The Copy Writes Back:Digital Art History and the Crisis of Authorship

Digitization process,while provoking ontological crises and fueling debates over disciplinary discourses,has simultaneously become a methodological framework and a generative force for reshaping the nature of knowledge production and the writing of history.This paper examines the diverse practices emerging in the digitization of art history,encompassing database migration, computationally assisted analyses,the mobility of texts and discourses,and the algorithmic rewriting and AI generation that increasingly shape scholarly production.As digital processes generate vast amounts of detail while simultaneously fragmenting discourse through algorithmic operations, they challenge long-standing scholarly hierarchies and established structures of authority. This study employs the concept of “copy” as a metaphorical cue to explore the critical necessity of reconfiguring authenticity and subjectivity in the history of digital art.By redefining who has the right to write,who holds epistemic authority in the digital paradigm,how narratives are constructed and reconstructed,and through what mechanisms knowledge is produced,disseminated,and legitimized,this paper argues that digital art history is gradually distancing itself from historiographical traditions.Ultimately,the entanglement of human and non-human agents ranging from scholars and institutions to algorithms and data infrastructures will fundamentally reconfigure negotiations surrounding art,media,technology,and information.