David Scott on art history
“I take it that any “art history” worth the name is a story of the present of past conjunctures of art (creation, consumption, criticism, infrastructure). It is therefore always a provisional genealogy of the relation between “art” and “society,” that is, the irreducible dialectic of the art form (and the immanent relations that constitute it as an object) and the social form (and the immanent relations of conflict that animate it). I take “art history” to be an endless critical revision of successive presents of past constitutions of the “art and society” relation.”