What is art history and where did it originate? In the OXFORD HISTORY OF ART series, this book provides a critical reading of key texts from the past two centuries. Preziosi introduces an anthology of over thirty contributions by Kant, Gombrich, Panofsky, Mary Kelly and others, with background information on the major issues.

It becomes a practice wherein objects and subjects relate and relations often crystallize, under the unrecognized aegis of the fetish, this Other of art, since Preziosi concisely defines art as 'the anti-fetish fetish'. Far from the fantastic neutrality that is traditionally found in the format of such an historiographic endeavour, Preziosi frames his selection of text and threads through them with an array of different strategic voices, superimposed (to stress a spatial figure he is keen to discern) in order to elaborate a strong polemic position that situates art history as an enduring and well disguised fictional genre. In the process, the author courageously takes on the paradox that is at the core of his project: to introduce students to the coming out o art history...as art, one that is not necessarily meant to be our coming out of it but that certainly well establishes our motives to continue to shake its grounds and its multi-storied apparatus.' - Professor Johanne Lamoureux, University of Montreal.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Making the Visible Legible
CHAPTER 1. ART AS HISTORY
Introduction
Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture
Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History
Patterns of Intention
CHAPTER 2. AESTHETICS
Introduction
What is Enlightenment?
The Critique of Judgement
Philosophy of Fine Art
CHAPTER 3. STYLE
Introduction
Principles in Art History
"Form", Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description
Style
Style
CHAPTER 4. HISTORY AS AN ART
Introduction
Leading Characteristics of the Later Roman Kunstwollen
Images from the Regions of the Pueblo Indians
Warburg's Concept of Kunstwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics
Retrieving Warburg's Tradition
CHAPTER 5. MECHANISMS OF MEANING: ICONOGRAPHY AND SEMIOLOGY
Introduction
Semiotics and Iconography
Semiotics and Art History
Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition
Toward A Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds
CHAPTER 6. MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Introduction
Sculpture in the Expanded Field
What Is an Author?
The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism
Mapping the Postmodern
CHAPTER 7. THE GENDERED SUBJECT
Introduction
The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission
Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists
No Essential Femininity
Postfeminism, Feminist Pleasures, and Embodied Theories of Art
CHAPTER 8. DECONSTRUCTION AND THE LIMITS OF INTERPRETATION
Introduction
The Temptation of New Perspectives
The Origin of the Work of Art
The Still Life as a Personal Object
Restitutions of the truth in pointing [pointure]
CHAPTER 9. THE OTHER: ART HISTORY AND/AS MUSEOLOGY
Introduction
Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order
Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums
The Recalcitrant Object: Culture Contact and the Question of Hybridity
Nestor Garcia Canclini
Donald Preziosi
Afterword, Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Biographical Notes, Text Acknowledgements, List of Illustrations, Glossary, Index