The History of Art - Lessons in Mediation

Summary: The relevance of mediation in social science is that it questions the relationship between principles of collective action and the role of objects. The example of art history shows how an analysis can focus on the opacity of mediators, without making them the vehicles of an all-embracing cause, or the instruments of goals or of external reasons. The restitution of necessary intermediaries of art, initiated by social history as a critical denunciation of the relationship between aesthetic subjects and objects, or of the scholarly accumulation by art history, has converged towards the idea of a collective production of the world of art by its actors. The analysis of mediation must therefore consider the same aspects ,from individuals and institutions to frameworks of perception, through material elements and even the finest details of works of art and their production. It is thus able to close the gap that has so destructively separated social analyses of the conditions of art front aesthetic or semiotic analyses of the 'works in themselves'.