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CHOICE Review

The disciplinary "crisis" in art history has been typically located either in the internal squabbles of the proponents of different methodologies--formalist, Marxist, semiological, feminist, contextualist, and the like (e.g., The New Art History, ed. by A.L. Rees and F. Borzello, 1988)--or in the rift between art criticism and practice (e.g., H. Belting, The End of the History of Art, CH, Sep'87, or A. C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, CH, Jan'87). In contrast, Preziosi identifies the "crisis" with art historians' lack of self-consciousness of the ideological construction and institutionalization of the profession and its language. Like most theoretical studies, this one offers no solution to the posed problem (although it ends with quite a brilliant example of art historical practice). Preziosi furnishes a sophisticated if controversial interpretation of the state of discipline, and also provides the reader with beneficial exercise in the discourse of deconstruction. Graduate level. -A. J. Wharton, Duke University