Resumen de On not writing the history of Roman art
Part of a symposium on the relation between art and history. Focusing on Roman art, the writer addresses two issues: how we understand the concept of audience and how we might more effectively engage multiple social categories such as gender and class in our discussion of the production as well as the reception of visual materials. She argues that historians of Roman art and archaeology have been writing local histories as if they were “history” in the singular, caring about audiences without taking into account their gendered, ethnic, classed, and other motives for resisting, accepting, or misinterpreting messages and sometimes failing to imagine that those histories amounted to more than a sum of their monuments. She concludes that art history must take into account the idea of social community and the necessity of multiple social categories in play at every stage in the process of writing decentered histories.
