On Mirzoeffs Visual Culture and Arnolds Art History - Article Example

Inciting Rogoff, paintings in the postmodern era may be seen on a book, movies may be viewed on the home television, among other things (qt. in Mirzoeff 7). Moreover, watching television as a peculiar mode of habit, if not custom, becomes a “part of domestic life” rather than an individual activity. On the other hand, Arnold cites the canonical art historians such as Pliny and Vasari and how their approach in understanding or viewing visual art fundamentally transformed or affected the concept and praxis of art history.

She says that the bias of the chronological-centered art historians has become the catalyst for the emergence of the most revolutionary question concerning the “importance of canon in art history” (Arnold). In the process, Mirzoeff’s thesis involving modernism and postmodernism is substantially justified. By and large, Mirzoeff’s and Arnold’s deconstructionist/postmodern readings pertaining to the visual art -- specifically, his “visual culture” and her “art history” -- are, fundamentally, the results of the crisis characterized in the modernist visualization, or lack of visualization, of art.

Modernism has greatly shaped the system and philosophy of viewing the visual art that is considered inconsistent or unjustifiable in the present context. With the production and reproduction of visual art in today’s world, the chronological-based interpretation of art is no longer applicable. In fact, Mirzoeff consciously did not provide an all-embracing definition of visual culture simply because of the overlapping and probably overproduction of visual arts that cannot be contained in one single concept.

Furthermore, Arnold reviews the value and essence of art history, which departs from the classical reading mainly because of the changes that occur, and continue to occur, in the postmodern period.