Situated at the interface of philosophy, aesthetics and art history, this collection brings together a series of creative responses to the recent speculative turn in Continental philosophy. The range of contributors include philosophers, art historians, architects as well as art practitioners who seek to go beyond the mere complementarity of philosophy and art history. It is generous with the types of art including architecture, cinema, dance, new media and the philosophical trajectories it is engaged with. This book provides both a genealogy of speculative art history and an experimental and provocative counter-discourse of new art histories.
Speculative Art Histories follows the eponymous reading group and research symposium in 2013, organized by Samuel Saelemakers (Curator, Witte de With) and Sjoerd van Tuinen (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam).
‘The essays in this timely volume perform a twin function: they attend to object-orientated philosophies, anti-correlationist aesthetics and the non-human; but also to that rich counter-tradition of Art History that has always attended to art’s own speculative and inventive becomings. A must read for anyone interested in both the future and other pasts of Art History, but also for those working within the expanded fields of art theory and Contemporary Art.’
— Simon O’Sullivan, Goldsmiths College, University of London