Materiality as Periphery, Revisited

This essay revisits the themes of an earlier essay on the peripheralization of materiality in art-historical practice and adds insights to it based upon disciplinary and cultural developments since 2019. Primary among these is the advent of artificial intelligence image-generating applications, which challenge the materiality of artworks in entirely new ways. This essay proposes that such mechanisms mask art’s materiality within and behind seductively sleek illusions that hide the true materiality of art. It also uses the repatriation of art objects to propose that art’s materiality still matters.