Introduction
This paper critically examines the potential of Michel Foucault’s theoretical and methodological apparatus—especially his concepts of archaeology and genealogy—for rethinking the field of art history. Rather than considering art as a linear progression of styles, autonomous genius, or national aesthetic traditions, this study adopts a Foucauldian perspective to situate art within the broader networks of discourse, power, and knowledge. By doing so, it seeks to destabilize dominant narratives in art historiography and reveal the historical conditions and institutional mechanisms that render certain artistic forms, practices, and subjectivities visible, valuable, and legitimate.
Foucault’s work invites us to move beyond traditional conceptions of history as a continuous chronology, and instead to approach the past as a series of discontinuities, ruptures, and discursive shifts. His archaeological method focuses on uncovering the epistemic rules that govern what can be thought, said, and seen in a given era. Applied to art, archaeology helps illuminate the underlying structures that make certain aesthetic expressions intelligible, while others remain inconceivable or excluded. It emphasizes the archive as a site of power and silence—what is preserved, what is erased, and what is allowed to speak.
In contrast, Foucault’s genealogical method investigates the contingent emergence of subjectivities, institutions, and regimes of truth through complex power relations. Genealogy resists the search for origins or essence; it seeks instead to trace the discontinuous and often contradictory processes through which norms are constituted, bodies are regulated, and discourses are naturalized. Within the context of art, genealogy directs attention to how the figure of the “artist,” the “viewer,” and even “art” itself are not fixed categories but historically produced positions shaped by institutional, religious, political, and economic forces.
Materials & methods
The paper develops a dual-framework of archaeological-genealogical inquiry to analyze the field of art as a discursive formation and a site of power/knowledge. On the archaeological level, it examines how different historical periods establish specific regimes of visibility—determining which artistic forms are seen as legible, worthy of preservation, or capable of conveying “truth.” These shifts can be identified in moments where the epistemic foundations of aesthetics are destabilized—such as the Enlightenment rupture between religious iconography and secular representation, or the modernist rejection of mimetic traditions in favor of abstraction and conceptualism.
On the genealogical level, the study interrogates the institutions and dispositifs (apparatuses) that regulate artistic production and circulation: museums, art academies, state patronage, religious authorities, markets, and media. These are not neutral platforms but mechanisms of control that both enable and constrain artistic subjectivity. Genealogy reveals how these institutions define and enforce artistic norms—what materials can be used, which bodies can be represented, who is authorized to speak through art, and which audiences are imagined or excluded. In this light, the history of art is also a history of discipline, exclusion, and struggle.

Discussion & Result
The paper supports its theoretical argument with examples across diverse historical and cultural contexts. These examples illustrate how bodies, gender, sexuality, faith, and national identity are shaped within the field of art—not as stable essences but as contested constructions. The depiction of the human body, for instance, offers a rich terrain to investigate how visual regimes are bound up with medical, religious, and juridical discourses. From the idealized nude in Renaissance painting to fragmented, grotesque, or hyperreal bodies in contemporary art, artistic renderings of corporeality reflect broader tensions around normativity, desire, and resistance.
Similarly, the paper explores feminist and religious art as discursive practices that both engage and disrupt dominant visual economies. Feminist artists often deconstruct patriarchal iconographies by reclaiming the female body as a site of agency and subversion. Religious artworks, particularly in contemporary settings, may operate outside secular regimes of truth, challenging the viewer’s assumptions about the sacred, the rational, and the aesthetic. These forms are not marginal anomalies but vital nodes in the network of power where visibility, meaning, and value are negotiated.
What Foucault ultimately offers to art history is not a new methodology for categorizing artworks but a radical rethinking of its assumptions and boundaries. Art is not simply the expression of individual creativity or cultural essence; it is a historically situated practice, embedded in regimes of discourse and power. The artist is not a transcendent subject but a position made possible through institutional recognition and disciplinary formation. The viewer, likewise, is not a passive observer but an effect of historically conditioned modes of seeing. And the artwork itself is never outside of discourse—it is always already entangled in operations of truth, authority, and exclusion.
This Foucauldian framework urges art historians to interrogate the epistemic foundations of their field. What are the historical and institutional conditions that make certain questions, styles, and interpretations possible? How do disciplinary boundaries determine what counts as art history and what remains outside its purview? How is aesthetic judgment complicit in mechanisms of social control or ideological reproduction?

Conclusion
In conclusion, this paper contends that Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy provide critical tools for examining the production of artistic subjectivity, the formation of aesthetic regimes, and the politics of visibility. By foregrounding the contingent, relational, and constructed nature of artistic meaning, this approach enables a more reflexive and politically aware mode of art historical inquiry. It opens up new paths for engaging with the margins, the silenced, and the unrecognized within visual culture, challenging the field to reckon with its own complicities and limitations. In doing so, it repositions art not as a timeless expression of beauty or genius but as a field of struggle where power and resistance are constantly at play.