Afterword: The Promise and Perils of Visual Culture's Big Tent

Abstract

This commentary on the articles in this special issue of Visual Resources suggests that they provoke a consideration of the virtues of imagining a history of visual culture that is both distinct from a history of art, on the one hand, but also distinct from a general cultural history, on the other. In order to be a useful category of historical analysis, the differences as well as the similarities between visual culture and cultural history or material cultural studies, more broadly speaking, must be constantly and consistently interrogated. Visual culture has to be more than a “big tent” designed to include everything that the history of art (as Modernism) has excluded, overlooked or relegated to a second tier. At their best, these articles get us out from under that tent and onto a vast and open interdisciplinary terrain on which the future of visual culture will be written.