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From Art History to Visual Culture Studies? Questions of History, Theory, and Practice

Marquard Smith 1

1University of Westminster

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this article I raise a series of questions around the history, theory, and practice of Visual Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that studies visual cultures. These questions include: What is Visual Culture Studies? What are its genealogies? Why are the bonds between it and its intersecting fields of inquiry such as Art History, the very fields that inform it, so tense? What is the purview or object domain of Visual Culture Studies, or, rather, what is the ‘object’ of study of Visual Culture Studies? If Visual Culture Studies is actually different from Art History, which I think it is, how do these differences show themselves? How does the question of, for instance, ‘place’ as a geo-political-aesthetic subject in our transcultural era enable us to speak about an interdisciplinary ‘object’ of Visual Culture Studies that is not determined in advance, and that can only come together, come into being, become known it us, as it takes shape by way of the critical study of it? In the end, then, what does it mean to ‘do’ Visual Culture Studies?

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.