Conflicting Logics: Twentieth-Century Studies at the Crossroads

Abstract

Art history, psychoanalytically informed, does not disillusion us with art, but shows us what it is concretely. “History,” Geoffrey Hartman writes, “is the wake of a mobile mind falling in and out of love with the thing it detaches by its attachment.”¹¹² Art history is the creative love of works of art, showing how, perhaps more than any other human creations, they present what is deepest in the psyche to that part of it called the mind. When we honor an object, such as a tribal sculpture, by calling it “art” rather than “craft,” we accord the object this power of representation.

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Notes on contributors

Donald B. Kuspit

Donald B. Kuspit is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1983 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America, a staff member at Artforum, and the editor of Art Criticism. His most recent books are The Critic as Artist: The Intentionality of Art, 1984, and Leon Golub: Existentialist/Activist Painter, 1985.