Conclusion Out of Perspective
Art history often stages a peculiar estrangement: it invents the category of
its analysis. While the objects investigated by Islamic art historians go back
centuries, the category of‘Islamic art’depends on modern understandings
of Islam and art as discrete and definable categories. The resulting practice
claims to familiarize culture, but does so on its own terms. No amount of
information about an attractive object can explain the nuances of that
attraction, any more than the name, dates, nation, and hair color of a
person can explain their being. If we look in awe at a palace, the story of its
construction can induce admiration for architects or political leaders of its
era. This can impress with historical grandeur and frame modern nation-
alism. But it will not tell us anything about how we experience enchant-
ment. It will not tell us how the work produced meaning to the people who
have experienced it across time. We can taxonomize and chronicle all we
want, and yet we will come no closer to understanding how our fascination
functions, or how it overlaps or diverges with the encounters of others.
The disciplinary demand to convert the pleasure and curiosity born of
our senses into a desire for historical knowledge is profoundly political. It
situates us in a world where meaning comes not from discursive associa-
tions or internal experiences, but from measurable information. It trans-
forms expression into competition through paradigms such as those of
artistic genius or national prowess. Subjects are invited to project their own
identities into a relationship with a historical imaginary, conceived either
as their own (in nationalism), admirable (in an ally), or alienating (in a foe).
Blind to its own ideological agency, this conversion from sensation to
historicism obviates other frameworks of meaning. It considers the experi-
ences of perception as so personal that they cannot be described, and yet
also paradoxically transparent and universal. This persists despite libraries
full of books transcribing discourses replete with insight into the sensory
and supra-sensory experiences of other times and places, engaged through
eyes, ears, and hearts, sung out in poetry and painting, melodies and their
rhythms. The terms of our fascination are not private, personal, or uni-
versal, but constructed through such contexts.
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