ABSTRACT
This text traces the genealogy of Piotr Piotrowski’s accounts leading to horizontal art history and analyzes its relation to other theories or concepts. It also aims to shed light on horizontal art history’s insecure, endangered position in the climate of neo-nationalism. His main idea was to secure place, visibility and presence on an equal footing for East-Central Europe, while ‘reversing and overturning the dominant art-historical narrative’. He eliminated the hierarchy of the positioning built into the ‘universal art history’ by levelling the centric and marginal position. The political climate has changed considerably from the time Piotrowski’s theory was launched in 2008, and even from the time, it was updated just before his death. One can no longer argue for the historical specificities of art and culture of the East-Central European region as deriving from the locality and different trajectories of its history since this argument, though only on the surface, is all too easily mistaken for the rhetoric of the neo-nationalists and populists. His powerful vision has been squeezed in between two fringes: the politically instrumentalized and essentialized national discourse, and the reinvigorated universal art history under different names. His theory can be qualified as unprotected endangered species of knowledge.
