ABSTRACT
After what is now more than a quarter of a century of disciplinary self-critique, why is it that we have been perennially unable to escape art historicism? Apart from the massive and growing commodifications of art history and museology as ancillary professions of a larger infotainment and edutainment industry in which all of us today are implicated, what most deeply supports and naturalizes our interest in the “history” of art, and motivates our abiding concern with “visual cultures”?
