About Michael Baxandall

A distinguished group of art historians reflect on the work of Michael Baxandall, in terms of its importance for their own formation, its location in the development of a new art history, and its influence on the broader languages and theories of contemporary cultural theory. The volume deploys the meaning of the word 'about' both as an adverb and a preposition to weave a tissue of readings through and around the writing of Baxandall in such a way as both to characterize its importance in recent thinking on art and cultural history and to displace it from a conventional understanding.

Working critically, analytically and through analogy the essays not only rethink Baxandall through a cultural theory in which he takes an unexpected position alongside Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, but position his ideas in the conceptual fields of a Marcel Duchamp or a Donald Judd. Alternatively they historicize his thinking in a context of modern ethnographic, sociological and feminist methodologies, or one of important considerations on such concepts as material culture or artistic production as figures in the writing of art history.