What begins as a meditation on the museum by one of the worlds leading art historians becomes in this book a farreaching critical examination of how art history and museums have guided and controlled not only the way we look at art but the ways in which we understand modernity itself. Originally delivered as the 2001 Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts at Oxford University the book makes its deeply complex argument remarkably accessible and powerfully clear. Concentrating on a period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth Donald Preziosi presents case studies of major institutions that he argues have definedand are still definingthe possible limits of museological and art historical theory and practice. These include Sir John Soanes Museum in London preserved in its 1837 state the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 and four museums founded by Europeans in Egypt in the late nineteenth century which divided up that countrys history into ethnically marked aesthetic hierarchies and genealogies that accorded with Europes construction of itself as the present of the worlds past and the brain of the earths body. Through this epistemological and institutional archaeology Preziosi unearths the outlines of the more radical Enlightenment project that academic art history professional museology and art criticism have rendered marginal or invisible. Finally he sketches a new theory about art artifice and visual signification in the cracks and around the margins of the secular theologisms of the globalized imperial capital called modernity. Addressed equally to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of art historymuseology history and anthropology this book goes to the heart of recent debates about race ethnicity nationality colonialism and multiculturalismsand to the very foundations of modernity and modern modes of knowledge production.show more