Preziosi's Proper Position

Abstract

Donald Preziosi: Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2003), 39 b&w illns, 250 pp., paperback ISBN 0 8166 3358 4, $19.95. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds): Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2004), 68 b&w illns, 804 pp., paperback ISBN 0 7546 0835 2, £35. Donald Preziosi's Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity is no ordinary collection of chapter-like essays. It is the printed outcome of his series of Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University in 2001, which were entitled ‘Seeing through Art History’. Eight lectures have turned into as many chapters, covering some 150 pages, alternatively referred to as lectures, talks, essays, and texts, as if the author could not decide the nature of his discourse. While notes have been added, the visual support of the lectures has, naturally, been severely reduced. The book was intended as a sequel to his department-shattering or, at least, consensus-challenging Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science,1 but it became a ‘rethinking of Rethinking Art History’ instead. Drawing heavily on the former volume (as have numerous articles by Preziosi ever since 1989, many of them recycling each others' arguments with slight variations), the present book seeks to establish no less than ‘a new beginning, beyond [the] discourses of art history, museology, ethics, and aesthetics’. But if the book is rather slim, and the opportunity to elaborate on the orally presented topics is forsaken, it certainly contains no shortage of ideas, sentences or propositions with which to think, learn and argue.