ABSTRACT
One has to admire the obstinacy of David Summers in wanting to create concepts that could account for everything in the open-ended domain that has come to be called art. Notions like “place,” “images,” or “planarity” are reminiscent of the Deleuzian “precepts,” and I believe they are entirely relevant because they answer to specific demands.173 According to Deleuze, each new concept of philosophy — or of art history as far as we are concerned — is the answer to a problem that needs to be solved; for instance, the Platonist theory of form came to be created as Socrates and Plato tried to address the issue of choosing the right candidate for leading an improved Athenian democracy to the discovery and definition of unchanging concepts, like courage or justice. Summers’s concepts may not be entirely new; like the “fold” Deleuze saw in the philosophy of Leibniz, they are mostly a reworking of older concepts that needed to be adapted to a new situation. It is obviously a remarkable project and, precisely because the author does not claim to have written a global history of art, it is a wonderful attempt to answer the problem of globalization and its new cultural requirements. I think the requirements Summers sets himself can be stated this way: to formulate concepts that can be used in any circumstances, for the art history of any cultural domain in relation with any other; and to avoid historicity. This statement obviously does not do justice to the richness of Real Spaces, but I think it is a fair assessment of its mission.
