New Art History: A Critical Introduction

Art history is one of the fields that has undergone intense transformation from the 1960s to the present. As it began to draw more from different fields such as sociology, psychology, and philosophy, art history increasingly moved away from form and style-based approaches, gaining an interdisciplinary quality and renewing itself, enriched with new critical tools and approaches capable of interpreting recent art.

Jonathan Harris's The New Art History, prepared as a critical introduction to the field, opens a theoretical door to the fundamental changes in art history and practices from the 1960s to the present. Harris questions the established values and traditional approaches in the field of art history, examining the connection of this field to social transformations from the 1960s to the present, drawing on key texts by critics who did not exclude the 'social' in their readings of art, ranging from T.J. Clark to Griselda Pollock. Within this framework, The New Art History approaches art practice and history from different perspectives such as the effects of capitalist modernity, forms of visual representation within the context of the nation-state, subjects, identities, the reflections of visual ideologies within the framework of feminism, and politics of sexuality and the body.