Art History and Other Stories

Through the analysis of one erroneous piece of art criticism, an essay by Goethe that re-imagines a lost ancient sculpture, I demonstrate the difficulty that the discipline of art history has with conceptualizing the experience of art making and how one ought to respond to it. I re-examine the relationship between art making and art appreciation informed by ideas such as the Aristotelian view of Poiesis, Iris Murdoch’s praise of art in an unreligious age, and Giorgio Agamben’s call for the unity between poetry and philosophy. I also argue that much of modern art criticism has forgotten Arts’ earlier conceptual vocation, and propose methods of appreciating art that are in themselves artistic.