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Interview with James Elkins

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 Perspective
Actualité en histoire de l’art
2 | 2015
United States

Interview with James Elkins

Carlo A. Célius, Sophie Raux, Riccardo Venturi and James Elkins

Translator: Géraldine Bretault, Deke Dusinberre and Olga Grlic

Publisher
Institut national d'histoire de l'art

Electronic version
URL: http://perspective.revues.org/6056
ISSN: 2269-7721

Electronic reference
Carlo A. Célius, Sophie Raux, Riccardo Venturi and James Elkins, « Interview with James Elkins »,
Perspective [Online], 2 | 2015, Online since 07 December 2015, connection on 01 October 2016. URL :
http://perspective.revues.org/6056

This text was automatically generated on 1 octobre 2016.

 Interview with James Elkins 1

Interview with James Elkins

Carlo A. Célius, Sophie Raux, Riccardo Venturi and James Elkins
Translation : Géraldine Bretault, Deke Dusinberre and Olga Grlic

1 James Elkins should need no introduction, for he is one of the most prolific and influential art
historians of the past twenty years. Yet he is certainly not as familiar to French readers as his
international popularity would suggest. A professor at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1989,
Elkins has written or edited twenty-five books and more than 120 articles and essays. Several books
have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean and Czech, while anthologies of his
writing already or will soon exist in German, Russian, Spanish, and Estonian. Nothing of the sort,
however, is available to the French-speaking public.
2 Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1955, Elkins studied art history at Cornell University. He then earned a
fine art degree at the University of Chicago, where he later completed a PhD in art history with a
dissertation on Perspective in Renaissance Art and in Modern Scholarship. His centers of interest
have constantly expanded and evolved since that time, testifying to his insatiable curiosity about
every aspect of the visual world. His major fields of research range from the historiography of art
history to the theory of images1
3 His research, informed by an original critical perspective that willingly crosses the boundaries
between fields, has always been on the cutting edge of the new art history. Although a great
promoter of visual studies, Elkins has never disguised his “skepticism” with regard to the difficult
task of developing a visual science that places equal interest in a painting by Rembrandt and a
microscopic image of paramecia.2 His deconstruction of the canons of academic art history has
extended in two directions. The first concerns debate over the development of the field in a global
context: how can a global art history be conceptualized and written today without falling into
ethnocentrism?3 The second addresses what Elkins considers to be a major untheorized dimension
of art history: writing. Art-historical writing merits a self-reflexive examination of its practices
because it can never be a neutral vehicle of ideas, and because its forms are conditioned by well-
defined academic and professional expectations. Elkins’s forthcoming publications on this issue (
What Is Interesting Writing in Art History? and Writing with Images) seek to break with
academic formalism, ivory-tower isolation, and sacrosanct scholarly “authorship.” He now

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 2

develops his manuscripts in real time on the internet (“live writing”) and invites interactive
contributions from readers.
4 This year, at the height of his fame, the ever-surprising Elkins announced on social media that he
would cease publishing in the fields of art history, visual studies, and the theory of art in order to
devote himself to other intellectual projects. Between now and 2020 he will be preparing A Journey
, a work of fiction that will represent the culmination of his experimental exploration of the ways
that texts emerge in the face of images. [Sophie Raux]

***

Carlo A. Célius. Statistical documents, textual analysis, various discussions, consideration of

the academic world... everything allows you to draw a firm conclusion: the history of art is and
remains a Western-centric discourse. Furthermore, you do not seem to perceive any possibility
of transcending this within the framework of a global art history, especially since you do not see
the potential approaches alternative (postcolonial theory, theories of the image, studies of visual
culture, etc.) as offering satisfactory points of view. The type of history that needs to be written
– apparent from the number of publications devoted to the subject – seems to be primarily that
of an “art” that has reached the “global age,” coinciding with what we call “contemporary art” in its
various forms. Upon closer examination, however, these creations pertain to a specific system.
We find ourselves in an extension of the fine-arts model (even as it is undergoing
transformation); that is to say, a type of organization, of institutionalization of the visual arts
– among others – of a specific form of creation, established in the sixteenth century and
disseminated outside Europe, which has enjoyed a long-lasting hegemony. The history of art is a
discourse generated by this model, to which it remains strongly attached. Its Western-centrism
is therefore not at all surprising. It is possible that “global art” is simply the last phase of the
maximal expansion of a model, or scholarly field (which is perpetuated through transformation),
and history that we wish to see as global: that is, a search for an appropriate accompanying
discourse. Now, isn’t the challenge – revealed by the anthropology of images and visual
studies – to achieve a conceptualization of the visual arts (the focus of image production,
among others, in a given society) in their various forms of organization, of crystallization, in time
and space?
James Elkins. Thank you for the question. It is a pleasure to “meet” you, even if it is
only in this digital forum. I hope we have the opportunity to talk face to face sometime
soon.
I agree it is not surprising that the discourse of global art is “Western.” I agree, too,
with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, who emphasizes that the twentieth century was not
the first moment of global art – he points, for example, to Spanish expansion during the
Renaissance. And I agree with Susan Buck-Morss that Haiti, for example, needs to be
seen in a much more complex and global interaction not only with slavery, but with the
history of German philosophy.4
For me there is a difference between global art and the writing that describes global
art. Global art sometimes resists capitalism, but, as we know, much contemporary art
does not offer a political critique. Global art has evolved quickly in the last ten years
into a complex series of practices that refer to what is local, glocal, provincial, regional,
and national in many ways. The “Westerness” of the entire contemporary art world
may not be in doubt, but there are many ongoing “forms of organization,” as you say.
Writing on global art is, I think, partly distinct from these issues. In the last generation,
the different ways of writing the history of art worldwide have shrunk. Writing has
become more uniform. Serious scholarly writing on art history, in particular, has

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 3

developed a certain style, certain protocols, rules, and habits that have made it quite
uniform. It is not possible for a young scholar from China, for example, to be offered a
teaching position in a university in Western Europe or North America unless that
scholar practices this kind of writing.
And yet the difference between global art and writing on global art remains largely
invisible. The wonderful art historian Piotr Piotrowski, who died in spring 2015, once
wrote on “horizontal art history”: he was interested in ways of writing art history that
could do justice to marginal or belated traditions. It is an excellent analysis, which I use
in my own work; but Piotrowski does not notice that the book Art Since 1900, which he
critiques, is written in a certain style, with rules of argument, sanctioned theorists,
customary methodologies, and expected narratives: he only says in passing that the
book is written very well.5 Art Since 1900 is a good example of the currently acceptable
style of writing about art: it exhibits the mixture of October, French poststructuralism,
and Frankfurt School theory that have become the standard way to narrate the history,
theory, and criticism of art. What Piotrowski wants is different valuations of art,
different subjects to write about, but not different ways of writing. This is what
concerns me. There is a creeping uniformity in the ways art history is written, even
while there is a tremendous expansion in the subjects of art and art history.
I am writing from Schiphol airport near Amsterdam (one of my homes away from
home). Just before I opened this correspondence, I emailed the editor of Singapore
University Press to offer him my book The Impending Single History of Art: North Atlantic
Art History and its Alternatives. That book will have all my thoughts on this topic, which I
think is the most important one facing the next generation of writers on art. I hope to
publish it with Singapore University Press as a gesture against the increasing
homogeneity of art writing printed by Western European and North American
university presses.
Sophie Raux. In your seminal book, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003) 6, you
already looked critically at the practice of visual studies, too often centered on “high art” and
contemporary images and media. You called for the development of a more theoretically and
epistemologically ambitious project, one that would expand the questioning to historic images or
non-artistic, and non-Western images in order to lead to the development of a field open to more
comprehensive approaches to the image and the visual. You are currently publishing the texts of
the international workshop you led in 2011 at the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, under the title Farewell to Visual Studies. 7 How are we to
understand this “farewell” to visual studies? Is this a confession of your renunciation of a project
that failed to develop conceptual frameworks and theoretical tools necessary to its ambitious
scope? Or, is it rather a farewell to a certain narrow understanding of visual studies? In other
words, is this a new call to continue the critical effort you have been engaged in for over ten
years against a certain routinization of visual studies that does not seek to extend its arguments
(or not enough) to all visual artifacts and confront the real theoretical and epistemological
challenges facing it?
James Elkins. Sophie, it’s lovely to meet you in this forum! (There is something
appropriate about a digital forum in this age of endless traveling. Even though I travel a
lot – seventy-five countries so far – I have still relatively few French scholars as friends.
This is, for me, a fascinating anomaly.)
Farewell to Visual Studies is a large-scale effort: over forty scholars are in the book, from
perhaps twenty countries. I co-edited it with Sunil Manghani, a wonderful reader of
Roland Barthes, and Gustav Frank, whose area of expertise is German literature. 8 We

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 4

wanted the book to be an opportunity for visual studies to consider its position in the
second decade of the twenty-first century. We find that visual studies, visual culture,
the Swedish-language Bildvetenskap, and the German-language Bildwissenschaft lack
disciplinary self-criticism and are often self-congratulatory. There is a kind of euphoria
about the visual, because these fields have discovered the world beyond fine art, and
they are thinking about visuality and politics in ways that art history still does not. My
co-editors and I wanted to produce a book that gathers criticisms of visual studies, so
that fields like visual studies can become more self-reflective.
I will give two examples. First, we wanted to introduce Anglophone readers to the
German-language literature. Bildwissenschaft produces an enormous number of books
and essays, most of which are unread in the United Kingdom and North America.
Bildwissenschaft has different concerns, and a different style, than writing in other
countries, and non-German visual studies can only become more complex by including
it. I think the field of visual studies has four or five “flavors” worldwide – there is also a
Chinese visual studies, which is entirely different from European and American kinds of
visual studies – and we hope our book will make visual studies more complex.
Second, we hope to introduce different histories of visual studies. As a discipline, visual
studies is “presentist”: it looks disproportionately at contemporary art, and it tends to
ignore pre-modern art. This “presentism” has been critiqued, for example, by Keith
Moxey and Michael Ann Holly, both of whom are in our book Farewell to Visual Studies.
This “presentism” is accompanied by another, which I think may be even more
important: visual studies traces its own history only to the late 1980s (the first PhD
program) or, before that, to English cultural studies in the 1960s. But if we pay more
attention to national varieties of writing, the history of visual studies changes. Our
book also looks at writers like Béla Balázs, and we suggest new ways to think about the
history of visual studies that begins before the Second World War.
And in answer to your last question: I wish Farewell to Visual Studies were about
extending visual studies “to all visual artifacts.” I would love it if visual studies looked
more at science and other non-art images. But sadly, that remains my own interest, and
so I did not promote it in the book.
As I think you know, I am writing my last two art-historical texts this year. (This is
explained on my website. I’m surprised you haven’t asked me about that: this year it’s
what most people want to talk about.) One of the two books I am writing is The
Impending Single History of Art. The other is a large textbook called Visual Worlds, which I
am co-authoring with Erna Fiorentini, who works at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.
That book is an introduction to the entire visual world, in all fields, for beginning
university students. It is my opportunity to experiment with images of all kinds and not
focus on fine art. But it is not a book of visual studies: it’s impossible, I think, to do
justice to non-popular, technical, scientific images in the frameworks of visual studies
or even Bildwissenschaft. In that sense Visual Worlds really is a “farewell to visual
studies.”
Sophie Raux. Today the field of visual studies can boast of thirty years of existence within the
international academic landscape, and historiographical surveys are beginning to appear. In your
introduction to the collective volume Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through The
Discipline9, you draw up a map of the most active centers in the field, citing the English and
North American space, Latin America, Scandinavia and the Germanic world, and China and
Taiwan. While French Theory helped nurture many approaches to visual studies, how do you

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 5

explain the fading of France in the current panorama of international research? Is it a problem of
visibility that could be due, for example, to the lack of institutionalization of visual studies in our
country, or a language problem – the French publishing so little in English? Or do you consider
that French research has remained too impervious to the “in”discipline of visual studies so that
its contribution still remains marginal today?
James Elkins. What a wonderful, complex question. I wish I could answer it adequately
in this forum! Let me offer instead a couple of aperçus. (I borrow that word from
Georges Didi-Huberman, who gave a wonderful lecture on the aperçu subject in Prague
in May 2015.)
The voice of France can never be missing simply because it is central. I would probably
not have said “fading,” because for me, the French poststructuralist model is crucial to
the possibility of visual studies. I refer not only to Foucauldian analysis of politics and
institutions, but to Roland Barthes’s ideas about the power of the image and Gilles
Deleuze’s ideas about cultural difference and identity, which have led on to any number
of writers, from Hélène Cixous to Catherine Malabou and François Laruelle. These
aren’t, technically speaking, visual studies authors: but visual studies requires them.
On the other hand, there is the ongoing question of the relation between visual theory
and the practice of visual studies. I am developing a distinction between texts read as
art history, and those read for art history. Every visual studies student reads
poststructuralist analysis, perhaps beginning with Michel Foucault’s. Those authors are
indispensable for the discipline’s sense of itself. But they are of use for visual studies,
not as examples of visual studies. The French texts have a fascinating undecidable
location, at once in and for visual studies.
Instead of “fading,” I would perhaps say “waiting.” I was in Zurich in May for a
conference on the practice-led PhD Swiss academies would like to award without
relying on universities. We talked about how this sort of PhD has existed in the United
Kingdom since the 1970s, and I mentioned that they have also existed in Japan for that
long (over twenty “art universities” confer the PhD in Japan). Several people in Zurich
worried that German-speaking countries are late to the conversation on the PhD. For
me, that belatedness is a virtue. It permits them to think about all the things that have
been written and thought on the PhD in the last forty years and develop new models. I
am not sure they will! But belatedness, as Dipesh Chakrabarty once said, is opportunity.
The situation in French scholarship is similar: visual studies has arrived at an
interesting moment in its development, and a new intervention would be very
welcome.
The issue of language and publishing is also crucial here, as you say. In The Impending
Single History of Art, I spend a chapter analyzing the language competencies of art
historians. Because English is currently the lingua franca of art history (it’s a
wonderfully apposite expression, “lingua franca”!), it matters exactly how English is
used, how it is expected, how it is judged. I make a distinction between competence in
speaking English, in reading English, and in writing English. It is common to have
speaking competence in English. Competence in speaking and listening helps people
attend international conferences, and hear and answer questions posed in English. Next
is competence in reading English. This is more problematic. Most French scholars read
English, just as most Anglophone scholars read French, German, Italian, and other
European languages. But this skill is problematic because there is a difference between
reading adequately and reading fluently. To take an example from German: for five

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 6

years I was on the annual review panel for Eikones, the research center in Basel. Each
year we read as much of their literature as possible, and as a result I have read almost
twenty volumes of Eikones conferences and monographs. English and French sources
are always in the footnotes, but it is an open question how extensively some Eikones
contributors engage English and French texts. It is a sensitive and unquantifiable
phenomenon, but it matters because as the scholarship grows, it can develop a
tradition or custom of citing books without really entering into serious dialogue with
them. “Reading adequately” can mean pursuing a kind of conversation with a scholar
that is really not profound.
The third of these skills, writing English, is the most important and also the most
sensitive. (Sorry, my little aperçu seems to be growing into a dissertation.) I know a
number of scholars who speak French as native speakers. They have excellent
conversational and reading skills in English; their skill in writing English can also be
very high – but not quite good enough to submit essays to English-language journals, or
send manuscript proposals to English-language university presses. For scholars who
have not experienced this, it may sound trivial; after all, it’s always possible to hire an
editor. But it is a real-life obstacle, and it produces measurable effects on entire
communities of scholars.
Riccardo Venturi. My first question concerns the role of painting within the realm of images,
or the place of painting in image theory as it is conceived in art history and visual studies. Is
painting our model for images in general? This is an old question (in France tackled for instance
by Hubert Damisch and Yve-Alain Bois), recently discussed in one of the conversations you
hosted at the Stone Art Theory Institute10. Can we assess the specificity of painting without
embracing a modernist position about its medium specificity?
James Elkins. I have always loved this question. I love the ways it is asked. It is asked
polemically: people say, why should I pay attention to painting? Can’t we finally just
leave it behind? It is asked nostalgically: people say, de-skilling has meant that painting
is largely lost. It is asked historically: people say, since the advent of multimedia and
the post-medium condition, painting can no longer be a model. It is asked in the spirit
of Nietzschean recurrence: Thierry de Duve has remarked that painting dies and is
resurrected every five years. It is asked in a revisionist spirit: Richard Schiff has
recently blamed criticism for the state of painting.11 I wonder if this wide range of
questions means that a good approach to the question of painting as model is not
historiographic or theoretical, but affective. I will come back to this in a moment.
As you mention, the question came up in the Stone Art Theory Institute book What Is an
Image?. It was prompted by the strange fact that we had talked for several days about
the nature of images, but we had not agreed whether or not paintings were an optimal
example. Our seminar consisted of thirty people talking in a closed seminar from nine
in the morning to six in the evening, for three or four days: a very wide range of
scholars from several fields and a number of countries... and yet we seemed entirely
undecided about what an optimal example of “an image” might be.
So, I raised the question: is painting our model? Or perhaps our exemplar? Is it crucial
for our understanding of what an image is? Or is it simply the easiest, closest example,
without any special ontological or epistemological relation to our subject? For
Jacqueline Lichtenstein, for example, painting is indispensable and central, but with an
important caveat: she does not think art history in general pays enough attention to
paintings. Rather, she says art historians tend to abstract away the painterly and

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 7

material qualities of paintings, and treat them as pictures. For W. J. T. Mitchell, who was
also present at our discussions, paintings have no special position as models, except
what they have been given by the ideology of art history and criticism. For Gottfried
Boehm, painting, and especially, perhaps, mid-century abstract painting, has a deeply
privileged and central place in the imagining of what an image, and a picture (or Bild),
can be and how it can create meaning. For Marie-José Mondzain, painting is crucial as a
model not just for the “image” which is itself a contested term, but for representation,
fidelity, incarnation, and other fundamental concepts of Judeo-Christian thinking.
The conversation was fascinating and unresolved. It was one of my favorite moments in
What Is an Image?. It would be possible to say the irresolution was due to the different
discourses that were represented in our seminar. For some people, the question was
ontological (I would count Gottfried Boehm in this category). For others, it was
ideological (W. J. T. Mitchell). For still others, it was historical and disciplinary
(Jacqueline Lichtenstein). And for still others, theological (Marie-José Mondzain). To
these you could add semiotic and structural (Yve-Alain Bois) and even
phenomenological and psychoanalytic (Hubert Damisch).12
But to return to my initial observation: there are so many ways of asking this question,
and so many disciplines are brought to bear on it, that it may make sense to consider it
not as an ordinary question, the kind that can be answered by the application of a
philosophic discourse, but as an anomalous question, one that requires a different kind
of answer. The question: “Is painting a model for the image?” might be like one of
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s questions that involve certainty, like “Do I have two hands?” In
other words, it may not be a question that can be sensibly posed within the philosophic
language that it seems to draw upon.
That is why I suggested it might be a question about affect, about desire. The questions
such as “Why do we need them to be models?” or “Why do we need paintings not to be
models?” might lead to a deeper question “What do we want paintings to be?”
Riccardo Venturi. I am particularly interested in the role of moving images in image theory. In
What is an Image? – one of the most exhaustive treatments of the question, which gives voice
to scholars from the United States and Europe – not many of the speakers frontally address
images in the context of moving images. This is odd, since there is no doubt that cinema – the
“eye of the century” (Francesco Casetti)13 – represents the genuine visual revolution of twentieth
century. Can art history efficiently address moving images? Is the circulation of the gaze, the
collective experience of moving images, or the audience a major impediment to a more
comprehensive consideration?
James Elkins. You are exactly right, the many participants in What Is an Image? were
almost all content to speak of the still image as an example – and therefore, by
implication, a model – of the image in general. The same is also true of the participants
in the forthcoming book Farewell to Visual Studies, with an important series of
exceptions: our Germanists, led by Gustav Frank, were interested in re-introducing the
study of film into visual studies from a new perspective.
Anglo-American visual studies has always studied film, beginning with Douglas Crimp’s
spectacular critical essay “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” a polemic against Rosalind
Krauss’s misunderstandings of visual studies.14 And yet Anglo-American visual studies
have never taken film as its central example of a fine art: that place has been taken by
photography. The reason is that many universities in North America and the United
Kingdom have long had Film Studies or Media Studies Departments; those departments

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 8

predated the appearance of visual studies as a field. Photography, on the other hand,
was just emerging as a widely accepted fine art when visual studies was getting
underway in the 1980s, and so it was easier to adopt into the new discipline. As a result,
Deleuze’s books on film are read in visual studies, but not as central texts. By
comparison, Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, and Vilém Flusser are widely cited.
In the event Farewell to Visual Studies, Frank and I, along with Lisa Cartwright, were
interested in exploring an alternative history to the field including figures like Balázs
and Hugo Münsterberg. For Cartwright that history leads up to laboratory studies; for
Frank and myself it points to another, earlier, German- and English-language
theorization of film that was adopted by what Frank calls “visual studies version 1”
– that is, German writing before the Second World War.
This is how I would explain the slight, but measurable, distance between visual studies
and the moving image. There are many counter-examples, but I think this explanation
is helpful. The case of art history is different: it still continues to privilege painting,
sculpture, and architecture in art before 1960 (this is documented, for example, in the
book Partisan Canons15). The moving image becomes central in the study of performance,
time art, and other inventions of conceptualism, but that theorization involves
phenomenology, theater, and performativity, and it takes its theoretical cues from
Henri Bergson, J. L. Austin, and performance theory, and not so much from film theory
or Deleuze. So it is not surprising that the scholars in the event What Is an Image?, who
were mainly art historians, were satisfied with references to still images, photography,
painting, and documentation.
This raises a fascinating possibility. I attended a conference in spring 2015 in
Copenhagen called What Is an Image?, and the organizer, Bent Fausing, joked with me
that we should have a third conference with the same title in another five years. If such
a thing were to be done, would it be conceivable to found the conference on the moving
image – to begin with it, instead of using it as a secondary example? I leave this to you.

NOTES
1. James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, Cambridge/New York, 1998; The Domain of
Images, Ithaca, 1999; Master Narratives and Their Discontents, Londres, 2005; What Photography Is,
New York, 2012; Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy,
Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000, Stanford, 2008.
2. James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, New York, 2003; James Elkins et al. eds.,
Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, New York, 2012; James Elkins, Sunil
Manghani, Gustav Frank eds., Farewell to Visual Studies, (Stone Art Theory Seminars, 5), University
Park, 2015.
3. James Elkins, Stories of Art, New York, 2002; Chinese Landscape Paintings as Western History,
Hong Kong/Londres, 2010; Is Art History Global?, New York/Londres, 2006; James Elkins, Zhivka
Valiavicharska, Alice Kim eds., Art and Globalization, (The Stone Art Theory Seminars, 1), University
Park, 2010.

Perspective, 2 | 2015
 Interview with James Elkins 9

4. For Thomas Kaufmann’s thinking on premodern globalisms, see Elkins, Valiavicharska, Kim,
2010, cited n. 3; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel eds.,
Circulations in the Global History of Art, Farnham, 2015, with an Introduction by Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann, p. 1-22. For Susan Buck-Morss on Haiti, see her contributions to Art and Globalization,
cited above and also her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Pittsburgh, 2009.
5. Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” in Umeni/Art, 5, 2008, p. 379;
Hal Foster, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York, 2004.
6. Elkins, 2003, cited n. 2.
7. Elkins, Manghani, Frank, 2015, cited n. 2.
8. Elkins, Manghani, Frank, 2015, cited n. 2; these issues are also discussed in Elkins et al., 2012,
cited n. 2.
9. Elkins et al., 2012, cited n. 2.
10. James Elkins, Maja Naef eds., What Is an Image?, (Stone art theory institutes, 2),University Park,
2011, p. 79-89.
11. See www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/reviews/exhibitions/156620 (viewed on
September 26, 2015).
12. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model, Cambridge, 1990. The very entertaining debate with
Jacqueline Lichtenstein is in Elkins, Naef, 2011, cited. n. 8. See also Anna Brzyski ed., Partisan
Canons, Durham, 2007; Douglas Crimp’s “Getting the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies and
Queer Culture,” in InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 1, Winter 1998,
www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/crimp/crimp.html (viewed on September 26,
2015).
13. Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, New York, 2008.
14. Crimp, 1998, cited n. 12.
15. Brzyski, 2007, cited n. 12.

INDEX
Mots-clés: historiographie, Bildwissenschaft, image
Keywords: historiography
personnescitees Mondzain (Marie-José), Mitchell (W. J. T.), Chakrabarty (Dipesh), Elkins (James)

Perspective, 2 | 2015

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