Response: The Dark Side of Art History

• Autores: Hayden White
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 89, Nº 1, 2007, págs. 21-26
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A response to Michael Ann Holly's paper “The Melancholic Art,” which is published in this issue. By referring to art historical writing as “melancholic,” Holly alludes to a psychoanalytic way of explaining the relation between the past and the present, how the past “returns” to, bears on, and colors the present in masked or distorted forms. The notion that the particular scholarly discipline of art history may be inflicted with a psychological malady or syndrome is intriguing, but Holly moots the possibility of history being a science by designating art history as an art. The foremost problem with associating art history with the psychoanalytic concept of loss is that it invariably views loss in terms of the individual subject and, thereby, makes no distinction between actual loss (of an organ or limb, for example) and virtual loss, or the sense of having lost an object that was never actually possessed.