Brain of the Earth's Body by Donald Preziosi

Brain of the Earth's Body by Donald Preziosi

What begins as a meditation on the museum by one of the world's leading art historians becomes, in this book, a far-reaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University, the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that, he argues, have defined--and are still defining--the possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soane's Museum in London, preserved in its 1837 state; the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851; and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, which divided up that country's history into ethnically marked aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europe's construction of itself as the present of the world's past, and the brain of the earth's body. Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology, Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history, professional museology, and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally, he sketches a new theory about art, artifice, and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the secular theologisms of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art history,museology, history, and anthropology, this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race, ethnicity, nationality, colonialism, and multiculturalisms--and to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.

Donald Preziosi is an Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA and a member of the History Faculty at Oxford University. In the Aftermath of Art and Rethinking Art History are among his many publications.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780816633586
ISBN 10	0816633584
Title	Brain of the Earth's Body
Author	Donald Preziosi
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	2003-07-09
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.