A workshop organised by the international research project “Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology”.
8 – 9 November 2019
Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity,” Berlin.
From racially and financially motivated scholarship to the pseudo-science of conspiracy theories, art historical boogeymen are ubiquitous. The discipline of art history has deep, potentially inseverable, roots in explicitly nationalistic discourses and the relationships between art history and unsavoury political regimes are written into the scholarly record. Quarantining what we might think of as art historical contagion, however, let alone inoculating the discipline against its past infections, is far from straightforward. Contagion as a metaphor is rich with value and has proven productive in certain historical moments.