A brief history of theory in art history

This is a talk about the ways people have thought about theories (semiotics, feminism, iconography, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, style analsis, connoisseurship, etc.) and theorists (Panofsky, Wölfflin, Rancière, Laruelle, Malabou, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.) in the discipline of art history. There was a period before art history called its interpretive methods “theories,“ and then a period in which art historians identified what they did, and implicity distinguished it from what neighboring disciplines did, by enumerating their theories. In the 21st century theories have proliferated, but so has the idea that art historians don’t need or use theories and that inquiry can be guided by the objects themselves or by any number of individual texts. Through all these changes there’s been the question of what art history does differently from other fields. It was originally given in the 2021 College Art Association conference, online on account of Covid.