ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2009, at a lecture on the bodily effects of religious visions in the Middle Ages, an audience member asked the speaker whether he was addressing the subject as a 'reporter' or as a person of faith: whether he believed that these 'things', stigmata and the like, actually happened. In the past five years, a debate on ethical practice has found its way into art history via the museum community – albeit somewhat unwelcome – in response to the cultural heritage repatriation battles, most notably between Italy and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. David Joselit's book goes on precisely to read television against the grain, as a project to visualise television's unconscious, a tactic that has served as a profitable model of investigation in modern art history. Unlike a project that projects or aspires to a future, the proleptic inscribes within a present that future.
