Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewWinner of the 2012 Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association "Along with David Summers's Real Spaces, Whitney Davis's General Theory of Visual Culture is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades... As conceptual reorganization of art history's fundamental terms of engagement with objects, the book is exemplary, and it is difficult to imagine a reader who is engaged with the discipline for whom this book is optional reading."--Jim Elkins, CAA Reviews "[Q]uirky and ambitious."--Choice "Davis's project to develop a general theory of visual culture is a necessary and urgent one."--Derval Tubridy, Visual Culture "[A] magnificent book. This is an ambitious and fascinating work, one that offers a novel perspective on the intertwined projects of art history and visual culture. The sheer scope of the book and the detailed, methodical argument are simply too broad and too detailed to adequately summarize here."--Brian Kane, Art Bulletin
Table of Contentsllustrations xi Preface xv Part One The Successions of Visual Culture Chapter 1: Vision Has an Art History 3 Chapter 2: Vision and the Successions to Visual Culture 11 Part Two What Is Cultural about Vision? Chapter 3: What Is Formalism? 45 Chapter 4: The Stylistic Succession 75 Chapter 5: The Close Reading of Artifacts 120 Chapter 6: Successions of Pictoriality 150 Chapter 7: The Iconographic Succession 187 Chapter 8: Visuality and Pictoriality 230 Part Three: What Is Visual about Culture? Chapter 9: How Visual Culture Becomes Visible 277 Chapter 10: Visuality and the Cultural Succession 322 Notes 341 Index 375
