藝術史根植於我們最古老的學術文化：對美、藝術、模仿、圖像、詩畫同律、藝術家角色等議題的思考，早在藝術史於學院中誕生的數世紀之前，便已然存在。藝術史長期以來指定特有的研究對象，將其劃分等級，且理想化為藝術品。面對這門歷史悠久的學科，視覺研究則平實地關注整個視覺過程及視覺人造物。此外，視覺研究援用某些往往被藝術史忽視或拒絕的概念、方法及理論家。視覺研究的實用主義及不可知論觀點，與任何當代科學一樣明確。因此，這兩個學科的關鍵交鋒勢必無可避免，同時也有其必要。

Art history is deeply rooted in our earliest learned culture: speculative thinking on Beauty, Art, mimesis, the image, the ut pictura poesis tradition, the artist’s role, and so forth, all predate the discipline’s emergence in academia by many centuries. Whereas this venerable field has for long claimed exclusivity on works of art, which get organized into hierarchies and often idealized, visual studies are instead concerned with visual processes and artifacts. Moreover, visual studies rely on notions, approaches, and theorists that have been largely ignored, if not rejected by art history. Visual studies, however, continue to perpetuate the same pragmatism, materialism, and agnosticism found in any contemporary discipline in the humanities. Therefore, the critical comparison of art history and visual studies, and of their respective intellectual projects, is both inevitable and essential.