Image/text/cliché/insight: analogical practices in the global art world

Abstract

The special issue Analogical Practices in the Global Art World systematically examines for the first time the widespread practice of constructing global art and architectural histories through analogy. In addition to summarizing the essays presented and the pertinent literature on analogy across several fields, this Introduction marshals primary research alongside scholarship and observations from diverse disciplines to advance two overarching arguments. First, we claim that art world analogies both disclose and influence the axes along which art-historical and museological thinking is habitually oriented: national groupings or “schools” above all, but also chronology, gender, race, cultural identification, art media, and style. Second, we argue that the art world analogy paradigmatically involves collaborations of textual iteration with works of visual art. Proposing, ultimately, that visual analogy is never just visual, we build a theory of analogy-as-discourse for the visual arts.