Art and the modern European city: survey and conference report

Abstract

Arguably, art history has always had an interdisciplinary vocation, though this was at times underplayed during its establishment as an academic subject. Recent intellectual trends have tended to work in the opposite sense, encouraging art historians to highlight the relationship between visual art and a range of cultural and economic discourses. This has often involved discussion of specifically urban contexts, since cities have been the principal sites for the production, distribution and interpretation of works of art, and their fabric a means by which cultural practices have been allied to political, class and gender interests in modern society. The language and approaches currently adopted for this enterprise are often deeply marked by excursions into literary theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology and urban history and geography.