Conditions of Visibility
Edited by Richard Neer
Author Information
Richard Neer, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies, The College of the University of Chicago
Richard Neer is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies, and the College, at the University of Chicago. He works at the intersection of aesthetics, archaeology, and history, with particular emphasis on theories of style in the fields of Classical Greek sculpture, neo-Classical French painting, and mid-twentieth-century cinema. He has received fellowships and awards from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the American Academy in Rome. His most recent books are The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, c. 2500-c. 150 BCE (Thames & Hudson, 2012). Since 2010 he has also been the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry.
Contributors:
Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is also Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum, and has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline.
Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with particular interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013; co-authored with Mary Miller), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009; co-authored with Stephen Houston, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner).
Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and also Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in both the United States and China. He has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art, experimenting with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by two of his most recent books, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelation between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.
The four contributors to this volume are the founding members of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago.
