In the context of current vigorous conversations between vision science, visual culture studies, and art history, the talk presents the counter-intuitive argument that some essential features of visual art and visual culture are not visible, though they belong to ‘visuality’. How then can they be investigated by vision science or art history? This thesis is reviewed in light of ‘classic’ art-historical formulations in formalism and iconology and in view of renewed interest in philosophical psychology and elsewhere in the notion that ‘vision has a history’, though not necessarily in the field of the visible.
Whitney Davis is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of A General Theory of Visual Culture and the forthcoming Visuality and Virtuality: A Historical Phenomenology of Images and Pictures, both published by Princeton University Press.