Resumen de Interventions: The Melancholy Art
The occupation of writing art history superficially suggests that one can retain and tame the past into a comprehensible narrative. At another level, it strives toward that frequently painful “aesthetic moment,” which calls up the question of what ails, or alternatively empowers, art historians. While other fields of inquiry similarly deal with “dead” objects, the history of art invites the company of melancholy in order to breathe new life into works of art from worlds long gone. The art historian's writing is animated precisely because the objects of his attention are at once very “live” and very “dead,” and his disciplinary soul is provided by none other than melancholy. Other articles in this issue respond to this paper.
