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Art Is Not What You Think It Is presents a thought-provoking manifesto by two leading art historians which reconsiders current discussions on the idea of art, and offers new and challenging insights into its uses, meanings, and its very nature.

Takes up the commonly unexplored question of what is actually present in art—what aspects have survived the vicissitudes of time. International and interdisciplinary, this volume conducts readers into a discussion of the significance of personal response to works of art. Contributors: F. R. Ankersmit, Mieke Bal, Oskar Bätschmann, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Ann Holly, Donald Preziosi, Renée van de Vall.

This thesis will explore the connection between the practice of comparative anatomy as developed by George Cuvier in the decades before the professionalization of art history and the attribution method of Giovanni Morelli. In 1815, Cuvier published his, “theory of the correlation of the parts.” Assumptions about the correlation of body parts to tendencies of the mind at the root of the practice of comparative anatomy (“form following function”), laid the bedrock for Morelli’s education. Morelli’s legacy as a medically trained, contentious, and influential attribution expert has inspired creative speculation as well as oversimplification and misunderstanding. His self-proclaimed “experimental method,” proved foundational to the professionalization and development of art history as a rigorous discipline, one in sync with natural science rather than “bookish” musing. Morelli’s scientific tendencies—his desire to observe works in person, to categorize them into charts, to map an “organic genealogy” of regional schools—have been well documented. This influential methodology is steeped in a social history of ideas, an ideology that deserves a critical historiography because of its implications for disentangling the roots of a discipline with racial thinking. In this paper, I offer speculations on how late nineteenth and early twentieth century examinations of race and methodologies of attribution might not merely be compared, but contextually interwoven in ways that elucidate both. My emphasis lies in understanding the relationship between the medical/scientific discourse of comparative anatomy implicit in Morelli’s art history and the dominant scientific discourse around race during this period.

The aborted commission (1503-06) is reexamined to learn more about the exchange between theory and practice in Leonardo's working procedures, indicating that he planned elaborate coloristic effects. Conservation treatment of the Last Supper (1497) calls into question longstanding assumptions about the surviving documents and early testimony. The recently rediscovered Madrid Codex II (ca. 1503-05) reveals how the project helped form Leonardo's mature ideas on color perspective in narrative painting. This new evidence contextualizes his developing critical response to Alberti's humanistic theory of pictorial composition, and suggests how practicing artists read his widely disseminated writings.

As people are faced with imposed precarity in contemporary society, it is imperative that art be reclaimed as a tool for the assertion of counter-narratives and expressions of agency. In this thesis, I utilize theories of affect and materiality toward the analysis of three case studies in contemporary art to consider how they could contradict or counter the affective consequences of oppressive structures and the imposition of exclusivist narratives. First, I discuss the public art project Monument Lab for its interrogation of the role of monuments in contemporary society. As an ongoing, participatory project, Monument Lab affirms the coexistence of diverse experiences of American history, resisting retrospective oversimplification by which the durational effects of past events are obscured. In the second chapter, I analyze the immersive installation Untitled (of occult instability) [feelings] by South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape. In contrast to scholarship that posits the authoritative ability of artists and museums to direct viewers, I argue for a recognition of art experiences as a generative exchange informed by the diverse agencies of the artist, the audience, and the work itself. Finally, I examine the social media application Vine as an emergent medium for creative expression. Through this short-lived form of networked technology, young people of color cultivated a digital community for emotional uplift and the creation of an alternative archive of daily life in resistance to the affective pressure of larger-scale structural forces. Thus, I aim to demonstrate that art experiences are meaning-generating, reciprocal exchanges between diverse agencies, and thus a powerful and flexible medium for the assertion of counter-narratives and expressions of agency.

In a classic study now nearly thirty years old, John Shearman concluded that Leonardo's paintings manifest an increasingly complex tonal structure and progressively lighter palette. Since then, The Last Supper has been cleaned, Leonardo's fragmentary literary remains have been ordered, and medieval optics has been shown to be an important basis for the artist's definition of painting. Now it is finally feasible to study developmental aspects of the extensive manuscript evidence for Leonardo's interest in reflected color. The following essay examines the relationship between the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of painting in Leonardo's thought. The same evidence may provide new insight into the status of art as a form of knowledge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Reforms enacted by the patriarch of Venice in the sixteenth century silenced the canonesses of Santa Maria delle Vergini, leaving only the words and images of their illuminated chronicle to articulate their thwarted resistance. The Latin text scrolling across the top of the chronicle’s architectural frontispiece proclaims the manuscripts intentions: “The original monastery of Santa Maria delle Vergini di Venezia begins :∼ Whoever should plunder it, such that he destroys its honor, will be excommunicated.” Persuasive visual and textual threads weave a complex institutional history across the pages of the previously unpublished Cronica del Monastero Delle Vergini Di Venezia, giving material form to a highly politicized controversy. In an attempt to persuade Venice’s ruling men that the patrician convent and her elite inhabitants were sacred and indispensable components to the city’s superior moral and mercantile fabric, the Cronica warns that an attempt to reform or alter the institution will in turn ruin the leaders of Venice and threaten the city’s sanctity and power. A desperate fear laces the Cronica’s venomous threats issued both implicitly and explicitly, while the historical habitual refusal to acknowledge the manuscript confirms and clarifies the threat posed by the illuminated chronicle. I examine the Cronica’s written commentary as it converges with the vibrant narrative illustrations. Through this study I seek to understand how the visual aspects of the Cronica add weight to the women’s threats, and contribute to the manuscript’s exiled life in the shadows. I approach the Cronica through a comparative analysis, addressing Venetian women’s writing in the sixteenth century, the Venetian narrative painting tradition and the practice of illuminating manuscripts and printed books in early modern Venice. Through my analysis I conclude that by inserting their foundation story and the figure of Abbess Giulia into one of the myths of Venice and conforming to sixteenth century Venetian literary and visual traditions, the Cronica created a relevant and “authentic” history that threatened to contradict the intentions of the Venetian church and state. Ultimately, though the convent appealed to multiple sources of authority the documents did not persuade the Pope or the ruling officials of Venice to interfere and save the convent from reform.

This thesis aims to analyze the use of new media by contemporary Arctic artists as a means of redefining their region against the popularly accepted separation of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and Alaska as individual nation-states, and toward the community of the Arctic region, using themes of language, land, cosmology, folklore, embedded aesthetics, values, symbols, and stories. It is my belief that these artists are creating important works that constitute contemporary self-production of a post-national Arctic cultural future. My discussion focuses on three artists, Ólöf Nordal, Catarina Ryöppy, and Tanya Tagaq, who demonstrate the use of nativism and spotlight everyday repetitive life experiences (de Certeau) to define their individual and collective identities as part of a postnational Arctic community. Each of these artists utilizes video art as a unique medium that offers subaltern communities a counter-discursive voice and an ability to control their identity representation from an “interstitial space”(Bhabha). Nordal, Ryöppy, and Tagaq utilize the concepts of community, postnationality, and the appropriation of film works to express their individual and collective identity as part of the Arctic in accordance with their own models of interpretation. Nordal self-represents with the utilization of folklore, Ryöppy relies on manipulations of time and space to highlight her identity in relation to nation-state boundaries, and Tagaq fully immerses herself in the techniques and arenas of mass media to spread a new narrative of Arctic community that defies previous colonial representation.