The Repressive Logic of a Profession? On the Use of Reproductions in Art History
I N M O S T D I S C O U R S E S of Art History, the art object is present only through representations. Art historians do see a lot of works of art, but when speaking, writing and reading about art and art history, that is, the standard routines for scholars and students, the works of art are absent more often than not. Does it make a difference to scholarship whether the subject of analysis is the original work of art or its reproduction? Three cases will be used to discuss this difference from a historiographical point of view. The first case concerns Winckelmann and his use of reproductions, the next case the colour problem of Art History, and the third case two art historians' partly different reflections on the use of reproductions during the founding of Art History as a modern academic discipline. Is the artwork the research object of the discipline of Art History today? Or is it possible to imagine the artwork lined up with other distinguishing characteristics that simultaneously constitute the research object of Art History? Or even replace it? By the end of the eighteenth century, the artwork apparently legitimized Art History as an upcoming scholarly profession. It became the empirical basis for connoisseurship, stylistic analysis, the histories of art, and iconology. But considering today's multilayered discourses and practices of the profession, can anyone then, without prejudice, claim that the artwork is the superior research object? For example, current research often touches upon discourses in which the artwork takes only a peripheral or secondary place, e.g. discourses on the history and methods of art history and art criticism, philosophy of art, museology, design theory, visual culture, art education, and sociology of art. If the artwork is the research object, these otherwise significant discourses are obviously marginal to the >real< Art History wherever this is to be found. In this article the implicit framing of such a kind of superior Art History is an effect of what will be termed with a deliberated psychoanalytic hint the repressive logic of Art History. It is a logic which at the same time privileges the presence of the art object and represses the dislocation of it. Even if it was to be found, this >real< Art History and all the other art historical discourses take place within or in relation to in a general sense the art history system: for example university courses, network meetings and conferences, study rooms, archives and libraries, academic journals and books, mass media, certain parts of the internet etc. Roughly speaking, knowledge on art and the history of art is produced, distributed and stored in this system. Taken as a whole, the >real< objects in museums and university collections play only minor roles because the artwork more often than not is mediated by some kind of reproduction in the