The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Arts & Photography

Davis, Whitney

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

... a valuable scholarly addition to any student of Freud or as research material in a library." ―HNet, H-CAACADavis argues that the visual dimension of Freud’s writing is crucial to understanding its structure and significance. He offers a new and challenging reading of Freud’s case study of Serge Pankejeff, the "Wolf Man." Much of the analysis revolved around Pankejeff’s childhood dream of wolves and a drawing of this dream he made for Freud.

Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Literature & Fiction

Indiana University Press

Whitney Davis argues that an unstudied dimension of Freud's writings visual or graphic dimensions crucial to understanding its structure and significance. "Drawing the Dream of the Wolves" offers a new and challenging reading of Freud's case study of Serge Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, on whom Freud conducted a complex psychoanalysis from 1910 to 1914. Much of the analysis revolved around the patient's childhood dream of wolves and a drawing of this dream made for Freud by Pankejeff and amateur artists in the first weeks of the analysis.Davis explores the role of the drawing of the dream in Freud's interpretation of the patient's latent homosexuality, showing that Freud based his decipherment of the drawing and, in turn, of the patient's sexual identity in part on his own established practices of making and using images to represent the history of persons and their sexuality. During the analysis, Freud interpreted the Wolf Man's childhood phobia and intense fear of wolves and his adult neuroses as having been the result of the little boy's latent homosexuality. In fact, both Freud and the Wolf Man apparently used the analysis to reorganize and, as they thought, overcome their latent homosexualities. In addition to investigating this dynamic in the case and the case history, Davis sets it in the wider context of Freud's evolving theoretical sexology and clinical work, his creation of psychoanalytic institutions, and especially his distinctive imagination of homosexual subjectivity.

Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freuds Wolf Man (Theories of Represen)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis

The twelve interdisciplinary essays collected here explore what Whitney Davis calls replication in archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis-the sequential production of similar artifacts or images substitutable for one another in specific contexts of use. Davis suggests that while archaeology deals with the physics of replication (its material conditions and constraints), psychoanalysis deals with the psychics of replication (its mental conditions and constraints). Because art history is equally interested in the material properties and in the personal and cultural meaning of artifacts and images, it can mediate the interests of archaeology and psychoanalysis. Thus Replications explores not only the differences between but also the common ground shared by archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis-focusing, for example, on their mutual interest in the style of artifacts or image making, their need to treat the nonintentional or nonmeaningful element in production, and their models of the subjective and social transmission of replications in the life history of persons and communities. Replications is an original contribution to an emerging field of study in domains as diverse as philosophy, cognitive science, connoisseurship, and cultural studies-the intersection of the material and the meaningful in the human production of artifacts. Davis develops formal models for and theories about this relationship, exploring the ideas of a number of philosophers, historians, and critics and presenting his own distinctive conceptual analysis.

Penn State University Press

The twelve interdisciplinary essays collected here explore what Whitney Davis calls "replication" in archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis—the sequential production of similar artifacts or images substitutable for one another in specific contexts of use. Davis suggests that while archaeology deals with the "physics" of replication (its material conditions and constraints), psychoanalysis deals with the "psychics" of replication (its mental conditions and constraints). 
Because art history is equally interested in the material properties and in the personal and cultural meaning of artifacts and images, it can mediate the interests of archaeology and psychoanalysis. Thus Replications explores not only the differences between but also the common ground shared by archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis—focusing, for example, on their mutual interest in the "style" of artifacts or image making, their need to treat the "nonintentional" or "nonmeaningful" element in production, and their models of the subjective and social transmission of replications in the life history of persons and communities. 
Replications is an original contribution to an emerging field of study in domains as diverse as philosophy, cognitive science, connoisseurship, and cultural studies—the intersection of the material and the meaningful in the human production of artifacts. Davis develops formal models for and theories about this relationship, exploring the ideas of a number of philosophers, historians, and critics and presenting his own distinctive conceptual analysis.

The meaning of late prehistoric Egyptian images has until now been tantalizingly mysterious, as little understood as the circumstances of their production. As a result, analyses of these images have been general and often incorrectly illustrated. Whitney Davis now provides a welcome remedy in this detailed reinterpretation of the images carved on ivory knife handles and schist cosmetic palettes. These images are among the most important documents of early Egyptian history and include the Narmer Palette, often considered the very inception of ancient Egyptian image making. Davis deciphers the intriguing pictorial narratives and complex metaphors of images that are concerned with "masking the blow" of the ruler. "Masking the blow" refers to the ways that the images—from hunted animals to human antagonists—represent, elide, or suppress the depiction of a ruler's violent act of conquering an enemy. Examining late prehistoric Egyptian images in light of contemporary visual theory and illustrating his analyses with excellent reproductions, Davis goes beyond the usual concern for stylistic development and iconographic meanings that characterize prior studies. His work will greatly interest art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and students of the visual arts.

Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (California Studies in the History of Art)

University of California Press

From the beginning of Egyptian dynastic history (c. 3000 BC), Egyptian artists worked within a set of specific rules for image making. The system was established in order to depict and to justify the ambitions of the ancient Egyptian elite, and was so successful that virtually no other forms of image making survive in the archaeological record. This book describes the rules for making correct canonical images at the levels of technique and subject matter, and explores the way in which these rules were expressed and transmitted from artist to artist over 3,000 years. Although it uses up-to-date visual and archaeological data, it presumes no specific knowledge of ancient Egypt and aims to introduce the fundamentals of Egyptian art to readers with general interests in Egyptian art, history and archaeology.

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

Cambridge University Press

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision.
 Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

A General Theory of Visual Culture

Princeton University Press

A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images
This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis’s acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture.
Davis argues that pictoriality―the depiction intended by its maker to be seen―emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian’s craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including “bivisibility” (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases―Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.
A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline’s most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.

Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Davis, Whitney. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Davis, Whitney

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Davis, Whitney. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freuds Wolf Man (Theories of Represen)

Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis

Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis

Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (California Studies in the History of Art)

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism)

A General Theory of Visual Culture

Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective

A General Theory of Visual Culture