" In mocking the modern business of art, including historical scholar ship, Wilde was striking back, as Nietzsche had done almost thirty years earlier, against the great accumulated pile of writing that loaded the burden of the past on the back of the present. The weight of learning in 1890 seems light when one struggles today, deep in the stacks of of an art-history library housing half a millions volumes, to part the mobile shelves creaking on their runners. Wilde's solution was economical. Both the judgment of value in the present and the shaping of a narrative pf the past would be entrusted to the critic. Historiography is reborn inside the critic's project, and so redeemed. "

― , A History of Art History