Promotional Information

Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Time 9
1. Is Modernity Multiple? 11
2. Do We Still Need a Renaissance? 23
3. Contemporaneity's Heterochronicity 37
Part II. History 51
4. Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn 53
5. Bruegel's Crows 77
6. Mimesis and Iconoclasm 107
7. Impossible Distance 139
Conclusion 173
Bibliography 177
Index 199

About the Author

Keith Moxey is Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is the author of many books, including The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History; The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History; and Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation.

Reviews

"The time is out of joint for art history and image studies more generally. Keith Moxey's Visual Time makes this traditional curse into a blessing for scholars who want to rethink the nature of historical temporality and free it from the monotony of homogeneous empty time. Moxey shows that history (and no doubt memory as well) are deeply anachronistic in structure, and that images and works of art play a central role in revealing the multiple, disjunctive temporalities we inhabit, not only as art historians, but as subjects of human experience. Moxey's book will be required reading for anyone interested in thinking about images of and in time." - W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race and editor of the journal Critical Inquiry "This is a beautiful and thoughtful book on the fundamental meanings of time in art historical writing. Keith Moxey is open to the radical possibility that the encounter with the artwork, as distinct from the interpretation of that work, might not so much reveal the object's historical time as mute it, bringing the viewer and the art into a domain of plenary experience, and an awareness of historical blindness, that are only distantly and problematically compatible with the traditional interests of the discipline of art history." - James Elkins, author of What Photography Is "Moxey's important achievement... lies in treating art discourse as a leading methodology within the broader discipline of history. And he does this with an explicit awareness of the idiosyncratic nature of the artworks as historical objects, which many previous historians chose either to ignore or misuses. Moreover, every page is graced with an erudite yet refreshingly accessible writing style - a rare feat these days" - Art in America