ABSTRACT
I find the sense of theatrical antagonism implied by the title Art History Versus Aesthetics both convincing and misplaced at the same time.7 It seems convincing because art history has relied upon its distance from aesthetic reflection as a means of ensuring its autonomy and validity since its inception as an essentially modernist discipline in the nineteenth century. This has set the conditions for the subsequent uneasy relationship between the systems of art history and aesthetics. It’s easy to see how both may share a suspicion of one another’s modes and methods. Art historians often distrust what they assume to be the philosophical impulse to subsume material and historical particularities under conceptual or ideal universals. And likewise, the philosopher might be skeptical of the epistemological benefit in the historian’s attention to taxonomic detail.
