“Which art history should I teach in Khartoum?”
—Salah M. Hassan, an art historian, critic, and curator, Cornell University.
Art history occupies a unique position in the longue durée of intellectual thought. It is a narrative of images and a history of ideas inscribed in pigment and stone, language, philosophy, and shifting regimes of visibility. More than a chronology of styles or the study of individual genius, art history, at its most ambitious, aspires to be an archaeology of meaning: a critical inquiry into how societies see, feel, and imagine themselves and their others. Yet, the discipline has never been stable. Like the works it studies, it bears the marks of its time, embedded in and reflective of the intellectual climates that have shaped it. For instance, Katharina Lorenz’s “Art History and Intellectual History” positions art history not as a mere auxiliary to thought but as a full participant in intellectual inquiry. Tracing a genealogy from Winckelmann to Panofsky, she shows how art history has long theorized visual cognition and historical consciousness. Lorenz argues that when art history moves beyond stylistic taxonomy to interrogate how form produces meaning, it becomes an intellectual enterprise in its own right.
So, what does it mean to write the history of art at a time when its geographies have exploded, its categories are under contestation, and its modes of circulation are in flux? This essay takes that question seriously. It traces the intellectual history of art history. It reflects on its current condition—a post-1980s moment shaped by global dispersals, epistemic challenges to Eurocentrism, and the aesthetic-political entanglements of biennial culture.
From Formalism to Worldmaking: Turns in Art History
Following Lorenz, we are shown that the classical roots of art history lie in Renaissance connoisseurship and Enlightenment taxonomies, but it was not until the 19th century that it emerged as an academic discipline. In the Germanic tradition, figures like Johann Joachim Winckelmann and later Heinrich Wölfflin sought to establish rigorous principles of artistic development—stylised notions of linear progression, morphology, and form. In this paradigm, art was a mirror of the Zeitgeist, a reflection of the cultural spirit of its age. But this approach was not without metaphysical aspirations. Wölfflin, in his contrast between linear and painterly modes, or Alois Riegl’s formulation of Kunstwollen (artistic will), inscribed art history within a metaphysical ontology that echoed Hegelian historicism: the idea that art evolves dialectically, mirroring the rational unfolding of spirit in time.
The 20th century ushered in key ruptures. The Vienna School, Aby Warburg’s iconology, and later Erwin Panofsky’s iconographic method expanded the scope of inquiry to include the symbolic and the cultural—a hermeneutics of images as texts. Simultaneously, Marxist critics (notably Arnold Hauser and later T.J. Clark) offered art as a symptom of political economy. Feminist, psychoanalytic, and structuralist interventions throughout the 1960s and 70s further pluralised the field, disrupting notions of aesthetic autonomy and emphasising subjectivity, power, and ideology. By the time poststructuralism arrived, art history had absorbed theoretical tools from the broader humanities, increasingly positioning itself within intellectual history and cultural studies.
Yet this expansion came at a cost: disciplinary coherence. The art historian was no longer simply a student of style or iconography but now had to be conversant with semiotics, psychoanalysis, and political theory. The field became more self-reflexive—perhaps even anxious—about its methods, objects, and blind spots. If this was, as some claimed, a “crisis” in art history, it was also a fertile moment of epistemic transformation.
No phenomenon better encapsulates the contemporary condition of art than the explosion of biennials. From the Venice Biennale—founded in 1895 as a nationalist exhibition platform—to the recent proliferation of events in Gwangju, Dakar, Istanbul, Sharjah, Kochi-Muziris, and São Paulo, the biennial form has become both the vehicle and symptom of globalisation in art.
Biennials are not merely exhibitions. They are, in Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian sense, “exhibitionary complexes”: devices of cultural governance that mediate between states, markets, and the public. They create temporal infrastructures of visibility, forge new patronage networks, and offer cities the symbolic capital of “cultural globality.” But they also reproduce uneven power relations. Many critics have noted how biennials serve as soft power extensions for neoliberal urbanism or function as stages for elite spectatorship rather than platforms for local engagement.
The 1980s marked a critical inflection point. Under the pressures of postmodernism, neoliberal globalisation, and the end of the Cold War, the art world—and art history with it—underwent profound change. A new category, “contemporary art,” emerged with growing institutional legitimacy, often contrasted with the modernist past as pluralistic, transdisciplinary, and global.
Crucially, this new paradigm displaced the chronological logic of modernism—its linear, teleological succession of -isms. Instead, contemporary art adopted a rhizomatic temporality, operating through multiplicity, simultaneity, and fragmentation. A work by Ai Weiwei or El Anatsui could now sit beside a Gerhard Richter or Cindy Sherman—not in a provincialising move, but within a global grammar of relevance, sparking new dialogues and interpretations.
This posed a problem for art history: how can we write a history of art no longer grounded in shared aesthetic criteria, canonical geography, or developmental narratives?
The proliferation of practices and histories from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa challenged the discipline’s Euro-American core, compelling a shift in the epistemic centre of gravity and the need for a more inclusive approach to art history.
In this post-1980s context, contemporary art does not merely refer to a historical period but becomes a conceptual condition characterised by intermediality, political affect, and discursive instability. Art historians now had to grapple with the ‘global contemporary,’ a term that was as enabling as it was vague. Who defines the global? What does contemporaneity mean in Jakarta, Johannesburg, or Bogotá? The challenge is to forge a shared historical consciousness without flattening differences into aesthetic cosmopolitanism, thereby preserving the rich diversity of art history.
Visual Translation as Intellectual Labour
To envision a more integrated relationship between global intellectual history and art history, we must reimagine how key methodological concepts- translation, circulation, and universality- can be reconceived through the visual lens. This reimagining does not seek to retrofit existing intellectual frameworks to accommodate images but demands that we understand images as generative forces that shape rather than merely reflect historical consciousness.
Take the notion of translation. In the world of ideas, translation is often understood linguistically as converting words and meanings across languages. But visual forms, too, are translated across time, space, and ideological terrains. The architectural dome is a compelling example. In Islamic mosques, Christian cathedrals, and postmodern civic buildings, the dome is not simply a recurring motif but a symbol whose meaning is constantly reloaded. In one setting, it might stand for divine omnipresence; in another, for imperial authority; in another, for the abstraction of public reason. What we encounter here is not mere replication but a shifting semantic field where the same form mobilises entirely different conceptual and political structures. Visual translation is not just about resemblance- it is about transformation. It carries the challenge of cross-cultural legibility without assuming equivalence, of movement without flattening (Belting, 2003).
Circulation and the Frictions of Mobility
Circulation, too, takes on different stakes when viewed through visual culture. While a text- a pamphlet or a manifesto- can travel easily across borders, carried in a suitcase or uploaded online, many art forms cannot. A mural painted on the side of a church or a temple is anchored to its environment. It resists mobility. However, even these immobile works begin to circulate through reproductions, drawings, photographs, and digital scans. However, the movement is never neutral; it reframes the work, strips it of context, or re-situates it in new regimes of visibility. These are not linear journeys from origin to recipient. They are non-linear circuits marked by gaps, mediations, and distortions, calling for models of analysis that treat circulation not as flow but as friction (Appadurai, 1996). What matters is not simply that something circulates but how it is seen, framed, and instrumentalised within its new location. This invites a methodology attentive to visibility infrastructures- who gets to see, who is seen, and under what conditions.
Perhaps most urgently, the category of conceptual universality must be revisited. Global intellectual history has rightly challenged the notion that Western ideas-“freedom,” “rationality,” and “sovereignty”-can be seamlessly mapped onto other cultures. However, a similar critical gaze must be turned toward the concepts of “art” and “intellectuality” themselves. As Sartori (2014) warns in his critique of culture as an exportable unit, we must also recognise that not all traditions make the same categorical separations between art and craft, between beauty and function, or even between aesthetic and ethical value. To treat a ceremonial mask, a manuscript illumination, or a temple fresco as “art” in the Western sense may impose distinctions that did not exist in the world that produced them. The result is a misunderstanding and a conceptual erasure- a failure to encounter these objects on their terms.
This insight underlines the necessity of methodological humility that resists the epistemic violence of translation-as-domestication. Juneja (2012) has warned against the additive model of global art history, wherein non-Western forms are incorporated into the canon without interrogating the canon’s structure. Instead, she calls for a shift toward relationality- a practice that foregrounds entanglement, co-presence, and the politics of epistemic asymmetry. In such a model, the visual becomes a site of negotiation, not a transparent window onto cultural meaning.
Case Studies in Visual-Conceptual Complexity
Such rethinking is not merely theoretical. For instance, Enwezor’s curatorial strategy in documenta11 (2002) materialised this approach through a distributed exhibition model, with platforms in Lagos, St. Lucia, and New Delhi that foregrounded multiplicity over centrality. This dispersed, dialogic framing challenged global art exhibitions’ geography and Western institutions’ epistemic authority in framing visual knowledge (Enwezor, 2002).
Contemporary art practices also reflect this shift. Artists like El Anatsui, whose large-scale installations made of bottle caps reflect both colonial legacies and local economies, embody a visual-conceptual intelligence that resists singular readings. His work defies categories between sculpture and textile, consumption and ornamentation, and demands a form of interpretation attuned to material, context, and embedded histories (Okeke-Agulu, 2015).
Digital technologies further complicate the landscape. Circulating artworks via Instagram, museum websites, or NFTs raises urgent questions about reproducibility, ownership, and authorship. These technologies collapse temporal and spatial distances, altering the reception and meaning of images. Here, we must ask: What does a digital vernissage look like in Jakarta or a TikTok performance in Nairobi? These are not peripheral events-they are central to how visual knowledge is being produced and consumed globally.
Between the Artworld and Global Art History: From Danto’s Frame to Juneja’s Critique
The discourse of global art history is often invoked with optimism, sometimes with resignation marks, and is one of the most significant and contested intellectual projects in the field today. At its core lies a double tension: first, the conceptual challenge of redefining the artworld, and second, the epistemological challenge of constructing a history that accounts for plurality without reproducing colonial or Eurocentric frameworks.
Two figures who have offered contrasting but complementary critiques of these problems are Elkins (2007), whose writings map the structural impossibilities of global coherence in art history, and Juneja (2012), whose interventions open up decolonial and pluriversal possibilities through conceptual unlearning and rethinking. What binds their contributions is the shared concern that the art world and art history, as traditionally constituted, are insufficiently equipped to deal with the plural and uneven terrain of global visual cultures.
Arthur Danto’s notion of the “artworld,” formalised in his 1964 essay, also contributes to this critical moment. In After the End of Art (1997), Danto contends that the teleological narrative of Western art has culminated in a conceptual plateau, where art, having absorbed philosophy, becomes indeterminate in form but bound by institutional framing. His claim that art has entered a “post-historical” phase highlights how meaning is no longer inherent in the object but ascribed through interpretive frameworks. However, this thesis, derived from the specific trajectory of Euro-American art history, falters when applied to the global field. The emergence of transnational biennials, hybrid curatorial practices, and epistemologies from the Global South all call into question Danto’s claim to historical closure.
Enwezor’s curatorial intervention is again instructive. His framing of the “postcolonial constellation” resists the narrative of finality and instead foregrounds ongoing struggle, translation, and reinvention. In this view, there is no “end” of art-only a multiplication of artworlds, often operating without shared infrastructure, language, or institutional validation.
Hence, the task is not merely to globalise the art world but to provincialise it- to subject its norms to critique and recognise multiple, co-existing logics of value, legitimacy, and practice. The global does not signal uniformity but relationality—a dense, uneven terrain of visual production that resists consolidation. This is the terrain on which the future of art history must be built.
These shifts in understanding suggest more than just methodological adjustment. They point toward the emergence of a new kind of historical inquiry- a visual-conceptual history. In this framework, the making and interpretation of images are not relegated to a minor subfield but recognised as a primary form of intellectual labour. Images are not merely illustrations of thought but sites where thought happens. They produce knowledge about the world and the world-sensuous, affective, and embodied. To treat them seriously is not to aestheticise intellectual history but to deepen it, to complicate it, and ultimately, to globalise it in a way that is not only spatial but epistemic.
The image must speak
The image must speak and be listened to differently in the global history of ideas. To listen to the image is to risk hearing what lies outside dominant languages. It is to embrace opacity, ambiguity, and multiplicity as conditions of knowing rather than obstacles to be overcome. Only then can the promise of a truly global intellectual history begin to be fulfilled- not as a totalising vision but as a constellation of ways of seeing and knowing, unfolding in dialogue, tension, and care.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.