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By focusing on the various modes and media of the fetishised object, this anthology shifts the debates on thingness into a new global art historical perspective. The contributors explore the attention given to those material images, in both artistic and cultural practice from the heyday of colonial expansion until today. They show that in becoming vehicles and agents of transculturality, so called "fetishes" take shape in the 17th to 19th century aesthetics, psychology and ethnography - and furthermore inspire a recent discourse on magical practice and its secular meanings requiring altered art historical approaches and methods.

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Gabriele Genge is professor and chairholder of Art History and Theory at the University Duisburg-Essen (Germany). Her researches focus on visual culture from 18th to 21st centuries, on art and ethnography, modernism and postcolonialism. Angela Stercken (PhD) is art historian, curator, and writer focusing on art from the 19th to 21st centuries, exploring subjects such as the theory of image, the history of exhibition and the museum, the theory of art, space and technology, contemporary conceptual and digital art and transcultural processes.

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