Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies

This essay traces the commonalities and divergences between the discipline of art history and contemporary interdisciplinary material culture studies in order to explain why the two have been so poorly integrated with each other, as well as to suggest that art-historical practices should play a greater role in the broader scholarly examination of the social lives of objects. Materiality has been a largely unnamed, implicit dimension of art historical inquiry for over a century, and the essay argues that its continual suppression has rendered art history difficult to conceptualize as material culture. The essay examines art history's transformation into visual culture and calls for it to instead assume the mantle of material culture. It does so by revisiting the ideas of Jules David Prown in order to advance an Aristotelian rather than Platonic conception of the discipline.