How to Cite
License (Chapter)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Identifiers (Book)
Published
Medienrevolution und Kunstwissenschaft
Unter und vor dem Einfluss der Digitalisierung
In this paper, I take up the correlation between art history and its visual media: first the original artworks, then photography on paper, reproduced by slides and halftone process, then digital images. As a first step, I describe the first media revolution which happened at the end of the nineteenth century, when art historians started collecting photographs, using slides and illustrating their books with the new halftone prints. Heinrich Wölfflin’s book on Dürer featured in its final edition 225 illustrations on 370 pages. The first flood of images was answered by the new format of analyzing a single work of art. That started with Hans Sedlmayr’s structural analysis in 1925. The article follows the development and present state of this type of “Bilderebbe” (Margarete Pratschke), ebb of images. Facing the challenge of digitalized art history with its repositories of millions of artworks, the field has answered in three ways: in a tendency towards a new canon, in Visual Studies and Image Science (Bildwissenschaft) and in Art-in-the-Plural Studies.
Keywords:
Art-in-plural research, canon, digital art history, digitized art history, ebb of images, flood of images, formalism, neoformalism, single-work-focus, visual culture
Wolfgang Kemp is an art historian and emeritus professor at the University of Hamburg. Main research interests: History and theory of photography, narratology, reception aesthetics.
