Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2016)
To betray art history
Abstract
The work of Donald Preziosi represents one of the most sustained and often brilliant attempts to betray the modern discipline of art history by exposing its skillful shell game: precisely how and why it substitutes artifice, poetry, and representational schemes for putative facticity and objectivity (that desirous and yet ever elusive Kunstwissenschaft that art historians prattle on about). This attempt is inseparable from a sinuous, witty, involutive writing style that meanders between steely insight and coy suggestions of how art history could be performed otherwise. Preziosi’s writes art history. In doing so he betrays its disciplinary desires. It is this event of betrayal that has made his work so exciting to some, so troubling to others.
