Introduction XVIl

On the other hand, it means that, rather than being shaped by tradi-
tion, the discipline will consist of those interpretations of images that
are most effective in exploring the potential meaning of the cultural
creations of the past for the circumstances in which we find ourselves
today. In some sense, this commitment corresponds with past practice,
if not past theory. Despite its insistence on the value of an established
canon, the shape of art historical interpretation was always determined
by th()se authors whose interpretations most effectively captured the
imagination of a contemporary audience.
The transformation of the history of art into a history of images may
be seen as one of the consequences of the theoretical and methodologi-
cal developments that have affected other disciplines in the humanities.
These transformations mean that the cultural work of the history of art
will more closely resemble that of other fields than has been the case in
the past. It offers the prospect of an interdisciplinary dialogue, one that
is more concerned with the relevance of contemporary values for aca-
demic study than with the myth of the pursuit of knowledge for its own
sake. The move from the history of art to a history of images is intimately
related to the realization that full and final knowledge of the world is
a utopian dream of nineteenth-century idealism and twentieth-century
positivism. It depends on a conception of knowledge as something that
is necessarily compromised by the attitudes and values of those engaged
in its production.

The Social History of Art

Among the identifiable writing genres that currently constitute the his-
tory of art, one that has actively contributed to its conception and his-
tory of images is the social history of art. Despite the efforts of those
who pioneered the project of accounting for art in terms of social his-
tory, there has always existed the risk of its dilution into a procedure
that merely adds on to artistic masterpieces a supplementary backdrop
of "context." In practice, and at its least enlightening, the procedure
consists of locating works of art against a "background" constituted
by economic and social history, with little or no investigation of the
ways in which the latter intersect with the former. It is assumed that
the point of the juxtaposition is obvious, that the work, which is still
accounted for in terms of the formal conventions that determined its
structure, somehow synthesizes or mirrors the social and cultural cir-