L'histoire de l'art : leçons sur la médiation

Abstract

The relevance of mediation in social science is that it questions the relationship between principles of collective action and the role of objects. The example of the history of art shows how an analysis can emphasize the opacity of mediators, without making of them the vectors of an overhanging cause, the instruments of goals or of external reasons. The restitution of necessary intermediaries of art, started as a critical denunciation of the relationship between aesthetic subjects and objects by social history, or of the erudite accumulation by the history of art, has converged towards the idea of a collective production of the world of art by its actors. An analysis must therefore consider the same mediations, from humans and institutions to frameworks of perception, to material elements, and even the finest details of art works and their production. It is thereby able to close the disastrous gap that has separated social analyses of the conditions of art and aesthetic or semiotic analyses of the "works themselves".