This edited volume de-familiarizes European conceptions of artistry and thinks its history anew. It represents a rethinking on a global stage of some of the most fundamental assumptions in what were once arguably helpful methodological tools in art history.
As chapters in this book demonstrate, the category of artisanal knowledge opens up the history of culture, allowing discourse to be freed from a narrative of cultural development without excluding Art with a capital A from consideration. Our shared inquiry, approached through many different case studies involving many kinds of data and contexts, focuses attention on methodological aspects. Each chapter provides a sustained meditation on artisanal knowledge that includes intellectual, social, economic, and political factors without relying on universals, monolithic categories, hierarchies of genre and medium, or the use of binaries, least of all the global/local binary. As different as they are from one another, all the chapters in this book ask about various connectivities among peoples, ideas, things.
The book will be of interest to artists, critics, curators, and scholars working in art history, museum studies, history, material culture studies, performance studies, eco-criticism, Latin American studies, colonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and Indigenous studies.
The Introduction and Coda of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Autorentext
Claire Farago (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has written widely on early modern art theory, historiography, cultural exchange, the materiality of the sacred, the history of style, and museology, including Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis (2025).
Susan Lowish (Ph.D., Monash University, Melbourne) is Senior Lecturer in Australian Art History, University of Melbourne. She has published extensively on Indigenous collections, digital image archives for Australian art history, and rock art, including her award-winning book, Rethinking Australia's Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (2018).
Jens Baumgarten (Ph.D., Hamburg University) is Professor of Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo, where he established one of the first autonomous departments of Art History in Brazil. He specializes in the early modern art history of Latin America and Europe, the historiography of art, and contemporary visual culture.