"Questions of vision have always been about the body and the workings of social power. In a large part of this book, I examine how new relations established between the human body, on the one hand, and institutional and discursive forms of power, on the other, redefined the status of the observing subject in the early 19th century and the relationship between this new status and modernism...

"Why a new history? Doesn't art history virtually coincide with the history of human perception? Aren't the formal changes that emerge in artworks over time the most striking evidence of the historical mutations that vision itself has undergone? My study, on the contrary, argues that the history of vision (if such a thing is possible) involves much more than merely listing the shifts experienced in representational practices. The aim of this book is not to create empirical data on artworks or to develop an isolable concept of 'perception,' but to focus on the phenomenon of the observer, which is at least as problematic. Because the problem of the observer is, in fact, the field where vision is materialized in history, where it becomes visible itself. Vision and its effects can never be separated from the possibilities of the observing subject, who is both the historical product and the site of realization of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and subjectifying procedures."
Jonathan Crary