing discourse" that exasperates mostly to the so-called non-Western fields. Gestaltung at Karlsruhe.3 He says in the pref- both Manovich and Belting, it would seem, is In Europe, the words Anthropologie, anthro- ace that one of his aims is "to win for native not simply the old empiricist art history, an pologie, antropologia, and so on, are still avail- disciplines of the image [Bildwissenschaften] easy target, but precisely the "new" art history able for general use, in much the same way like art history and archaeology more of a that has internalized critical theory (ideology that psychologyor logic are for English speak- profile within the discourse on media" (p. 9). critique, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis) ers. That is, they are terms that denote orga- Media studies has become a dominant para- over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Belt- nized academic fields and yet at the same digm within the German-speaking academic ing's argument, were he to spell it out, might time are easily detachable from those con- cosmos to an extent that American art histo- run something like this: critical theory is cer- texts. European historians, for example, have rians can hardly imagine, except perhaps in tainly all about mediation. But it has become BOOK REVIEWS 371

a mere rhetoricof mediation, a set of analytic ended research program. The chapters of this temporal themes like death, body,and time" (p. routines designed to disrupt any possible ex- book open onto a whole new galaxy of re- 23). change of meaning. Critical theory, he might search topics. An example is Belting's entirely The boldest idea of the book, developed say, has become a negative theology that has original genealogy of the 15th-century Neth- over several chapters, is that the true vanish- made an idol of absence itself; it is a self- erlandish panel portrait, already developed in ing point of every picture is the death image, contained and tautological scholasticism in- earlier publications. Belting describes por- the Todesbild.The tomb effigy, the memorial creasingly closed to the perspectives of the traits by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der portrait, and the death mask approach a con- physical sciences, to any true interdisciplinar- Weyden as intensified versions of coats of dition of perfect substitutability for the irre- ity, to the realities of politics, to experience arms painted on shieldlike wooden panels, vocably absent object, the once-living body. itself. Accordingly, Belting is unwilling to sub- which were themselves in turn something like The dead person exchanges his body for an mit the image to any such radical theory of social placeholders for the body of the noble- image; that image holds a place for him mediation (p. 31). Bild-Anthropologiemay in man. The comparison discloses a whole di- among the living (p. 29 and chap. 6). Belting truth be pointing to a new intellectual self- mension of the historical meaning and power describes this exchange, enacted in ancient satisfaction and nonporousness of the disci- of these paintings that modernity had lost cults of the dead, as the archetype of the image- pline of art history in the English-speaking sight of. To think of the Netherlandish panel body-medium triangle (p. 29). The photo- world. A sociologist, a cyberneticist, or indeed portrait as a substitute body is to displace all graph, the performance, and the statue, in an anthropologist would have been equally our thinking about Renaissance painting, turn, point directly toward that ideal exchange- out of place at that recent art historical con- given that the independent portrait was one ability. Essentially, every image wants to be a ference on medium. of the crucial templates for the modern con- home for a lost soul. "Without the connection Visual culture, for Belting, is generated by cept of the autonomous artwork. The new to death," Belting explicitly says, "those images combinations of the three elemental terms historical research that such a paradigm shift that merely simulate the world of life quickly image, body, and medium, which serve as the could generate will only complement recent fall into a pointless circularity and the prover- overall rubric of the research project at American work, in a wide range of fields, bial accusation of deceptiveness...." (p. Karlsruhe (Bild-Kbrper-Medium).In his analy- around the concepts of the gaze, attention, 190). Death guarantees the image. Without ses, the rubric becomes a sort of mystical spectacle, and embodied vision. that strong link to the irreversibly absent yet triangle whose terms seem perpetually to Belting often defines his project in nega- sharply desired object, the image would be a transmute into one another. "Images" for tional and even redemptive terms. With Bild- mere work of art. Belting are above all simulacra of the human Anthropologie, he says more than once, he This perspective opens onto a completely body; a pictorial representation or formal seeks simply to restore the image to man. To new map of the cultural uses of pictures and construct other than the doubled body does do this he has to exclude from the image- statues. Belting offers precisely not a plot, not quite constitute an image. He often body-medium triad the concept of art. Belting a narrative about images, but rather an ahis- speaks of images as if they were immaterial repeatedly accuses art and the "art experts" torical schema. The exchange-with-the-dead entities, something like ideas or souls. He (p. 33) of alienating the image from the body. model avoids any mention of a transcenden- says, for example, that "since an image has no He even disapproves, with what I can only tal referent and sets aside the whole problem body, it needs a medium in which to embody describe as a kind of mock-Philistinism, of of subjectivity. It brings religious and secular itself' (p. 17). Images are like "nomads who abstraction itself.8 Belting blames the work of uses of the image to a common denominator. alter their modes in historical cultures and art, a cultural construction of 16th-century Yet it is anything but a "cold" structuralist or thus occupy the available media as if they Europe, for having neutralized the once-pow- systematic model of the cultural meaning of were temporary stopping points" (p. 32); me- erful image. Art history, another child of the picturing. On the contrary, Belting's model is dia are like "hosts" (p. 26). The source of this Renaissance, then projected its art idea onto strictly anthropocentric, one might almost say rather exotic notion of a disembodied image the images of all cultures and all peoples, existentialist. Death becomes the all-encom- wandering in search of its medium must be favoring the artlike and marginalizing the rest passing horizon that organizes the experi- either television broadcasting or the digital (p. 17). For Belting, art is an effect generated ence of time and generates all the efforts to image coursing the Internet-unless it is just by institutions and ideology developed in the overcome time. This horizon produces the Plato after all. Belting goes on to point out early modern period, but obsolete already by effect that images have "power." The idealist, that the image cannot be perceived by other the 19th century and subjected to lethal cri- bourgeois ideology of the aesthetic, finally, bodies until it is embodied, even that the tique in the 20th. His own innovative and emerges as nothing more than a conspiracy image does not really become an image until influential art historical scholarship has fo- to deny the anthropic limitations of the im- it is animated by a beholder (p. 30). Bodies, cused on the image before9 and after'1 the age. though, can also produce images internally, "era of art." He has written especially imagi- The exchange model contains both a the- in dreams, visions, and memory. Moreover, natively on the 15th and early 16th centuries, ory of the origins of picture making and a some bodies are themselves images, for exam- the moment of maximum torque in the shift description on a deep-structural level of his- ple, in performances, or as "auto-icons," like from image to art." As Belting explained in torical figuration practices. It also implies a the bodies of executed criminals or the posed the preface to The Invisible Masterpiece, the program for contemporary culture. So-called "plastinated" cadavers of Gunther von Ha- "era of art" itself, the proper cultural home of postmodernist art, especially photography gens's spectacular and dreadfully appealing art in the 16th through 18th centuries in and video, has for years played a significant exhibition Kirperwelten, still unmountable in Europe, is "dispensable" to his project.12 It is role in Belting's thinking on the image. He the United States (p. 89). Sometimes the as if in this period the institutions of art so welcomes the return of the mimetic image, body is a medium, for example, with tattoos perfectly produced their effect that they re- the simulacrum, to a cultural scene paralyzed or body art. By "images," as we have seen, quire no further analysis. In early modern by abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism, Belting mostly means images of bodies. Other Europe, supposedly, art was just itself. and institution critique, which he evidently images are both of bodies and stand in for The main aim of Belting's project, then, is considers to be late and decadent postures of bodies, such as portraits or effigies. The me- the reactivation of an original drama of the the aesthetic ideology. In this book and oth- dium can function as the prosthesis of the image, liberated from its paralyzing aesthetic ers Belting seems to be suggesting that images body, as Marshall McLuhan showed (p. 26). conventions, the bienseances inherited from created by such artists as Cindy Sherman, Bill Genetic engineering, finally, converts images the early modern period. It is an openly ahis- Viola, Gary Hill, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, into bodies (p. 109). The point of all this torical and even essentialist project: "the and Thomas Struth are in some sense no conceptual combinatorics-and, at least for question of images bursts through the bound- longer "art." Work by these artists, in this Belting, the point of media studies-is to re- aries that divide epochs and cultures from view, connects back to a premodern world store to mediation its material, somatic, "hu- one another.... Images do take on temporal where the image had not yet been fed into man" dimensions. forms in historical media and technologies, the self-propelling, dialectical machinery of Bild-Korper-Mediumis a flexible and open- but they are nonetheless generated by supra- aestheticism, critique, and more aestheticism. 372 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2

The image after art, like the image before art, of art from Giorgio Vasari to Erwin Panofsky an articulated system and as an invitation to is asked neither to reflect the beholder's sub- favored complex models of representation, interpretation. The word "picture" suggested jectivity back onto itself, nor to comment on often grounded in rhetorical criticism, over that the question about reference to the real the conditions of its own possibility, nor to the blatant designating force of the indexical could never precede the question of figura- contribute to the progress of spirit in history. trace. Vasari made no place for the death tion. A curious inconsistency in this book points mask, the wax effigy, or the reliquary in his It turns out that Belting's Bild is in fact best to a deeper fault line in Belting's argument Lives of the Artists. Belting is most engrossing translated as "likeness," as it was in the title of about images. All the examples of nonart dis- when he turns his searchlight to these mar- the English version of his book Bild und Kult. cussed and reproduced in the book-the ginal zones of art history, dark corners first His Bild, like the Greek terms eidolon (simula- masks, effigies, fetishes, anatomical models, explored by Julius von Schlosser and Aby crum) and eikon (copy), puts its stress on and so forth-are drawn either from pre- Warburg at the beginning of the 20th century similitude or resemblance. The word recon- 20th-century European or from "non-West- and only now being revisited by the disci- figures all of picture making as a set of plays ern" cultures. The modern period, by con- pline, or when he ruminates on the masks on the psychology of the perception of resem- trast, is represented almost exclusively by and painted skulls of Jericho, a trove of enig- blance. Resemblance is neither a rhetorical works of art. The only exceptions to this rule mas nine millennia distant from us. The im- nor a logical category but an operation of the are a baseball card and a few purely illustra- plication of Belting's thinking is that the ef- mind designed to secure recognition. Recog- tional reproductions of newspaper clippings figy, the icon, and the mask are inscribed in nition is motivated by fear or longing. We are or book covers. Moreover, the modern art- every figuration, even in so-called works of quickest to recognize the faces and bodies of works reproduced in Belting's book are all art. our families and our predators; they are the works by well-known contemporary artists. If, Belting's image, though, is not simply an densest points in our visual field. No matter as he says, the era of art is over, why not open indexical trace. It is also an apparition that sets how far the picture may stray from resem- up to the full chaotic, demotic range of con- up an asymmetrical relationship between a blance-into abstraction, or into tropology- temporary visual culture? Instead, contempo- real thing and a less real experience of that the mind always wants to pull it back into a rary culture is represented in this book by a thing. The usefulness of the term image is that state of likeness. This schema overturns the select list of highly refined, gallery-based, it can point in either direction, from matter dominant theoretical tendencies of the last blue-chip artists. Bill Viola, to name just one, to idea or the other way around. The image of decades, which have preferred either to dis- can hardly be perceived as a radical threat to the body, for example, is presumably less real integrate iconicity into just another semiotic, the idea of art. On the contrary, Viola's acces- than the physical body. Plotinus, however, convention-bound signing operation or to ex- sible, pathos-saturated video installations are described the body itself as an eidolon-a pose it as the dangerous naturalizing strategy embraced with increasing enthusiasm by a simulacrum or phantom-of the soul: for of repressive, spectacularizing forces, whether mainstream museum-going public eager to him, the physical body was less real than the psychic or societal. reconcile contemporary art with an older soul, and the soul in turn less real than divine Belting has rejected those recent critiques model of aesthetic value. Being.14 Likewise, for Belting the remem- of the icon in favor of what one might call an There is a good reason why Belting might bered image of the dead person is less real "orthodox" conception of eikon and eidolon, turn to such artists as Viola or Sugimoto to than the absent body. Yet the photographic that is, an icon exonerated from the Protes- make his points. Their works are very much image of that same person could also be de- tant (or generally iconoclastic) imputation of about the problems that concern him. Such scribed as more real than the memory. Belt- its appearance quality, that is, its capacity to works frame the nostalgia for a more power- ing's image is therefore a dynamic concept delude. This historical critique still echoes in ful image. They are sophisticated diagrams of that always moves to compensate for its own the modern English words icon and idol, but an imagined postart condition. Conceptual lack. In its incompleteness it preserves the less so in the German Bild. And, as Belting art was able to diagram that condition already traditional dualism of matter and spirit, in the made clear in the closing chapter of Bild und in the 1960s, admittedly, but conceptual art form of the movement from real to nonreal Kult, the iconoclastic critique was complicit was often ugly and alienating. Belting prefers and back again. The incompleteness of appa- with the early modern ideology of art. Protes- the contemporary artists just named because rition propels a permanent movement from tant image theology tried to force the icon their work manages to sublate the conflict apex to apex of the image-body-medium tri- out of public religion and into the private between critique and beauty. These artists angle. sphere, where it was retheorized as "art." For overcome conceptualism in the same way that In stressing the analogical and apparitional Belting all theories of art retain a secondary, the image overcomes aestheticism, or that aspects of the image rather than its powers to provisional, and spurious flavor. His concept "anthropology" overcomes "theory." seduce and to mislead, Belting in effect is of Bild, close to the words eikon and eidolon, is Is it not possible that both this critical, deproblematizing representation. His image also Greek in the sense that it never connects diagramming operation and these fond is always an image of something-as if the with the Latin term figura, "shape" or "fig- dreams of a pre- or a postaesthetic directness preposition "of" did not open onto a laby- ure," surrounded by its cognates "figment" are in fact constitutive features of the art- rinth of uncertainties and alternatives. Belt- and "fiction." Whereas eikon and eidolon put work? that the artwork never does anything ing's image is never repressed, condensed, the stress on the viewer's ability to recognize else but muse about what it would be like to projected, or spectacularized. It simply makes the referent behind the image, figura puts the be an image (or a mere thing, as another art its object appear, with no margin for doubt, stress on the shaped artifact itself and the historian who once tried to think "anthropo- as instantly recognizable as the sinners and viewer's efforts to interpret it. The entire logically," George Kubler, had it'3)? If so, poets whose shades Dante met in the under- modern conception of art, whether textual or then the concerns of Belting's postmodernist world and in Purgatory (p. 189). pictorial, derives, I would argue, from the artists signal that the art idea is now more I used to think that Bild as Belting used it in Latin Christian model of figuration as a trans- deeply institutionalized than ever, and that his historical writings was best translated as figuration whose truth value is found precisely the image itself is nothing other than a dia- "picture." That word captured the artifactual in its dislocation from the real-art as a kind lectical myth of art. nature of the painted panel and the statue. of allegorical revelation, in other words. What sort of image does Belting claim to The picture, with its roots in the Latin pingere, Whereas for Belting art remains, in true Pla- have extricated from the art idea? Above all, it "to paint," was in the first place something tonic fashion, contaminated by its willingness is not an image that raises problems of inter- made. It suggested the radical subordination to traffic in figuration and virtuality. pretation for its recipient. His conceptual of referential ambitions to the exigencies of Belting's model of the image as existential triad of image-body-medium collapses figural material and technique, to the historical sed- exchange is intelligible only as a desired des- or pictorial representation back into a basic imentation of convention, and to the internal tination, some sort of escape from the coils of analogical or mimetic relationship. Belting is logics of format and tropology. "Picture" in representation and illusion. He perceives cor- right to point out, following Georges Didi- this sense was the counterpart of "text"; it rectly but deplores the essential negativity of Huberman, that the humanist historiography named an aggregation of forms perceived as art. He sees that art amounts to nothing more BOOK REVIEWS 373

in LatePrehistoric Art than the repression of desire through desire's specious plenitude). Those are the two op- Representation Egyptian (Berke- of CaliforniaPress, 1992); and idem, figural restaging, nothing other than a swerve tions. Belting rejects the theological view and ley: University Replications:Archaeology, Art History,Psychoanalysis from the real, a of the blow" (in instead chooses the first option. And yet he "masking (UniversityPark, Pa.: PennsylvaniaState University Davis's a deferral of himself never it this The blind Whitney phrase'5), plen- puts way. only Press, 1996), chap. 7. of a fall into er- of this book is that it does not itude, a disruption mimesis, spot inspiring 16. Theodor W. Adorno, AestheticTheory (Minne- ror. Belting expects from his preart or postart acknowledge that the place it is coming from apolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1997), 80. image nothing less than a reversal of all that, is the place of art. 17. Emile Durkheim, The ElementaryForms of the a negation of the negation. Such a gesture of ReligiousLife (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1968), 426- reversal can carry considerable weight and CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD is professorin the 27. pathos, but I would argue that it can never history of art at Yale University [Department of succeed. The priority of the image's represen- History of Art, Yale University, New Haven, tational, figural identity is absolute. Represen- Conn. 06520-8272]. DAVID SUMMERS tation is, as it were, the reality principle of the Real Spaces:World Art Historyand the image. Rise WesternModernism To place anything prior to representation, Notes of as does, is to fall into like a London: Phaidon, 2003. 707 343 Belting something 1. Hans Belting, Das EndederKunstgeschichte? (Mu- pp., logocentrism. That is perhaps the best way to nich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983), translated as b/w ills. $75.00 characterize Belting's image theory: his "im- TheEnd of theHistory of Art?(Chicago: Universityof age" functions the way logos ("word" or Chicago Press, 1987). Far and away the most pressing problem fac- "voice") used to function in models of linguis- 2. The University of Konstanz sponsored until ing the discipline of art history is the prospect tic His is too December 2002 an interdisciplinary research of world art And the first signification. picture theory on literature and For an En- history. yet thing "iconocentric." is project anthropology. that needs to be said about that troublesome Belting's "image" supposed index to the see the last to the material in the same glish-language project, is that there is no consensus about guarantee picture revision of the website http://www.uni-konstanz. expression way that the spoken word was once supposed de/FuF/ueberfak/sfb511/index_eng.html. its meaning or even its value. The common to have guaranteed the merely spatial linguis- 3. See http://kunstwissenschaften.hfg-karlsruhe. alternatives and near synonyms for world art tic signifier, the written word. In fact, the de/kolleg/index.html. history are also problematic: multiculturalism spoken word is always already writerly, that is, 4. See Michael Viktor Schwarz, VisuelleMedien im carries with it the air of a compromised rela- alienated from its signified. So, too, is the christlichenKult (Vienna: B6hlau, 2002). tivism;' visual culture is currently an unstable image always already pictorial. The image 5. See, for example, Horst Wenzel, Wilfried field, subject to intense debates;2 and global never comes to its material "host" Seipel, and GotthartWunberg, eds., Audiovisualitat art has the unfortunate connotation of con- innocently; vor und nach Zur dermedi- it is not even clear that the exists be- Gutenberg: Kulturgeschichte as if art is image alen Umbrfche(Milan: Skira; Vienna: Kunsthisto- ceptual imperialism, history already fore it is submitted to the transfiguring mech- risches Museum, 2001). adequate to all possible occasions.3 It remains anisms of Even the skull of unclear how a world art be figuration. painted 6. Some writings by Friedrich Kittler, however, history might Jericho, primordial cult object, derived its have been translatedinto English:Discourse Networks related to its neighboring disciplines. It has meaning from its place in a series, its relation 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, been proposed that art historians take an- and to other skulls, its multiple feints toward the 1990); Gramophone,Film, Typewriter(Stanford: thropological theories as models, but it has Stanford Press, 1999). cosmetic art, the ceramic art, the art of ges- University also been urged that art history define itself ture itself. "Culture" sets in and 7. See, for instance, Rosalind Krauss,A Voyageon its difference from It has right away, theNorth Sea: Art in the thePost-Medium Condi- by anthropology.4 at least as conceives Age of been said that art should remain dis- "anthropology," Belting tion (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), the history it, will never be able to keep up with the pace latest and, one hopes, last book on the topic of tinct from visual studies, but it has also been of culture's transfigurations. medium specificity. predicted that the two fields will end up en- It is easy to see that the mimetic image is 8. See Hans Belting, "Beyond Iconoclasm: Nam twined.5 It has been suggested that literary inscribed in art. Every painting, every sculp- June Paik, the Zen Gaze, and the Escape from theory is the best resource for the expanding ture, wants to be a second Representation,"in Iconoclash:Beyond the Image Wars but it has also been claimed that every photograph in and ed. Bruno Latour and discipline, And it is to see that the Science,Religion, Art, is a direction for art body. easy appari- Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe:ZKM; Mass.: literary theory wrong instantaneous is also inscribed Cambridge, tional, image MIT Press, 2002), 390-91. history.6 in the work of art. Modern works of ac- this it remains art, 9. Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikumim Despite conceptual disarray cording to Theodor Adorno, are "ashamed" Mittelalter(Berlin: Mann, 1981), translated as The absolutely essential for art history to ask about of their apparitional quality but are unable to Imageand Its Publicin theMiddle Ages (New Rochelle, its limits and its future, and those questions shed it. "If the deities of antiquity," Adorno N.Y.: Caratzas, 1990); and Bild und Kult: Eine Ge- inevitably lead to the problem of world art schichtedes Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: wrote, "were said to appear fleetingly at their history. It is a cardinal virtue of Real Spaces Beck, 1990), translated as Likenessand Presence:A cult sites .. . this act of became the that Summers dares, as few art historians appearing Historyof the Image beforethe Era of Art (Chicago: law of the of but at the to tackle the of world art his- permanence artworks, Universityof Chicago Press, 1994). have, problem of the incarnation of what in a book. In Onians price living ap- 10. Hans Belting, Das Endeder Kunstgeschichte: Eine tory single 2000, John pears."16 It is harder to see that the work of Revision nach zehn Jahren (Munich: Beck, 1995), organized a conference at the Clark Art Insti- art is already inscribed in every image, even in translated as Art Historyafter Modernism (Chicago: tute on the theme of art historical writing that of and Das unsicht- the supposedly pre-aesthetic artifact like the University Chicago Press, 2003); keeps to the local and particular, as opposed bareMeisterwerk: Die modemen derKunst (Mu- and the mask. Emile Durkheim recog- Mythen to that tries, in Onians's "to effigy nich: Beck, 1998), translated as TheInvisible Master- writing phrase, nized this fact when he observed that "art is the world in a book."7 The conference piece(London: Reaktion, 2001). put not an external ornament with which with whose work merely 11. Hans Belting, GiovanniBellini Pieta (Frank- began speakers "expanded" the [religious] cult has adorned itself in order furt: Fischer, 1985); Belting and Christiane Kruse, local subjects into specialized monographs to dissimulate certain of its features which Die Erfindungdes Gemaldes:Das ersteJahrhundert der and progressed to the most "compressed" at- may be too austere and too rude; but rather, niederliindischenMalerei (Munich: Hirmer, 1994); tempts to address the problem of world art in and Bosch:Garden De- in itself, the cult is something aesthetic."'7 Belting, Hieronymus of Earthly its totality. I was on the final panel, along with lights(Munich: Prestel, 2002). The image is thus best understood not as the Onians, Summers, and David Freedberg; we 12. Belting, 2001 (as in n. 10), 8. origin but as the destination of art. Figural were said to have tried "to the world in a 13. The Time:Remarks on put strives toward the condition of George Kubler, Shapeof book." Summers did not the representation the (New Haven: Yale Only deny the Historyof Things University image, namely, pure presence, appari- Press, 1962). charge.8 The panel would have been more and and had it in- tion, instantaneity, beauty. "Image" 14. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortalsand Immor- representative problematic names both the state that art desires (the tals:Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University cluded Marilyn Stokstad and other authors of beautiful semblance) and the state that (Prot- Press, 1991), 192. one-volume freshman world art survey texts, estant or iconophobic) theology deplores (a 15. Whitney Davis, Maskingthe Blow: The Sceneof because then it would have been apparent