Acknowledgments

Preziosi, Donald

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Acknowledgments

Donald Preziosi

Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science

Acknowledgments

Author

Donald Preziosi

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00103.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18654

Acknowledgments

So many persons have informed this study to its benefit that to preface the volume with a neat and orderly genealogy would be misleading. But there are some palpable landmarks on the way. The need for a focused discussion of many of the issues raised was first felt during graduate studies at Harvard that jostled together art history, anthropology, and linguistics. The feasibility of pursuing such a study became apparent in stages, in part through graduate seminars that I taught at Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the State University of New York at Binghamton; and in part thanks to participation a decade ago in a discussion group at Harvard known as the Philomorphs.

I am greatly indebted to two extraordinary institutions that provided me with space, time, and intellectual challenge in recent years: first, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where as a senior fellow during 1981-82 I began the present project in earnest; and second, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. A substantial part of the present volume began to take shape during my residency at Stanford as a research fellow in 1983–84, under the auspices of the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities whose support I gratefully acknowledge.

At CASVA I had the good fortune to interact with a constant stream of art historical colleagues from around the world; during that time I profited from unfettered, dispassionate, and passionate dialogue on art historical and critical issues of the most diverse kind. Art history internationally owes a great debt to Dean Henry A. Millon and Associate Dean Marianna Shreve Simpson for actively opening up and nurturing an intellectual and material space for the discipline to reflect upon itself. At CASBS I had the opposite but reciprocal good fortune not to interact with art historical colleagues as I began to write, profiting rather from conversations and discussions in adjacent and distant areas of the human sciences that, as I was to discover, resonated with a number of the deepest concerns of my own discipline. The juxtaposition of these two institutional residencies within the space of three years contributed strongly to my understanding of, and ability to begin to articulate, many of the issues, questions, and problems raised in this work.

In and around these experiences, I have had the opportunity to discuss these issues with friends, students, and colleagues in Berkeley, Berlin, Binghamton, Bloomington, Los Angeles, New York, Urbino, Vienna, and Washington within a variety of contexts—lectures, symposia, disciplinary and interdisciplinary meetings, and graduate seminars of which I was, ostensibly, the conductor. As the graduate students in my Binghamton seminars will surely understand, this book is a gift to them.

I especially want to thank Philip Armstrong, Deborah Cibelli, Alison Ferris, Sue Friedlander, Melissa Hall, Paul Ivey, Preminda Jacob, Amy Karlinsky, Lynne Kirby, Judith Sumner, Pam Toma, and Rosemary Welsh. For comments and criticisms on earlier versions of parts of this text, I am grateful to the following: Svetlana Alpers, Nancy Armstrong, Irene Bierman, Norman Bryson, Teresa de Lauretis, Michael Fotiades, Christopher Fynsk, Frederic Garber, Christine Hasenmueller, Michael Herzfeld, Ian Hodder, Wendy Holmes, Gregory Jusdanis, Rosalind Krauss, Alexandros Lagopoulos, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Sir Edmund Leach, Rob Nelson, Joseph Riddel, Thomas Sebeok, William Spanos, Maureen Turim, and Hayden White.

I also owe a great debt to the late Roman Jakobson for extended discussions on some of these issues in Cambridge and on Ossabaw Island, Georgia; and to Meyer Schapiro for long Saturday conversations on West 4th Street many years ago. In no small measure, my sense of what art history could be has derived from the latter.

Finally, I want to thank Judy Metro, senior editor at Yale University Press, for her ongoing encouragement and unfailingly good advice in bringing this project to completion.

Los Angeles
Summer 1988

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