The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect

“The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect” stands as an important contribution to current debates concerning the future of art and philosophy as these ways of human expression inform the question of an uncertain future. Nancy Wellington Bookhart’s lead essay expertly historicizes the aestheticization of Western historiography and thereby situates the butterfly effect at the very center of these debates. The essays she includes in her collection exemplify the very best in contemporary critical philosophy. These range from Kathe Albrecht’s brilliant critique of the intertwinement of art and history, Robert Anderson’s equally brilliant continuation of this theme vis a vis race and gender circa 1893, and Kate Farrington’s superb transhistorical engagement with dOCUMENTA (13). The essays that follow round out the collection as a striking encounter with the possible.

Dr. George Smith

Founder and President

Edgar E. Coons, Jr. Professor of New Philosophy

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

This book reflects our contemporary moment. Editor Nancy Wellington Bookhart brings together the voices of eight scholars, curators, and artists (sometimes a single individual author has backgrounds in all three of these different roles) who actively rethink our histories of what art has been in order to provide insight into what it might be in the future. This is done as a provocation into the possibilities of what art might do. The book differs from older traditions of art history and criticism that have attempted to define how history creates a sense of inevitability of what comes next. Instead, these authors reenter history and the philosophy of ideas to ask how we might be able to think anew. The Butterfly Effect speaks to how small, even seemingly insignificant reimaginings of the past might produce a dramatically different present from which we enter the future. The book brings together a rich variety of voices that revise the past as we strive for new possibilities in the ways visual art allows us to reinvent ourselves and our communities of discourse. With its focus on scholarly attention on the critique of history to expand the prospects for making, this book will be of strong interest to visual arts programs, from undergraduate to doctoral study, that frame art making and scholarship as grounded in research and the critical examination of ideas.

Dr. Richard Siegesmund

Professor Emeritus, Art and Design Education

Northern Illinois University

Bookhart’s audacious approach to history and art in this transhistorical undertaking, "The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect" seeds generations the Kantian promise of the subject-object relationship in the restaging of narratives once constructed and perceived vis-à-vis the law of perception belonging to colonized schools of thought.

Doris Wellington

Independent Scholar

Founder of The Great Commission Humanitarian Project

Author of 'I Waltzed with God the Morning of Genesis: The Human Mosaic'