Deaths of Art: David Carrier’s Metahistory of Artwriting

This essay is a critical examination of David Carrier’s Artwriting (1987), which offered a philosophical account of the implicit strategies of narrative and presentation deployed by a wide range of art historians and critics. Here, this author raises some questions concerning Carrier’s attempt to describe or define a genre of ‘artwriting’ distinct from philosophical aesthetics; he also discusses Carrier’s views in the context of those writers whom Carrier examines in Artwriting.