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Since the day it was inaugurated in 2004, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art has assumed a pivotal role in re–establishing the history of modern and contemporary artistic practices in Turkey. The major all–woman exhibition titled ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’, which was opened in late 2011 at Istanbul Modern, constitutes an important case study to prompt deeper exploration into the narrative frameworks within which the art museum reproduces differences. This chapter revisits the institutional and the curatorial discourse of ‘Dream and Reality’ by examining the statements released in the media and in catalogue essays with a view to comprehending the allegedly conflicting notions of gender and feminism on which the exhibition was premised and how differences were articulated against the politics of the state and art history writing. With this reconsideration, the chapter addresses the reverberations of these framings in the art histories of Turkey but also relocates them within the debates of art’s new transnational landscape.

This chapter first summarizes the ancient history of Dura-Europos, its inhabitants, and its eventual destruction. It explains how the house-church came to be buried and preserved in the third century. The narrative then turns to twentieth-century excavation and interpretation of the site. Finally, the chapter presents a method for studying the interaction between biblical narrative, visual art, and ritual behavior in the initiatory space of the baptistery. It offers a focused survey of previous scholarly approaches to sites of early Christian initiation in general, and this house-church in particular.

Serving as the volume introduction, Chapter 1 lays out the scope of the ancient Near Eastern canon as it has been understood since its inception. Situating the canon within Art History, Archaeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, this chapter raises an inquiry about the fluidity and staying power of its content. Through a case study of the ancient Near Eastern canon as it appears in college art history textbooks, we detect patterns in the canon, which remains a flexible but essentially conservative phenomenon. Nevertheless, the individual contributions in the volume’s four sections are shown here through chapter synopses to be historically grounded, theoretically provocative, and full of potential avenues for research and revision of the seemingly outmoded phenomenon of the canon. The chapter proposes that celebrating the longevity and future of the canon, rather than dismissing it, can allow today’s researchers to take the study of the ancient Near East to new levels and share it with expanded audiences.

This chapter concludes a procession around the baptistery at the southwest corner, arguing that the female figure drawing water from a well is not the Samaritan Woman, an infamously sinful convert, but more likely the Virgin Mary, the famously holy mother of Jesus. Through detailed analysis of textual sources and an original, extensive survey of artistic depictions of the Annunciation in late ancient and Byzantine art, this chapter proposes that the earliest depiction of Mary outside of the Roman catacombs likely resides now at the Dura-Europos Collection. Sources from Syria and its environs corroborate the ritualization of spiritual pregnancy and new birth in Christian initiation. Like Mary, these initiates have a divine encounter at a water source and receive the illumination and incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Yet just as in chapter 4, polysemic interpretations may be appropriate in the end. Ancient authors blended their analyses of various virgins, brides, and water-well seekers from biblical narratives, such that the threads of purity, marriage, birth, and death were not often easy to separate.

Scottish-born banker James Coutts sat for a portrait with painter Joshua Reynolds in the early 1770s. Painted on a panel of unprimed mahogany, the resulting picture is now a wreck. Flakes tear through the forehead, eye, and cheeks; they pierce Coutts’s visible ear and tatter his throat. So problematic was the panel that it was given in the 1850s to Scotland’s national art gallery as a means for teaching a moral lesson to aspiring artists about the dangers of Reynolds’s risky painting techniques. That conception of the first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts is difficult to square with familiar assessments. Yet, Reynolds’s chemical experiments were intensively discussed and collected by his votaries. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were seen to bear on painting and photography alike. This introduction argues that the force of Reynolds’s chemical experiments is reducible to neither painting nor photography; instead, it opens a history of “temporally evolving chemical objects”—of materials known and valued for changing visibly in time, while affording conceptual reflection on time. This introduction defines the temporally evolving chemical object and maps the structure of the book as a relay through and beyond British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century.

In the formative years of the Internet, researchers collaboratively connected computing systems with a goal of sharing research and computing resources. The model process with which they created the Internet and its forefather, the ARPANET, was echoed in early social media platforms, where creative computer scientists, artists, writers, musicians educators explored the promise of computer-based platforms to bring together communities of interest in what would be called “cyberspace.” With a focus on the arts and humanities, this introduction traces the development of social media affordances in applications such as email, mailing lists, BBSs, the Community Memory, PLATO, Usenet, mail art, telematic art, and video communication. The author outlines the early social media platforms documented in each chapter in this book and summarizes how the book's epilogues both explore differences between early and contemporary social media and look to the future of the arts in social media.

This chapter considers how late-eighteenth-century chemical replicas after chemically unstable academic paintings were rediscovered in the early 1860s. Seeking to acquire a prototype of James Watt’s steam engine from the Soho manufactory established by Matthew Boulton in the mid-1760s, curator Francis Pettit Smith unearthed a set of replicas, which he called “sun pictures.” Smith identified the images as early photographs. On that basis, he claimed that photography must have been invented at Soho in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Although Smith’s story found support among several leading photographers in the 1860s, it was strongly opposed by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, grandson of the Soho industrialist. This chapter demonstrates how M.P.W. Boulton destroyed Smith’s story. It also highlights the ways in which Boulton simultaneously integrated Smith’s chemo-mechanical findings into his own aircraft designs. The chapter concludes by arguing for the extensive connections between the leading inventors of photography and combustion-engine research.

This transitional section takes stock of the contributions of traditional white, Western jazz criticism. It has reproduced in this specific field the alienation of African American culture at large and music specifically from Western society. First scorned, African American music was assimilated with the help of critics. They notably contributed to an understanding of the music that eschewed social, historical and economic context in which the music was originally created. Promoting a classically Western understanding of art as distinct from social life, it allowed for a consumption of jazz devoid of political critique. This would change with the advent of black jazz criticism.

In its depictions of Guantánamo Bay detainees, the state’s agenda is obvious. But the state is not the only entity that mediates detainees’ voices: so, too, do the individuals and organizations that work on their behalf. Reading the history of anti-Guantánamo activism, the chapter demonstrates that it often relies on an erasure of detainee political subjectivity and a refusal of the possibility of detainee anger. Three case studies bear this out. First, a set of city-council resolutions from Massachusetts and California that extended hypothetical welcomes to select detainees on their hypothetical release; the chapter queries the politics of this deeply conditional hospitality and the presumptions of American exceptionalism underpinning it. American exceptionalism is central to the analysis of the next object, the Witness to Guantánamo documentary project, which collects testimonies from former detainees. W2G does crucial documentary work, but its structure also compels the detainees to offer forgiveness and recuperative visions of American goodness. Next, the chapter explores the politics of detainee creative production, with a particular attention to practices of circulation and consumption, and the fictive experiences of intimacy that they promise their audiences. The chapter ends with a critique of a fanciful renarration of Guantánamo’s past and future.

The conclusion critically examines one possible legacy for the relay of chemical image-making and its fusions with combustion-engine research examined in this book: the Anthropocene. Noting ways in which James Watt and British industrialism have figured in the historiography of an epoch of humanity’s influence on the global climate (and in critiques of the Anthropocene), the conclusion highlights the abiding, art-historical force of tools and concepts rooted in the work of Alois Riegl. Against persisting resistance within art history to interpretations privileging materials and techniques, it concludes by considering the contours and possibilities of an “elemental art history.”

My speculation in this paper is to consider, in short, what if art history is a system? In other words what does it means to think about art through the systems-thinking. To do so would mean understanding both art as a system and how art is also a part of other systems. It is my overall claim that to do so would require a rethinking of particular ideas about art and art history in ways that are both radical and effective. I begin by introducing some key feature of the systems-thinking approach. In short, systems thinking emerged in the mid 20th century along with related theories such as Cybernetics and Information Theory. Recently it expanded to incorporate the developments of 2^nd order cybernetics (Bateson) and dynamical systems theory (von Bertalanffy); examples of such developments include the Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann and the use of systems by Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze. Whilst often very different these theories share an interest in: self-organizing systems; their behaviour and how they are defined by their interactions with their immediate environment. Systems-theory understands phenomena in terms of the systems of which they are part. A system is constituted by a number of interrelated elements that form a ‘whole’ different from the sum of its individual parts. When applied to art discourse it means considering not only works of art but also art museums, art markets, and art histories as systems that are autonomous, complex, distributed and self-organising. Examples of these types of speculations are offered. I conclude with two key speculations as to what the adoption of the systems-theoretical approach within art history might entail. Firstly, I argue that it is particularly effective in dealing with art after modernism, which is characterised by, amongst other things: non-visual qualities; unstable, or de-materialised physicality and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support. By prioritising the systems of support over the individual work of art, or the agency of the individual artist such an approach is not tied by an umbilical cord of vision to an analysis based on traditional art historical categories such as medium, style and iconography. Secondly, I identify a tradition within art historical writing – Podro called it the Critical Historians of Art – that is known in the German tradition as Kunstwissenschaft (the systematic, or rigorous study of art.) I do so both as a means of clarifying what I mean when I say art history; but also as a means of identifying a tradition within art history of self-reflexivity and systematic investigation of methods and limits. From a systems-theoretical perspective it is an interesting question in its own right to ask why model of Kunstwissenschaft has become the dominant mode of historiography (since the 1980s at least). As a discourse it has become, in systems-theoretical terms, ‘locked-in’ (via positive feedback). It is my view that the systems theoretical approach to art discourse places it within the art historical tradition of Kunstwissenschaft, and is not in opposition to it. In summary, it is not my intention to either attack or defend a straw-man, or flimsy stereotype of what art history is. I am rather, seeking a body of work, a canon, or discursive system, with which to engage. Overall my claim is that the systems theoretical approach to art discourse is a continuation of this rich and worthy heritage (of finding historical models to match the art under scrutiny)—not a break from it.

Before Eliot went to Paris, he was already endowed with some basic knowledge of the visual arts as he had been able to take courses such as the History of Ancient Art and Florentine Painting when he was still at Harvard. Paris, with a combination of past and future, was also big in the visual arts scene since the city housed many works of art that ranged from those of the ancient Greeks to those of the more recent nineteenth century. Also, the city was recognized for accommodating developing new movements. Eliot was engrossed with the Parisian art scene and in addition he visited various exhibits and museums in London, Bergamo, Venice, and Munich. This chapter attempts to provide descriptions of classical art works as well as the contemporary art movements that influenced Eliot's immediate and future works.

This introduction to the book Comic Art in Museums by art historian Kim A. Munson explores the history, controversies, and trends that have shaped comic art exhibitions, important publications, and key museums, galleries, and collecting institutions. Munson explains how the six sections of the book map out the history of influential shows of original comic art from newly rediscovered shows of the 1930’s to contemporary blockbusters like High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture and Masters of American Comics, as well as the critical dialogue surrounding these exhibitions. This introduction also contains a brief discussion on shows of fine art influenced by comics, such as Splat, Boom, Pow! The Influence of Comics on Contemporary Art. Includes exhibition photos: Marvel (Seattle), Krazy Kat (Madrid), Rube Goldberg (San Francisco), Mangasia (Nantes).

Andrei Molotiu, the Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, explores the formal characteristics of comic art and the fragmentation caused by showing framed pages that were originally created for publication and separated from their indigenous context, wondering if this separation is ultimately an act of creativity or an act of violence. This chapter explains white-out, margin notations, and how the eye is drawn to different things in an image when it’s isolated on the wall. In this 2006 essay, he focuses on the art of Jack Kirby, Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo 4, Metamorpho, Joe Palooka, Archie, Josie, Tom and Jerry, and "Sooper Hippie.” In this 2018 update to his 2006 essay, Andrei Molotiu, the Senior Lecturer in the Art History Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, returns to his analysis of the formal characteristics of original comic art as seen in exhibitions, exhibit catalogs, and high-end artist’s editions that faithfully reproduce full size comics originals, such as the IDW Artist’s edition of David Mazzucchelli’s and Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again (images). Molotiu briefly discusses the proliferation of comic art exhibits and contrasts the experience of reading a full issue of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi on the wall at the Comic Book Apocalypse show at CSU Northridge and in print in an artist’s edition.