"The New Art History: A Critical Introduction" by Jonathan Harris

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental changes which have occurred in both the institutions and practice of art history over the last thirty years. Jonathan Harris examines and accounts for the new approaches to the study of art which have been grouped loosely under the term "the new art history." Structured around an examination of key texts by major contemporary critics, including Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, Albert Boime, Alan Wallach and Laura Mulvey, each chapter discusses a key moment in the discipline of art history, tracing the development and interaction of Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic critical theories.

Author distinguishes between these and earlier forms of "radical" or "critical" analysis, explores the influence of other disciplines and traditions on art history, and relates art historical ideas and values to social change.
Individual chapters include: Capitalist Modernity, the Nation-State and Visual Representation; Feminism, Art, and ArtHistory; Subjects, Identities and Visual Ideology; Structures and Meanings in Art and Society; and The Representation of Sexuality.

Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Aims and readers
New, critical, radical, social
Terms and texts
Readings, meanings, values, and politics
Art history, radical art history, and real history
1 Radical art history: back to its future?
Prejudices, perspectives, and principles
For ‘new’ read ‘old’?
Politics, modernity, and radical art history
Structure, agency, and art
2 Capitalist modernity, the nation-state, and visual representation
‘. . . no art history apart from other kinds of history’
Elements within ‘the social history of art’
Institutions and ideologies
Meanings and materialism
3 Feminism, art, and art history
Politics, position, perspective
Greatness, creativity, and cultural value
Ideologies, sexual difference, and social change
Modernism, modernity, and feminist art history in the 1990s
4 Subjects, identities, and visual ideology
Psychoanalysis and radical politics after the 1960s
Self, sex, society, and culture
Psychoanalysis and systems of signification
Sight, social ordering, and subjectivity
5 Structures and meanings in art and society
Signs, discourse, and society
Marks and meanings
Making and masking the ‘real’
Perception, narration, and ‘visual culture’
6 Searching, after certainties
Beyond subjects and structures
Signs, surfaces, and civilisation
Politics, culture, and post-modernism
Cultivating nature
7 Sexualities represented
Matter and materialism
Semantic/somatic: Charles Demuth and Rosa Bonheur
Body heat
The matter of ideals
Conclusion: the means and ends of radical art history
Radicalism in art history and ‘identity-politics’
Race and representation
Somatic/aesthetic/exotic: bodies and blackness
‘Arguments and values’, not ‘theories and methods’
Notes
Select bibliography
Index