ABSTRACT
The discussions held at Cork on the relation between aesthetics and art history are fascinating. Having been involved in a Clark Art Institute conference that attempted to bring aesthetics, art history, and visual studies together, I am familiar with the ways in which these disciplines, which would appear to have so much to do with one another, tend to pass each other like ships in the night.80 The ambition to make them address each other, at least long enough to understand why it is that they neglect each other, affords us insight into the nature of the intellectual culture in which we live. My own way into this topic has to do with my suspicion of the “grand narratives” on which aesthetics and art history have so often relied. I am concerned that the infinite variety of human experience is necessarily neglected when it is reduced to orderly categories by means of philosophies of art or philosophies of history based on universalizing notions of subjectivity.
