Re-make/ Re-model: Strategies of Reading Art Historians

Abstract

This paper discusses the possibilities and limits of Gilles Deleuze's relation to art history. It addresses the specific way that he has appropriated art historical concepts, especially his relationship to modernism (from Riegl to Greenberg), questions his view of art as analogical to life and whether his concepts can merely be "applied" by art historians. Alternatively, the value of Deleuze's thought on art is detected in his methodology, the search from differences in the actual field of art history that resist the "administrative" perspective on art history as a history of artworks, styles and artists.