" A discipline enter into a state of self-consciousness, writes its own history and theorizes its practices, when something is unresolved. A prehistory of good empirical practices would be of limited interest, a chronicle of false starts, of trial and error. The practicing physician has no need to know the history of medicine. That history is valuable only when profiled against an alternative history: Asian medicine, for example. The art historians proceed by importing attitudes alien to them, provincializing their own scholarship as a hedge against the possibility of their fatal detachment from possession and beauty. "

― , A History of Art History