The most obvious and palpable feedback upon research and writing in the discipline is the very weight of the commodity marketplace and its hierarchies of value and fashion. The very existence of a history of art centered on the diachronic parade of masterpieces insures the perpetuation of a system of comparable worth in academic attention.

Preziosi, Donald (1989). Rethinking Art History. Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.