ABSTRACT
One of the most influential American journals, October, in 1996 submitted to an authoritative array of art historians and visual art scholars the famous “Visual Culture Questionnaire”.1 Though the answers showed some scepticism about the term “visual culture”,2 this issue can be considered the point of no return in the evolution of a field that has since had, especially in the United States, but also in Europe, considerable and well-established institutional effects,3 an increasingly transparent and self-conscious disciplinary statute as well as an appropriate number of canonical texts that define the “visual turn” in the humanities. Twenty years separate us from the questionnaire, and in that time many lucid introductory summaries have been published, a huge number of academic programs have been instituted, and there has even been extensive discussion of the situation and developments in the discipline in prominent journals such as the Journal of Visual Culture, Invisible Culture, Bildwelten des Wissens and Visual Studies.
