ABSTRACT
THE NEED TO REVIEW, REDRESS, AND revise the history of art and those practices that sustained modernism has led to the advocacy of the abandonment of this discipline by those engaged in formulating the interdisciplinary practices of visual or cultural studies. This stance is often problematically premised on a simplistic view of art history as a practice concerned with a deterministic narrative of masterpieces, genius, and taste built upon an evolutionary schema. This critique has also been accompanied by a revival of the concept of the work of art as a text whose form and medium is subordinate to its philosophical, literary, theoretical, and ideological content rather than the means of their aesthetic and conceptual realization. Such views of art are a far cry from those associated with historians such as Aloïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, Julius von Schlosser, Aby Warburg, and others, 1 who took as their task the production of a modern art history that could contribute to a rational model of human subjectivity. The compilation of this collection of essays, edited by Richard Woodfield, 2 which address and apply the methodology and concepts of Aloïs Riegl, is in part a response to this situation.
