What the fetish does to the history of art

ABSTRACT

The article tries to make the point that William Pietz’s contributions were the first to make a history of the term based on his longue durée and of the matricial embedding of the conceptual and the material into the notion of the fetish. The second argument points that art history can take advantage of William Pietz’s book in redifing the discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Art history
• fetish
• African art
• aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento (Paris: Usher, 1989).