What is an Image?

Front Cover
Penn State Press, 2011 - Art - 286 pages

What Is an Image? raises the stakes for writing in art history, visual studies, art theory, and art criticism by questioning one of the most fundamental terms of all, the image or picture. This innovative collection gathers some of the most influential historians and theorists working on images to discuss what the visual has come to mean. Topics include concepts such as image and picture in the West and outside it; the reception and rejection of semiotics; the question of what is outside the image; the question of whether images have a distinct nature or are products of discourse, like language; the relationship between images and religious meanings; and the study of non-art images in medicine, science, and technology.

Among the major writers represented in this book are Gottfried Boehm, Michael Ann Holly, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, W. J. T. Mitchell, Marie-José Mondzain, Keith Moxey, Parul Dave Mukherji, Wolfram Pichler, Alex Potts, and Adrian Rifkin.

 

Contents

Introduction James Elkins
1
SEMINARS
13
ASSESSMENTS
103
Configurations of the image Wolfram Pichler
239
Notes on the contributors
271
Index
281
Back Cover
287
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

James Elkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maja Naef is an art historian and art critic based in Basel, Switzerland.

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