Arabesques, Unicorns, and Invisible Masters: the Art Historian's Gaze
ARABESQUES, UNICORNS, AND INVISIBLE MASTERS 213 EVA-MARIA TROELENBERG ARABESQUES, UNICORNS, AND INVISIBLE MASteRS: THE ART HISTORIAN’S GAZE AS SYMPTOMATIC ACTION? Is it still true that art history, traditionally understood as be to look at these objects. As Margaret Olin has argued, an explicitly object-based discipline, lacks a thorough “The term ‘gaze’ … leaves no room to comprehend the understanding of an “action tradition” that could be em- visual without reference to someone whose vision is un- ployed to explain and theorize, for example, artistic der discussion.”3 Although she refers generally to the agency? And that therefore art history, as opposed to gaze of all possible kinds of beholders, viewers, or spec- other disciplines such as sociology or linguistic studies, tators, she also stresses: “While most discourse about the has found it particularly difficult to look at its own his- gaze concerns pleasure and knowledge, however, it gen- toriography in terms of academic or scholarly action or erally places both of these in the service of issues of agency? Such explanations were employed until quite power, manipulation, and desire”; furthermore, “The recently when expounding the problem of a general de- choice of terms from this complex can offer a key to the lay in critical historiography concerning the discipline’s theoretical bent or the ideology of the theorist.”4 Ac- traditions and methods, particularly in relation to Ger- cordingly, an action-based theory of historiography man art history under National Socialism.1 must find
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