Past Looking

Michael Ann Holly asserts that historical interpretation of the pictorial arts is always the intellectual product of a dynamic exchange between past and present. recent theory emphasizes the subjectivity of the historian and the ways in which any...

Michael Ann Holly is Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and teaches in the graduate program at Williams College. Her other books include Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations; The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective; Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Studies; and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, the latter also available from Cornell.

A strangely moving book to read.... Surely our desire to experience a kind of privileged timelessness before images—or our satisfaction with signification of any kind—has something to do with the consciousness of our own historicity; surely the challenge of art history, the challenge posed by the deep fascination of old art—or those faces from the past, so similar to our own, yet not our own—is like an encounter with the uncanny, with that otherness in which we discern our own end. A critical art history—like philosophy, like psychoanalysis—ought to take implications of that encounter seriously.